Be Our Guest Damian's mutterings are good, but we have decided that you wouldn't mind reading the compositions from other people every now and then, so let's welcome back freelance motoring and travel journalist Carlton Boyce to the pages of The Mud Life.
Memorable Drives The decade I spent working as a freelance motoring journalist reinforced my belief that most cars are inherently boring, and it’s what you do with them that makes them interesting. Take the 443bhp Audi RS4 Quattro I drove back in 2012, for example. Chasing a Range Rover prototype along a German autobahn at 170mph made for an unusually memorable launch and yet ten years later I can’t remember much about the actual car other than it had such a hard ride that my co-driver’s glasses kept sliding down his nose, but the effortless way it dispatched a large swath of Germany - door-to-door, we covered 600 miles in a little over eight hours including the Eurotunnel - will live with me forever.
As will driving across the Sahara Desert in a new Nissan Navara. The PR seemed uneasy about asking me if I was okay driving alone that day, but being able to waft along with the windows down, Bruce Springsteen playing softly, and a travel mug of coffee to hand is something I’ll remember for a long time. Again, I can’t remember much about the Navara’s design or dynamics now other than it rode very well for a pickup, but experiencing the vastness of the African desert alone more than made up for being hauled off the plane to be interrogated by a sweaty custom’s officer whose demeanour made me question whether I’d ever see my family again… Other highlights from my ten years spent exploring the world at someone else’s expense included chasing the Yukon Quest sled dog race from Whitehorse in Canada to the Alaskan border, during which we detoured for a ten hour drive along the Dempster Highway in the depth of winter.
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