Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [64]
Despite all this, I've become something of a fan of the Land Rover 'expedition'. So when Richard Newton and I were given the opportunity to drive the new Range Rover 12 weeks in advance of its launch, along with permission to go 'anywhere within reason', it seemed like a good scheme to spend four whole weeks driving all the way from London to the heart of South Africa. A couple of events served to quash this idea. Firstly, and quite by chance, I met a bloke in a pub who had made precisely the same journey in his own Land Rover, and it had taken him six months. Then another bloke called Bin Laden started a war, as if to reinforce my late grandmother's contention that you should never trust a man with a beard. It was thought that at some point on the trip the priceless prototype luxury off-roader might suffer a fate normally reserved for unattended packages at airports and be destroyed in a controlled explosion.
So I closed my eyes, Newton spun the globe and I stopped it with my fingertip. Risky, but I paid enough attention in double geog to know that the warm bits are round the middle. My intrepid index finger alighted on Pakistan. Most excellent. As a significant part of our old empire, it was the obvious place to put this triumph of Anglo/German engineering through its paces. And so, to cut to the chase, we went to Iceland.
We were, nevertheless, still mildly excited when we finally gained access to Reykjavik's container port to collect our sea-freighted vehicle. The customs docket proclaimed 'one piece Range Rover' but in fact we got the whole thing. This was the first time I'd seen it and I thought it looked pretty good; sort of still like the old Range Rover but not quite the same. I couldn't quite see what all the fuss over the headlights had been about, but that might have been because they, along with much of the rest of the car, were still plastered with the gaffer-tape disguise it had worn on the clandestine journey from Solihull to Grimsby docks.
I learned something curious about gaffer tape. In its normal role as the essential fabric of the May household it seems barely able to stick to itself. Yet at minus five or so it acquires great tenacity and a tensile strength slightly above that enjoyed by fingernails. Every hour or so a customs man dressed in Ernest Shackleton's own coat would emerge, watch for a few minutes and then retire to his geothermally heated office equipped with some interesting new Saxon words.
By the time we'd cleaned the car up it was pitch black. I looked at my watch and it was 4.30.
Besides the requirement for a decent coat, there are other factors to consider about Iceland in general and in winter in particular. What seems to be the world's most aptly named country could readily have been called something else.
Priceland, for example. There appears to be but one Indian family in Reykjavik and, joyously, they own a restaurant. Normally, foreign curry is a wishy-washy affair modified for timorous local palates and not like proper British curry at all, but this was pukka stuff: flavoursome, authentically spicy and altogether good enough to generate the phenomenon of a 'curry coat'. But then we got the bill, and it came to over £70. Even a pint was almost a fiver. No wonder hardly anyone lives there.
It could also reasonably be called Windland, since the fierce, icy breath of the Nordic gods could be unleashed suddenly and horribly upon the quaking, coatless carcass of your hapless correspondent at any time. Even Rainland would have sufficed for the day of our arrival, when the capital looked unnervingly like Manchester, but populated with