You’re inches away from the finishing line. You can just make out the Camel Trophy glistening bright amidst the trickle of rain and the mud stubbornly encrusted on your windscreen. Your windbreaker is caked with dried earth from a few kilometres down track when your Discovery made it out of a deep water-filled puddle. All you can think of is the pile of logs jamming your route to victory. Can you make it? You’ve got a flying chance thanks to Land Rover’s Experience Driving School.
Not satisfied with producing some of the greatest off-road vehicles – the Freelander, Defender, Discovery and of course the Range Rover – the company has seen fit to complement its legendary heritage with an off-road driving school. Is there more good news? Indeed. Should you be a bit hesitant about using your own vehicle and scratching the lovely metallic paint on your Range Rover Sport for instance, the company provides one for you to knock about a bit.
The Land Rover Experience Driving School has operations in North America, Europe, South Africa and Asia – the closest centre to our shores is in Turkey. The Istanbul Centre offers tracks designed by experts and obstacle courses encompassing 300 acres of rugged land at the Wattabe Outdoor Experience Centre. Just 45 minutes outside of Turkey’s cultural city, it offers you something to do more thrilling than visit the Aghia Sophia or the Blue Mosque – as captivating as they may be. As is customary with all the centres worldwide, obstacles include hills, cracks, wooden bridges, railway sleepers, rock crawl passes and sand and gravel crossings. There are two levels of courses depending on your skills as an off-road driver and training and services also include navigation, convoy driving, winching, night drive (as if daylight driving wasn’t hard enough). It must be mentioned that the centre is located on Büyükcekmece Lake which is one of the city’s biggest water reserves so preservation of the environment is key. Land Rover has special permission to use the environs because of its environment-friendly policy and practices.
As you can imagine the centres throughout North America offer a more rugged experience – it really depends on how extreme you want to get. And the experiences can be very versatile and varied, such as bushcraft and wilderness survival training (rope throwing, tree felling, etc), wilderness medical training, off-road vehicle recovery (basic maintenance, convoy techniques, etc), and trailer handling. Land Rover Experience can even customise trips according to your needs with specialized instructors are on-hand at all times. Land Rover’s most extensive experience is at the 65,000 acre Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello just outside of Montreal in Canada.
The whole adventure is relatively cheap, considering the kick and expertise you gain. A full day at the 8,000 acre and 250-room chateau at the Biltmore Estate in the US, including a tasty lunch, will cost you around 750 USD per vehicle. Considering that Ferrari charges around 8,200 USD for a two-an-a- half day excursion, you’ll be laughing (and bobbing) all the way to the bank.
Contacts
Land Rover Experience Turkey
Büyükcekmece, Istanbul
Tel +902164694850
HYPERLINK "http://www.landroverexperience.com.tr" www.landroverexperience.com.tr
Biltmore Estate
Asheville, NC, USA
USA
HYPERLINK "javascript:ChangeURI_txt_IntroBlock_Body__link_2();" http://www.biltmore.com
