Motorworld

by Jeremy Clarkson

  I was a glacier with wheels and this was only partly to do with the ever-present risk of mad children, madder cows and the boulders. It was mostly to do with my Jeep.

  This may have been based on the American beach-party special but it’s Indian-made and Indian-developed. Were it not for the Russian version I drove in Vietnam, I’d have to say it was the worst car in the world.

  The only smooth things about it were the tyres. Its steering was supertanker precise and heavier than a photocopier. It braked like a rhino, sounded like a bulldozer in an aviary and nothing electrical worked… except the horn.

  This, said my guide, Hormazd, was a good thing because in India the horn is ‘your air bag, your side-impact bars, your safety belt and your anti-lock brakes, all rolled into one little button. You’d better use it liberally.’

  He also told me that for sheer lunacy, Indian driving takes the cake and that if I tried to drive like I did in Britain, I wouldn’t really get anywhere.

  Well hey, I wasn’t driving like I do in Britain, and I still wasn’t really getting anywhere.

  The buses are a hangover from the British days but so too, sadly, is the bureaucracy which snarls everything up. There has never been an Indian Grand Prix driver. And, in all probability, there never will be.

  Continental drift was faster than me that day. And so were the buses. But when they came up behind, they didn’t sit there, waiting for a gap in the traffic; they simply pulled onto the wrong side of the road and went for it, irrespective of what was coming.

  It didn’t matter if we were 50 yards from a blind bend, or just about to crest a hill, or even if there was a car quite obviously coming the other way; they just went right ahead and tried to overtake.

  And that’s not the end of the story because if, while the bus was halfway past, a lorry wanted to overtake him, he did so, turning a two-lane road into a three-lane one-way system.

  So what if a bus was trying to pass and found itself on a collision course with something coming the other way? Who gives way?

  ‘Simple,’ says Hormazd. ‘Whoever is smaller. In India, might is right. You only give way to vehicles that are bigger than yours.’

  So, if while overtaking, the bus finds itself head to head with a car, the car driver heads for the ditch. If, on the other hand, it’s a big truck, the bus will swerve back onto his side of the road… where I was.

  Of course, if the bus had found itself heading for another bus of an identical size and weight, you’d have read about the accident on page 17 in the Daily Telegraph the next day.

  Things were pretty bad just on the flat coastal plain, but as the road started to get all mountainous it became stupid. It was taking minutes for a bus to crawl past us, during which time we’d gone through six or maybe seven hairpin bends.

  Little wonder, at the road’s highest point, you slow down to throw money into a small temple, giving thanks for your safe passage so far. I gave the guys there my Amex card and turned for home. I’d seen enough.

  But in town, there was more. On the basis that ‘might is right’, lorries are at the top of the tree, followed by buses, then vans, cows, cars and, right at the bottom, auto-rickshaws.

  Used primarily as taxis, these three-seater subcontinental Robin Reliants are pretty much invisible to all other road users. Crush someone’s goat and the villagers will lynch you. Destroy an auto-rickshaw and nobody seems to notice.

  I know this because I drove one. I was on a main road, seeing if it really was true that it could do 40 mph, when a car just pulled out of a side turning in front of me. Luckily, I was able to stop, but the truck behind just kept on coming. He didn’t brake, he didn’t attempt to swerve and he was going to flatten me unless I got going again right away.

  If other road users don’t get you in a rickshaw, the potholes will. If you don’t see them coming, the first indication that you’ve been over a bump comes when your spine snaps.

  But even if you can avoid all the other traffic and the potholes, there’s another nasty in store. Cancer.

  All of India’s cities are polluted but Calcutta has to be seen to be believed — not that you can see it. A spokesman for the World Health Organisation said they’d stopped listing cities in order of environmental risk because the press just latched on to one place, labelling it as the dirtiest place on earth and ignoring the fact that a hundred other places were very nearly as bad.

  But he did say, unofficially, that Calcutta is in a league of its own.

  Officially, the real reason for the all-pervading smoke is that everyone cooks on open fires, but that’s nonsense. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the diesel engine.

  It’s an inefficient fuel at the best of times, smoky and carcinogenic, but mix it with badly maintained motors and you simply would not believe the result. Every car in Calcutta is a Hindustan and every one belches a poisonous cocktail which has blackened the buildings and reduced visibility to just a hundred yards or so. The visibility at midday was exactly the same as it was at midnight.

  I was there three days and it was like the hayfever attack from hell. My eyes streamed, my nose ran and it tasted like I’d been sucking boiled sweets made from crude oil.

  Calcutta had two other drawbacks, too. First, every single patch of green was covered with cricketers 24 hours a day.

  And second, the producer stepped in some human excrement which someone had left on the pavement, and it splashed all over his jeans. That was bad enough but the hotel laundry then ironed creases in them, rendering them useless.

  Calcutta is shit.

  Madras is not.

  It was in Madras that I took part in the Blind Man’s Rally, a charity do where able-sighted drivers chauffeur blind navigators on a day-long treasure hunt.

  The car was an awful Maruti Jeep, I had never been to Madras before and my navigator had the worst BO in the history of the world. Things were bad and they got worse when I saw the instructions.

  They were in Braille, which my instructor could read, but the Braille was in English, which he could not understand.

  So, at every junction, he would spell out, letter by letter, what it said. Or rather, what he thought it said. His fingers would dart over the paper and then he’d look up with a pleased smile on his face and say, ‘Y-J-R-R-U-V.’ Well I know I didn’t go to university but I’m pretty damn sure that is not a word. And nor was I-I-J-V-V-K-O-Y-Y. And nor, indeed, were any subsequent attempts.

  We were helped by the man’s astonishing knowledge of Madras which meant that, at any given point, he knew exactly where we were. But at the same time, we were hindered hugely by the fact that neither of us knew where we were supposed to be.

  Madras is not an especially big city but by some miracle, we managed to miss every single one of the fifteen checkpoints. We also lost the crew, who were supposed to be filming our attempts. And we were so late back, dinner was finished.

  But that said, when I’m on my deathbed and someone asks me which day I would most like to relive, it would be that one. I laughed more at that endless stream of letters than I did when I once saw Lord Longford fall over.

  This is the point with India. If you can ignore the very obvious poverty, the leprosy and their staggering inability to drive motor vehicles, it is a funny place.

  And we have America to thank for that. Whereas the superpower’s tentacles have infiltrated pretty well every other country on earth to the point that, even in Peking, people know of Bruce Springsteen, India is clean.

  You can buy a Big Mac in Reykjavik and listen to Australian disc jockeys talking about what’s coming up ‘this hour’.

  But in India, I could find nothing that would remind Wilbur or Myrtle of home. India is a larger, hotter version of Britain circa 1950.

  They have inherited our love affair with bureaucracy, our legal system and, best of all, our figures of speech from a bygone age.

  When driving past the railway station in Bombay — a building the Americans would call impressive, or cool —
I asked my taxi driver what it was. ‘From British days,’ he said. ‘Most odd and solid.’

  Later, another taxi driver described the mosque in the middle of the bay as ‘most sturdy and spiffing’. This was fantastic.

  But it paled into insignificance alongside the message you find on the label of a bottle of Kingfisher beer. It says ‘most thrilling chilled’. Isn’t that just wonderful?

  The Americanisation of the English language just hasn’t happened on the subcontinent so that when you pick up a newspaper there, it appears to have been written by Mr Grayson and Mr Cholmondley-Warner.

  Just 10 per cent of the nation actually speaks English but it is English, not American, and anyway, 10 per cent of the Indian population equates to very nearly one hundred million people.

  And seemingly each one of them queued up each night, in the bars and nightclubs and restaurants to tell us that every educated Indian has a love–hate relationship with the old Motherland. They hate us for having been there but are grateful that it was us, and not the Spaniards or the Germans.

  I was told by one, ‘The British had a habit of raping a country, of taking what they wanted, but at least they never tried to reshape the people who lived there. They left us alone to get on with life. We like that. And you did give us cricket.’

  We gave them more than that. We also gave them the Morris Oxford, which they turned into the Hindustan Ambassador, and more recently, the Rover SD1. It was actually built there to avoid a massive import duty, but even though there were only two other types of car on the market it failed spectacularly.

  Like cricket, it was complicated, boring and prone to stopping every time it looked like rain, but worse, it was expensive. To fill it up with petrol, for instance, you’d have needed 2,000 rupees, which is twice what the average Indian earned in a year.

  Amazingly though, the Indians still haven’t given up with us. Indeed, when a British Airways 747 pulls up to the gate at Bombay airport, the entire ground crew come outside to welcome it.

  The trouble is that in the 1930s, a quarter of all Rolls-Royces ended up in India and most were subsequently customised with jewelled headlamps, ivory-plated doors and tigerskin seats. They’re still out there too, reminding the people that Britain is a byword for luxury.

  That’s why, when they were looking for a new car to build, they turned to Rover, who have just sold them all the tools to make the Montego. Today, there are twenty different types of car in India but the turbo diesel Austin will be by far the most expensive at £20,000 a go.

  Expensive when you think that you must give way at junctions to vans and buses, but there you go.

  On the last night of my stay in India I took a long stroll down the beach in Bombay and watched the sun slipping into the sewage they call an ocean. I saw kids kicking ponies, women urinating on the sand and people whose begging life had stopped when leprosy took their arms.

  I thought about the filth, the squalor, the cricket, the massive inequalities and the blundering bureaucracy. I thought about the carnage on the roads, the filth that is Calcutta and the endless head-wobbling.

  I was momentarily distracted when a small gurgle from my nether regions announced that my normally iron constitution was under attack from an ice cube I’d enjoyed earlier, but it soon passed and I was able to resume my mental shenanigans. Why, when everything was wrong with this country, did I like it?

  It’s taken a year to work it out but here’s my answer. I don’t know.

  Dubai

  Mine’s been an easy life. At the age of eight my mother thought it would be a good idea to take me on a bus. This turned out to be a bad idea when, in a loud voice, I asked why it kept stopping. She pointed out that other people needed to get on and off but I was still confused. And the confusion turned to horror when I asked whether it would stop at the end of my grandfather’s drive, or whether it would go all the way to his front door.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t even go down Spring Lane. We have to get off at the Ivanhoe and walk.’ WALK? What was this new verb? What is the possible point of a bus if you have to do walking? But all was well because my grandfather was waiting at the bus stop in his Bentley.

  At around this time, my mother designed Paddington Bear, which provided the funds for my education at Repton School in Derbyshire.

  I was able to land a job in journalism on the Rotherham Advertiser because grandfather, a doctor, had delivered the editor’s baby during an air raid in the war.

  And I found myself on Top Gear after sitting next to the producer at a party.

  And my luck didn’t run out on Motorworld. It only rained when we specifically wanted it to. People turned up at the appointed hour and said exactly what we had hoped. Machinery never broke down. The camera never jammed.

  This, for two years and eleven countries, was the law.

  But then we arrived in Dubai and absolutely everything that could go pear-shaped ended up looking like an artichoke.

  The customs confiscated bits of vital equipment. Our Range Rover caught fire. And on the last night, the very last night of our two-year world tour, we found ourselves in the middle of a religious festival and that all the bars were forbidden from selling alcohol.

  Let’s take it step by step. In order to demonstrate how Arabs are now more interested in power than purple-velour headrests, we borrowed an Escort Cosworth which had been tuned to develop 420 horsepower.

  You may recall that our interview with the driver was conducted at the roadside. This was because it broke down.

  Then the falconers didn’t turn up, and when they did, three days late, the hunting vehicles had disappeared. Then the heavens opened and in the next ten days Dubai received more than two years’ worth of rain.

  There were floods so deep, smaller people needed an aqualung just to go shopping.

  We were having to rejig our already vague schedule on an hour-by-hour basis, which would have been hard enough in a media-aware country like America. But in the United Arab Emirates to change a long-standing arrangement is to ensure it won’t happen. We know this because even if you don’t change anything, it won’t happen either.

  Take the fun run for an example. This was an event where 750 cars and upwards of 2,000 ex-pats head into the desert in their off-road cars for two days of getting stuck and lost, and then stuck again.

  The only way it was possible to demonstrate the enormity of such an event was from the air, which is why we’d hired a helicopter.

  This had been organised for weeks. It had the backing of their government. The pilot had been briefed. But air traffic control decided fifteen minutes into the flight that it was a military area and that the chopper should return to base.

  That meant we had to spend all day playing catch-up with the rest of the competitors — a problem that was made even harder because we had to lug half a ton of film equipment around.

  Just 50 yards into the soft sand and a call for help came over the radio from Keith, the cameraman. His Discovery was stuck up to its axles in powder.

  Happily, the producer, Andy, was in a 4.5-litre 24-valve, 6-cylinder Toyota Land Cruiser pickup which looked like shit but which, off-road, was unstoppable. It became known as the Millennium Falcon.

  And it pulled the Discovery out. And 20 yards later, it did it again. And then, 250 yards on, it repeated the process once more.

  Tactfully, we took Keith on one side and explained that, in order to keep going, he must stick the gearbox in first, in high range and never, ever, ever lift his right foot from the carpet.

  Keith, we said, it doesn’t matter if the valves begin to bounce through the bonnet, or if you’re about to crest a brow which may be the precursor of a sheer drop. No matter what, Keith baby, you must drive everywhere absolutely flat out.

  Now this was all right in my Jeep, and the director’s Range Rover and the Millennium Falcon because they were empty. But on the first bump taken at speed in the Discovery, £150,000-worth of camera equipment leapt out of the boot
, ricocheted off the roof and ended up in the passenger footwell.

  In the end, we were actually saved by the rain, which gave the sand a more gluey texture allowing poor old Keith to drive a little more slowly. The downside was simple. All hopes of catching the other cars up were dashed.

  But I didn’t care because I have decided that driving in the desert is better than sex.

  Certainly, it’s a damn sight rougher, as you are hurled sometimes three feet out of your seat. This means your right foot leaves the throttle and that, of course, is catastrophic, because the revs die, the wheels bog down and you are then faced with an hour’s digging.

  But on the flatter, harder-packed plains, you can get up to 100 mph or more, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing to hit, that you aren’t breaking the law and that your exhaust fumes can’t even find a flower to throttle.

  The desert is a big deal in the UAE.

  The fun run happens annually, and is organised by the Gulf News newspaper for ex-pats who, very sensibly, would never dream of heading out there alone.

  Over the last ten years I’ve been fortunate to see some truly epic scenery. There are the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, the Yorkshire Dales just near Keld and the wall reefs that surround the Maldives.

  But for me, the best views are to be found in a desert, and the best desert of all has its eastern fringes 30 miles from Dubai. They call it the Empty Quarter.

  There is no life out there, just millions of tons of sand which have been shaped and crafted by the wind. It’s a constantly changing landscape but it is never anything other than extraordinarily beautiful.

  Fun too, because most nights teenagers take their tuned four-wheel-drive cars to the wastelands for a bit of dune-bashing.

  Every night, hundreds of guys choose a particularly arduous slope and see who can get up it… and before the tree-huggers start to whinge, I should explain that after everyone goes home, one breath of wind is all it takes to erase their tracks.