BE OUR GUEST - MEMORABLE DRIVES

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.

At -40ºC, vast articulated lorries coming the other way steamed past us, forcing us to pull aside to let the snow wash die down; on occasion, I could count to 30 before visibility was properly restored and it was safe to continue.

Our GMC Yukon XL (do you see what the PR team did there?) woofled along happily enough, but the heater wasn’t powerful enough to defrost the side and rear windows, and various electrical bits played up too.

The tailgate froze shut too, which made getting the tow rope out harder than it should have been when I stuffed it into a snow-filled ditch.

It was a good job a passing Yukon Government pickup also had a chain in the loadbed with which to haul us out, because we were so firmly embedded that the tow rope snapped on the first pull. Embarrassed by my (albeit slow speed) accident, I was reassured to hear that they’d pulled their supervisor, someone with 30 years under their belt driving in conditions like this, out of a similar ditch ten minutes before

Crossing the Icelandic mountains in winter gave me a personal taste of what I still think is the best motoring film made to date. I’m talking, of course, about The Polar Special in which the chaps from Top Gear race to the magnetic North Pole in a pair of Arctic Trucks modified Toyota Hiluxs.

Sporting the same modifications and 38” tyres as the Top Gear cars, the Hilux I drove in Iceland in 2017 climbed and waded across terrain you simply couldn’t cross on foot.

We hauled a pair of hapless tourists out of a snow drift too, and enjoyed lamb cooked on a bed of charcoal in the snow, before drinking Penderyn whisky whilst bathing in a thermal river at midnight as the Aurora Borealis struggled to make an appearance.

Again though, while the days I spent there solidified my obsession with over-tyred pickups, it’s the people and the landscape I remember most vividly.

I later got to drive one of the very pickups the Top Gear team used, along with a 44” monster fresh back from crossing Greenland. The Top Gear vehicle had been the back-up vehicle for the Polar Special, and was the one James May later drove up the side of an active volcano.

It had lived a hard life, and had had half its dashboard removed to allow cameras to be fitted. It was also still fitted with the infamous shotgun holder, and yes, the bumper dumper was on the back seat!

The Greenlandic Toyota Hilux, on the other hand, was an absolute beast. At 6’ 3” it’s not often I struggle to get up and into tall cars (although the downside to such a lofty height is that the Lotus Elise and Caterham Seven remain elusive…), but the AT44 needed care. It drove well though, with those huge tyres providing a squishy and comfortable ride.

The locals must be used to Arctic Trucks trundling its wares around the streets because no-one batted an eyelid, even when we stopped for photos on the high street. It’s a ridiculous thing outside of the environment it was designed for but if I won the lottery I’d have one in a heartbeat. It was surprisingly easy to drive around Leamington Spa, even if some of the tighter corners needed another two stabs due to the Hilux’s restricted steering lock.

It wasn’t all freebies though, and I paid my own way on numerous occasions in the search of great copy and big adventure.

I returned to Canada in the summer to cycle across the Rockies, wild camping in the woods and even punching an inquisitive bear one night!

I averaged about 60 miles a day on my overladen mountain bike, which might not seem very far, but those mountains are steep, and go on for a long, long time.

Canadian drivers always gave me a wide berth, with articulated lorries crossing the white line to give me as much space as possible, along with a thumbsup and a toot of the horn in encouragement.

I later hired a Ford F-150 during the same trip and criss-crossed the Rockies again, drifting ever north through Dawson City.

I was the first person to cross the Top of the World Highway that year (it’s so remote and wild that it is closed during the autumn, winter and spring), dropping down into Alaska where I ambled about in search of grizzlies on the salmon run.

I alternated between wild camping and checking in to cheap hotels, often going three days without seeing anyone else, even on major roads.

The Ford was big enough that I could sleep on the back seat when the mosquitos got too much.

I spent six weeks there in total, and loved every minute even though the pickup was beat to hell but it just kept on running and that was all that mattered.

The longest journey I’ve done to date was from north Wales to Morocco in the then-new Jeep JL. All-in-all, we did 5,000 miles in it, circling the Sahara Desert, camping in the desert wherever we fancied and enjoying the hospitality of some of the friendliest people on the planet.

For a boy who grew up reading Wilfred Thesiger and Gerald Durrell in a council house in Derby, driving from the UK to Africa seemed impossibly romantic and fulfilled a lifelong dream.

My most vivid memories are of eating goat tagine in roadside cafes, lying on my back at night in a bivvy bag gazing at the Milky Way, and driving through an awful lot of police and military checkpoints.

Best of all was sharing it with my daughter. She had just turned seventeen, and had been strangely reluctant to take her place behind the steering wheel in the UK, a reluctance that was explained when she told me that she’d wanted to save her first road-legal drive for a section of the old Paris Dakar rally route: she’s a chip off the old block, that’s for sure!

Living at the time in north Wales gave me plenty of experience in messing about in old Suzuki Jimnys. Cheap enough that they could, in extremis, be viewed as disposable, careful placement and plenty of revs allowed me to keep up with most things, even if some of the passages were accompanied by the noise of metal grating on rock…

The Allt y Badi in Llangollen had a fearsome reputation for many years, and there are still plenty of folk posting videos on YouTube involving too many revs and too many relocated rocks.

I drove it most recently towing a stricken Suzuki Ignis up there at little more than tickover in the snow, a feat that would have made for poor viewing but left little trace of our passing.

We then ambled in convoy down into Shropshire, where all-wheel-drive was restored to the Ignis by the simple expedient of driving up a very steep snow-covered road at full speed in reverse, something I was, sadly, unable to video but which reduced me to tears of laughter.

Speaking of Llangollen, the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley Countryside Service were looking for a pickup capable of traversing peat and heather better than their standard Mitsubishi L200. I borrowed an Arctic Trucks Isuzu D-Max AT35 for a week, and we spent a happy day driving across the area on tracks and hillsides that would have been forbidden to me normally.

The AT35 took it all in its stride, crossing peat bogs that had swallowed two tanks and even a plane that had crashlanded there during World War II.

My most recent adventure was relocating to Shetland in my Hilux AT37. Infinitely superior to the old Hilux AT38, it flew along the motorways at warp-speed carrying everything that is important to me, including Humphrey the border terrier and my two bikes.

We arrived in Lerwick after almost 600 miles and an overnight ferry during a snow storm and parked up at Hay’s Dock to admire the view.

We peered through the swirling snow to watch two otters catching fish in the harbour in front of me; with that and the weather, what more of a welcome could I have asked for?