Well I'm just back from a month in the former Yugoslavia and a hell of a lot of it spent in various Land Rovers.

The most dramatic time was a week ago today when I was trying to travel in a Discovery from Tuzla, north of Sarajevo, to Medugorje, near the coast; a distance of roughly 300-400 Km. Well the emphasis was truly on the roughly. It took us 20 hours to plough our way through the metre of snow that fell that day. Despite living in Canada, including eight years in the Arctic, I've never seen winter driving conditions as bad as they were on that trip.

The worst bit was trying to get over the mountain after Zenica to join the main road, in fact the only road, that links Sarajevo and the coast. The mountain road is called the PacMan route for some odd reason and it's a hellish ride in any snowfall but beyond description in a one metre blizzard.

It was made all the worse by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stuck and abandoned trucks and other vehicles up one side of the mountain and down the other. But that Discovery Tdi simply chugged its way through it all and somehow kept us from plunging over the edge into some bottomless ravine.

I couldn't get over how that machine never even seemed to think of getting stuck. With only a set of chains on the rear wheels it would happily charge off the barely cleared track into virgin snow and carve its way around any vehicle blocking the way. Many times the snow was rolling up over the bonnet and breaking against the windscreen as we plunged on.

We passed a number of Defenders that weren't doing so well but to be fair to them they were the armored type and the extra weight, about another tonne and a half I believe, severely hampered them.

Those armored Def's are true pigs. I drove one in Sarajevo for a bit and it was like trying to pilot a submarine on wheels. All the armored plate puts a tremendous imbalance into the suspension and even though they're equipped with stronger springs and shocks they drive more like a boulder crashing down a mountainside than anything resembling a vehicle. And then there's the near total lack of visibility. The windscreen and the side windows are much smaller than normal so it's a bit like looking through the driving slit of a tank. The glass is bullet proof as well but it's also coated with a sheet of some sort of plastic that flares any light, such as headlights, into a blooming cloud of rainbow col ours. I believe that people with severe cataracts would recognize the effect.

But there are lots of more stock Defenders roaring around Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as vast numbers of new Discovery's owned by the United Nations. The UN Disco's are a bit of a scandal in the Croatian capital of Zagreb where they don't get much use beyond running around the city or trips out to the airport. In fact there are a couple of dozen new Disco's with every kind of accessory that are only used at the airport by the UN and Zagreb doesn't get much snow, not to mention that the roads are BMW smooth.

I didn't see too many "salvageable" wrecks lying around other than in Tuzla where there is this really nice clump of six S111's sitting in a junkyard right in the city centre. All but two are sitting on their rubber and although I couldn't get closer than 30 metres they appear pretty intact, right down to wipers and spare wheel fittings on the bonnets.

I would think that given the number of trucking outfits now running into places like Tuzla from other parts of Europe, and the total lack of any back haul cargo, it might be worthwhile for someone in say Britain to cut a deal with the junkyard and have a trucker haul them out for restoration.