A Renault 4 on the desert road between Damascus and Baghdad in 1970 – wikimedia commons

When I wrote about Agatha Christie travelling to Iraq, I mentioned how she took an express bus from Damascus to Baghdad.

There was no real road, simply a hard packed track over the desert, along which the buses (and various trucks) would thunder.

Well I was looking on wikimedia commons for a picture of a Renault 4 GTL similar to the one I owned in the 1980s, and came across this picture from 1970 of an early model Renault 4 dicing with death driving the track in among a group of trucks.

And unlke some of the dirt roads you see in the outback which have been graded and levelled, and where people (mostly) stick to the correct side of the road, this is truly a track, where everyone picks their own line…