Meeting the Tribe(r)

On our recent trip to South Africa, we took the Renault Triber on an unexpected adventure through KwaZulu-Natal province

- TUHIN GUHA

The event coordinator, while keying in the coordinates to our destination, Pietermaritzburg, said it was a two-hour drive inland from Durban, on South Africa’s sultry eastern coast. Great! Who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours travelling the seriously impressive South African road network, every frame of which seems lifted from a Windows wallpaper archive? There’s rolling, green hills as far the eye can see, peppered with even greener patches of forests and tree plantations.

But an hour in things seem to have gone a bit wrong. We’ve been on a quiet B-road for a while, when the GPS points to a dirt road up what is nothing short of a small mountain. This is not a cause for concern back home, a work brief in fact, but here in an unknown country with limited connectivity and few people around, there’s some concern. But we have a trusted companion in our quest, the event in question is the South African launch of the Renault Triber. An MPV that has caught our fancy back home but that ideally has no business scampering up hilly dirt trails.