Crown Victoria

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"I'm sorry sir, the only car we have left is a big one sir" said Maylene, the girl behind the Hertz desk at Doha International Airport. "How much for the day?" I asked. "300 Riyals sir" she told me. "I'll take it please" I said, handing over my credit card, passport and driving licence. I'm not really that interested in cars with less than one gearbox but I thought having a Chevy Caprice or a Dodge Charger for a day might be fun, especially as I had to go up to Ras Laffan on the North East side of the Peninsula. So imagine my disappointment when I got out to the car park and was shown my Ford Crown Victoria, a car of craptactularly bad proportions.

Now I'm no Jeremy Clarkson, but if this car was a Dutch girl in occupied Holland, you'd be telling the Stormtroopers she's in the loft. It is just a nasty piece of engineering. The suspension managed to be both soft and wallowing yet it crashed and jarred at the shallowest of potholes. I've steered canal boats that were more responsive. At best the air conditioning managed to blow warm, damp air into the car, not ideal when it's 50 degrees and 85% humidity outside. And by following my own advice of checking that the spare tyre, jack and wheel brace were there I managed to slice my knuckle open on a razor sharp edge in the boot. How ironic would it have been if later in the day that cut would have caused me to get infected by a zombie?

When I was at school I designed better cars than this in crayon, the teacher would stick a gold star on it and my Mum would blu tak it on the fridge door (who says A-Levels have gotten easier?) I reckon Ford just went through our bins and said, "there you go, make that". If they ever bring out a car that has chainsaws that emerge from behind the headlights and a "Boob Ray" that makes bras de-materialise then I will know they stole my ideas. That patent on the "Bonermobile" has been worth every penny too.

The standard of driving in Doha makes Abu Dhabi seem like Zurich. They've embraced roundabouts in a big way, a bit of a mistake since roundabouts only really work if people understand and observe other road users right of way. The curbs only really start about 20 yards before the roundabouts, so that means that on most of the dual carriageways you have two lanes, the hard shoulder and another two lanes of traffic side by side in the sand beside the hard shoulder all trying to converge on the roundabout which is itself crammed full of vehicles. The only time there is some semblance of order is when the police turn up and manually direct the traffic, however this rapidly causes the traffic to back up to adjacent roundabouts.

So that was that, another "glamorous" day in the Gulf, and by glamorous I mean getting up at four in the fucking morning (SotD reference there) and not getting home until midnight. You know the opening and closing scenes of "Love Actually" - Richard Curtis' 2003 Rom-crap-tic schmaltz fest - where Hugh Grant, the prime minister is going on about how much love and hope there is in the world because of observations he has made in airports? Well all I can say is that he must have been in some very different airports to me. Apart from the one time where Singapore airlines mistakenly thought I was the Junior Minister for Aviation and put me in first class, my thoughts in airports are generally of the "will all you smelly bastards please get out of my way" kind.

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Photos

The Crown Victoria
18 feet of useless American crap

Pencil
This is how big pencils were when they first came out.

Basket
This is how big baskets were when they first came out.

Creature World
A pet shop in Down town Al Khor.

Seashore Food Centre
A resaurant in Down town Al Khor.

Hang on...
Why are they loading stuf from Creature World straight into the Seashore Food Centre van?.

Comments

[Potter la']

This is how big..
Ford Crown Victoria's - Micro Machines when they first came out! Honest.