"Don’t worry, it’s all under control, just keep going slowly and don’t steer too much.” These were the words of wisdom that came from my jovial driving instructor, and on the face of it, the advice seemed perfectly straightforward and logical. The problem was, I was in the driver’s seat, at a seemingly impossible angle, with my door almost touching the side of an embankment; had it not been for my seat belt, I would have slid quietly out of the window, sideways.
In these circumstances, you tend to pay more attention to the involuntary clenching of your buttocks than to sage advice, but I forced myself to listen to the chap and followed his instructions. Sure enough, the Touareg inched forward, and as I turned right to exit the embankment, it was the instructor’s turn to be almost flush with the wall. “See, no problem,” he grinned and said. Indeed.
The new Touareg’s motto, in fact, could well be “No problem”. Volkswagen had set up an off-road obstacle course near the Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh, and at first glance, the course looked like a bunch of holes in the ground, with some large mounds of dirt thrown in. I can assure you, however, that when you’re attempting to drive a large SUV through said holes, they suddenly take on the dimensions of the Grand Canyon.
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