Catch My Drift

This May Not Be Tokyo, But It Is Ten Degrees Below Zero Outside And The Surface Can Put A Glass Pane To Shame. And Santa Is Waiting To Grant Me A Wish, Says Debabrata Sarkar. Game On Then

- Debabrata Sarkar

You seem a little confused, yes, it isn’t Christmas, but I did mention Santa. Why? You may ask. Well, it’s quite simple really. I am in the heart of Lapland and this little town, Rovaniemi, is registered as Santa Claus’s official return address. You know, in case you were being naughty and did not have the time to answer the door when the gifts came around. Or some such. And given the fact that it is very wintery at this address past the Arctic circle, it is of little surprise to see all the ice around. In fact, I’m told it’s a rather warm day as temperatures were hovering around a slightly more frosty thirty-below-zero the week before.

It is here that Skoda has chosen a spot, a little outside of town, to set up a series of tracks to give me a taste of driving on ice and snow. No, I am not trying to pun on the GoT books. A fleet of Skodas are ready at hand to deliver this incredible experience along with a bunch of Finnish driving instructors who were probably born sideways in a car. There are Kodiaqs, Karoqs, Octavias and Superbs and pretty much all of them are equipped with four-wheel-drive. While they were thawing their engines in the parking lot, the Finnish instructors took us away to a warm cottage and gave us some hot coffee. While sensation returned to my extremities, he showed us maps of the courses we’d be driving on, which remarkably looked like they’d been drawn by someone with a very bad cold. Plenty of kinks and squiggles that we needed to be careful about and try not to wrap any of the cars around the flanking trees.