Ok, actually, it’s my own car at home that’s backwards. I live in a backwards country that uses vehicles that literally mirror cars in the entire rest of the world.
No, it’s not the entire rest of the world but I’d have to look up who uses the same road system as the UK and I’m in a tiny tent with neither the battery, the data nor the inclination to do it.
I first hired a left-hand drive car in Iceland back in… 2014, I think. I had a black Hyundai i10 and I spent the first couple of days bashing my left hand on the door every time I wanted to change gear. Hiring it was a big deal. It was terrifying! I got my driving licence in 2003 and so for more than ten years, I’d been driving right-hand drive. Now I had to not only drive LHD but do it all on my own?? I remember practicing driving an imaginary car around the office for weeks, stopping on the way back from the printer at non-existent junctions and pretending to change gear without actually twitching my hand in case anyone thought I was weird – and they already thought I was pretty weird.
I survived. I did it again in 2015 (VW Golf with heated seats!) and 2016 (VW Polo) and a variation in 2017 when I hired a small campervan. Nervous every time but I got used to it after a day or so.
But it’s now been five years since I’ve driven LHD and although I didn’t have the weeks of worry and imagination – well, I only booked just over a week in advance, since this was all done in the name of a volcano that stopped as suddenly as it started – I just didn’t get on with it. My brain has 1000% reprogrammed itself to RHD in the last five years and even when I dropped it back at the airport on the seventh morning, I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. Given how careful we are with driving licencing, it seems unbelievable that you can be handed a car that’s literally backwards in exchange for nothing more than a huge pile of money and a flash of a driving licence. There’s no training or testing or any guarantee you’re capable of flipping everything you’ve ever known about driving. If I’d been able to do a short course at a bit of track down the road from Heathrow on my way to the airport, I’d definitely have done that. If anyone’s looking for a business opportunity, some LHD practice for Brits hiring a car abroad might well make a fortune out of people like me.
I know. Half of you don’t drive and the other half are staring at me right now, going “This really isn’t a big deal, I switch between LHD and RHD all the time, it’s a total non-issue.” Yeah. If the likes of Jeremy Clarkson was wailing about how hard it is to drive a strange car, I’d feel the same. I’ve always said there’s only one thing I Just Can’t Do and that’s play cards, but driving LHD has shot up there in the collection of Things I Persistently Struggle With. Oh, I hated it.
I hated it even more that I had to figure it out at the biggest airport in the country, where I’m surrounded by lanes and one-way systems and far too many other vehicles. I got the car over to the airport hotel despite being hooted at by an impatient 4×4 who wouldn’t understand that I couldn’t figure out whether I could just drive straight across the access road. I got the car out of the airport hotel by sneaking up a tiny stretch of one-way road because surely the only way out can’t be via the airport’s parking barriers? I don’t want to go into the airport, I want to leave. Hang on, how come when I try to leave I’m suddenly going the wrong way up a one-way road?? This isn’t what I want to do! Sweary sweary please let me get back to the two-way road before anything comes straight at me! Oh sweary sweary, idiot! It’s only in hindsight that I begin to wonder if there was another exit on the other side of the car park which would let me skip the airport car park. Anyway, who’s taking a car from the hotel car park to the airport? Yes, there are two other ways out. Turn right out of the car park and then turn left straight after the airport barriers or just turn the opposite way when you leave the parking space in the first place! Sorry, Kef. I was lost and confused and bewildered and scared and I messed up.
In a way, it’s more confusing that not everything is mirrored. The pedals are in the right place and so are the indicator/windscreen stalks, although the precise movements for different things have changed. I’d almost rather everything was backwards because remembering everything is backwards is, in its way, less bewildering than remember most things are backwards.
I remembered which side of the road to drive on simply by obstinately remembering that I go in the middle of the road. Often there are arrows directing you to the correct side of the road at a junction but I go in the middle of the road was the bit I had to embed in my mind before I turned the key.
For at least the first three days, I spent more time watching my sides in the wing mirrors than watching the front. I had no idea where the corners and edges were. Was I creeping over the white line? Were cars coming the other way going to scrape my side off? Or was I going too far the other way? Was I going to slide off the road? For Icelandic roads outside the big city tend to be raised slightly above the landscape, giving you anywhere between one foot and four feet of “sudden downhill” if you veer a bit too far to the right. Or was I going to hit the yellow poles that mark the road when it’s hidden under snow?
Concentrating on my exact road positioning meant it was hard to get up to full speed. Not that “full speed” is quite like it is at home, thank goodness. Maximum speed on an open road is 90km/hr in Iceland, about 56mph. At home, I can drive at 70mph on a dual carriageway and 60mph on an ordinary open road. Not that it bothered me too much because often I could barely get to 75km/hr what with thinking about the car. That did improve and I caught myself creeping over the limit on my last full day but I must have been such a pain to be behind for the first few days. Well, I know I was. I know how often I was overtaken!
Then there were the gears. I actually didn’t hit my left hand on the door once. I twitched my left hand a few times when I knew a gear-change was coming up but I hadn’t got as far as actually moving the hand. No, the problems were that it was just difficult to get started in first gear – I had to remember to give it an extra kick and that meant I had to be more cautious than I usually would be when getting started. Don’t know if that’s just because I never quite got comfortable with the clutch. And the second thing was that in my own car, I can move between gears, or even skip gears, with little more than a touch from a single finger. Is it a really light gearbox? But moving up from fourth to fifth gear in this thing, that was three movements. Up, sideways, up again, using my whole hand to push. In my own car, that’s one movement with my thumb. Again, maybe that’s just me not being accustomed to it but it made every gear change feel like an effort that must be prepared for in advance.
The pedals were difficult too and I know that’s nothing to do with the side they drive on. Every car’s pedals feel different. If I got in my dad’s car or my sister’s or my neighbour’s, I’d have just as much trouble with the pedals. My own pedals in my Panda are quite solid. I don’t stamp on the brake, exactly – but I kind of stamp on the brake. Even when I’m being gentle with it, which is most of the time, to be fair to me. But when I applied the same pressure to the brake in the hire car that I do to my own car, the car came to a halt and tried to throw me through the windscreen in exactly the way a horse might if you kicked it like that. I rapidly learned to be really really gentle with the brake. And I had to put more pressure on the clutch as well. By some magic or mercy, the accelerator was fine.
My own lights switch on automatically when I start the engine and go off when I stop. So they have in all the cars I’ve hired in Iceland before. This one switches on some dim daylight running lights which are not really enough in Iceland. So I had to remember to physically switch on the lights every time I got in and physically switch them off every time I stopped. I also had to press the clutch to start the car, although I get the impression that’s almost standard in cars built in the last ten years.
Any other complaints? Oh yeah. On Saturday I finally had to get some fuel and I wasted at least ten minutes swearing at the car at the fuel station in Laugarvatn. I assumed you pressed the flap and it would open. Nope. No key, no button, no pressure, no nothing. I’d paid for the fuel and couldn’t get at it and it took so long to figure it out that the machine reset and I had to get the manual out of the glovebox. There’s a tiny button on the floor next to the driver’s seat that I have to pull up. Icelandic fuel pumps require you to decide in advance how much fuel you want – not in litres, which I could kind of calculate, but in cost. Do I want to put 5000kr in? No idea! How much fuel does that get me? How much do I want? Luckily, there’s a “fill tank” button that’s a lot more prominent than it was the first time I was right here at this very fuel stop making the same decision in 2014 – at least, I think I got my first fuel at Laugarvatn then too. And I’ll avoid Orkan in future, the pink places, because that one didn’t have a “fill tank” button and I had to take a guess at a price for filling the car to return it to the airport.
So there we go. I had many problems with the fact that the car was backwards but I also had many problems with it just being an unfamiliar car. I thought I’d have the same problems returning to my own car after a week of driving a backwards one but it was so difficult to get out of the space and I had to do a so-many-point turn that I’d entirely re-figured out how much pressure to put on clutch and brake before I’d even got going. Oh, it felt good to be back in a car I understood. There’s a Japanese concept of horse and rider as one called jinba ittai and I kind of feel that about my own car and I was very glad I hadn’t lost that feeling. Of course, dealing with Heathrow and the M25 is another chapter in the story of my car woes but I’ll leave you simply with the explanation that I’m far more at home on single-track country lanes than motorways.