Driving a Borrowed Car in Tawau...

Whenever James Bond visits a new place, he never seems to have any trouble with transport.

He either hires the latest Ford Mondeo from Avis at the airport, or slips silently into a sleek Aston Martin provided by Q Branch, or, if he is really lucky, he gets a lift in an open top Ferrari driven by a half-naked girl who he later sleeps with or kills because she’s an enemy agent.

But look what happened to me when I went to Tawau last week with my dear wife, for some much needed RnR. Waiting in the blistering sauna that is the Kota Kinabalu International Airport, Annie got a call from her sister Anita to the effect that a cousin had lent us the use of a Pajero four wheel drive for the week, and that it will be waiting for us at Tawau airport. This was great news, and even though I had never driven such a beast before, I psyched myself up for an interesting and rewarding drive to our house.

Well, to cut a long story short, we arrived at Tawau and managed to get the keys to our Pajero. It was parked in the airport car park and turned out to be a nice white colour, albeit rather old and battered-looking.

Trying to open the thing was the first challenge. I am used to those keys with a little button that you press that goes ‘beep’ to open the car. But this one had a bunch of ordinary metal, bog-standard keys from the 1970s. As two of them were longer than the others, I reasoned that one of them would open the door. I was right, although I couldn’t open the door because for some reason, the key only turned when my wife did it.

Our next task was to get the bags into the back of the car. The rear door would not open – we tried every key on the bunch, my wife constantly warning me not to turn the key too much or I might break it and me swearing bitterly because it was hot, I was sweating and I was supposed to be on holiday not struggling to open a bloody car with a faulty lock...

We gave up on the rear door and managed to open the side doors and with great dexterity threw our bags into the back over the rear seats, after realising that putting them on the rear seat would stop me from moving the driver’s seat back.

So, with our luggage safely stowed, we proceeded to try the ignition. First of all it didn’t work but eventually, we managed to bring it to coughing, rumbling life. The loud ticking sound told me straight away that the car ran on diesel.

My wife kept telling me to make sure I understood all of the controls before we started off but I had to get into the bloody car first. Annie had no trouble because she is so much smaller than I am but I discovered to my horror and irritation that even when I moved the driver’s seat back as far as I could, I had about a millimetre of room between the steering wheel and my gut. But I squeezed in, closed the door and managed to adjust the mirrors, feeling like an overweight astronaut. The pedals were just too close to the seat, but I thought I would be able to use them, with effort and a few yoga exercises....

I then tried the gears and they all seemed to work like any other car. So I put her into reverse, pumped the gas, brought up the clutch, released the hand brake, and....we weren’t moving. God, what had I done? Annie was being helpful as usual, telling me I was in the wrong gear, even though I wasn’t. The problem seemed to be the biting point. I had to put more power on the accelerator, and release the clutch earlier. When I did this, we slowly slid backwards.

When I had straightened the car up to leave the car park, I made an annoying and potentially dangerous discovery. There was a big plastic sunshield across the top of the windscreen and it was obscuring my forward vision. I could only drive the car safely by bending my head down like a tortoise to look through the windscreen.

Well, to cut another story short, I managed to get us out of the airport compound and onto the expressway leading to Tawau, without killing anyone. The journey was Ok-ish, though I had to be constantly reminded by the wife to slow down, because it was a very fast road full of bends and steep rises and falls and I had never driven on it before. I also found out that the passenger side wing mirror kept moving, leading my wife to stick her hand out of the window from time to time to adjust it to my frantic directions. Also, the steering was a bit slippery, forcing me to be extra careful when changing lanes.

Eventually we entered Tawau town, and I learned that the stopping distance on a Pajero is much greater than on a Matrix, and nearly ran into the back of another car. But, with lots of vigorous encouragement and prayers from Annie, we finally managed to pull up into the drive of our house.

I slid down from the cab like a survivor in one of those air crash movies, just thankful to be alive. My right leg and my neck and shoulders were killing me, because of the cramped driving conditions and the windshield. Annie, on the other hand, was too busy hugging her mum and sister to notice, bless her.