King and Queen of the desert

[Clitheroekid]

Interesting - https://jalopnik.com/land-rover-and-mer ... 1831555271

It reminds me of a visit I made to Albania a few years ago. The roads were almost universally appalling, with huge potholes everywhere, so that driving was basically a matter of just avoiding the potholes.

It's obviously a very poor country, and there were two aspects of its cars that really made an impact.

The first was that it was quite common to see luxury UK cars - even things like Bentleys - parked up outside tumble down houses and surrounded by junk and other rubbish. At first I thought they must just be eccentric UK tourists, slumming it. But on speaking to one of the locals they told me that the cars had been stolen from the UK, and that the local police supplemented their no doubt very modest income by accepting a weekly fee to leave the car thieves free from any prosecution.

The other thing that struck me was that despite the poverty about half the cars on the roads were Mercs, though often clapped out ones. This seemed incongruous, but I was told that they were the only mainstream cars that could survive Albanian roads - a reputation reinforced by the article.