THE CARNIVAL IS IN TOWN

Kia’s plus-size MPV is more than a competitor for the Toyota Innova Crysta — it’s in a category of its own.

- Pablo Chaterji

Even though I drove the Carnival last month in Hyderabad, I’m going to go back in time a little and revisit a road trip I had done in the USA. In 2016, I decided to go to the Burning Man festival in Nevada with a group of friends. It’s an other-worldly celebration of art, music, people and pretty much everything else you can think of, held every year in a high-altitude desert where there’s nothing but heat, cold and dust... lots of dust. One of the festival’s guiding principles is ‘radical self reliance’, which translates into your having to bring everything you need to survive in the desert for a week — food, water, shelter, transport, artwork etc — with you, and then to take it all back once you’re done; another principle is ‘leaving no trace.’ To do this, you need some form of motorised transport that can accommodate all of this, so my friend Romil and I, who were driving to the festival from San Francisco, decided to rent a vehicle for the job. The plan was for him to land at the airport, rent the car and then come and pick me up, after which we would set out for the festival, making supply stops on the way.

Bang on schedule, Romil rocked up to where I was staying, at the wheel of a rather large Kia Sedona van (in the US, they’re called ‘minivans’, naturally). I admit to being a bit disappointed when I saw it, because I’d been having visions of a proper supersized Yankee pickup truck or SUV, with at least eight cylinders under the hood and a suitably raucous soundtrack to accompany them; a ‘mom mobile’ seemed like a step downwards. Upon closer inspection, though, the Sedona (which is what the Carnival is called there) revealed itself to be very spacious, extremely well put together and rather practical, in the way that the seats could be moved around in order to make room for luggage.