A Luxurious Ride Without Undue Arrogance
2007 Jaguar XK coupe
Sunday, February 5, 2006; Page G01
STELLENBOSCH, South Africa
We strayed from the tourist path -- far from the stunning beauty of the Cape of Good Hope's vineyards, the picturesque Dutch cottages dotting the wine country's landscape and the Victorian loveliness of Dorp Street in this storied town's center.
 2007 Jaguar XK coupe |
It was an accidental wandering, occasioned by my misreading of a map and willful inattention to voice directives coming from the navigation system in the 2007 Jaguar XK convertible.
My co-pilot, Joni Gray, a Los Angeles-based writer and editor for Kelley Blue Book, seemed not the least bit disturbed. In fact, she was encouraging.
"I think we're okay," Joni said. "I think we just keep following this road. . . ."
And so we did . . . until the rolling valleys became shantytowns and untenable tenements, until topographical beauty turned to the beastly ugliness of poverty so grinding, so humiliating, it was depressing and scary. We followed the road to a dead end.
"I think we're lost," Joni said.
Dear reader, I beg your forbearance. But I want you to visualize the scene: black man, blonde woman in an $81,000 luxury convertible in the middle of African poverty so overwhelming it redefined the meaning of "poor." It was a sight so discordant, so out of sync, so damnably odd and shocking, the many Africans who stopped to stare and look at us and our car simply laughed.
"Big man," someone shouted from the crowd, "you and that lady lost?"
We were, but Joni raised the map and pointed and assured everyone that we were going in the right direction. Benjamin Bradlee, who decades ago hired me at The Washington Post, had an expression for that kind of bravado. But I'll just say that the woman was gutsy.
Another man pulled up alongside of us in a battered truck and told us, map or no map, we were lost. He pointed us in the right direction. Once on that road, Joni said that what had happened "was a good experience, getting to see the real Africa, the other side of it," even if we did it by happenstance in a car unaffordable by most people in the very rich United States. I smiled, nodded, joked with her about being "a crazy white girl from Los Angeles," and drove toward the scenic glories of Cape Town.
What occurred in those moments changed us, our views of the world and our place in it. But we were in South Africa to drive its many gorgeous roads, not to concentrate on its poverty, 63 percent of which is concentrated in its rural areas, mainly among Africans and people the locals refer to as "Coloureds."
The roads were, indeed, beautiful -- better in many respects than scenic routes we've driven in Europe, Asia or our very own America. And who could not enjoy driving them in a car as splendiferous as the 2007 Jaguar XK convertible, or in its sibling 2007 XK coupe, which we also drove several hundred miles?
I have a theory about sports cars, which is that they should be more enjoyable than demanding. I find little pleasure in climbing behind the steering wheel of an automobile filled with the anxiety of a teenager preparing to take a scholastic aptitude test in physics or trigonometry. It is not so much that I want to be pampered and coddled by the car as it is that I don't want to be quizzed: "Are you smart enough, skilled enough to drive me?" I don't want that.
I just want to drive, let the car do its thing as I do mine. The engineers and designers of the new, aluminum-bodied Jaguar XK convertible and coupe understand that desire. They've endowed both cars with enough sport to be thrilling without chilling, and with enough luxury to please the owner without unduly offending the rest of the world that can't afford it.
Understandably, some people regard it as silly and trifling to speak of cars as having souls and personalities. But I insist that they do, and I believe that getting lost in South Africa confirms my belief.
The Jaguar XK is inviting, warm, friendly. There is no me-above-all arrogance about it. I wonder what would have happened had we gotten lost in that shantytown in a BMW 7-Series.
