Gearing up for a drop of Madeira

Emissions: Why the top 10 finishers in the world rally driving championships every year aren't from Madeira is beyond me. Never in all my born days have I witnessed such driving.

The only people that even come close are Mexican bus drivers. But then, both life and tequila are very cheap in Mexico.

Madeira is basically the top few hundred metres of a massive mountain rising from the Atlantic, several hundred miles northwest of the Canaries. Top of the pile is jovial president Alberto Jardim, who has been in power practically unchallenged since the 1960s, despite bearing a striking resemblance to Jackie Healy-Rae, albeit minus the flat cap and red nose.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this obvious physical impediment, Jardim has built up a fearsome reputation for prising hard cash out of the keyholders of the European Union's coffers. So successful, in fact, that large swathes of this tiny island boast a multi-billion euro road system that would put German autobahns to shame.

Road-building appears to be a constant activity, with cement-laden trucks almost outnumbering cars. Despite this industriousness, the majestic motorways, towering flyovers, spaghetti junctions and space-age tunnels have yet to extend much beyond the hinterland of the capital, Funchal, and the south coast.

There's an absolute belter of a road bisecting the centre, but the rest of the island is plagued by the kind of tracks that tourists in their rental hatchbacks baulk in fear at in Healy-Rae's glorious Kingdom of Kerry. Only worse. Much, much worse.

All 250,000 Madeirans, otherwise a seemingly gentle and kindly bunch, drive like they're being chased by the Four Subaru Drivers of the Apocalypse. All of the time. It took me a while to twig that the road signs are in kilometres. To look at the motorists driving past us as we left the airport, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they were in metres per second.

To be honest, the sheer danger of driving anywhere was daunting for a while. We barely got out of third gear for a week, hearts in our mouths as we felt our way, dodging the waterfalls and boulders that pour indiscriminately into the roads. It's pretty petrifying to be cruising along warily, desperately trying to ignore the 500-foot drop on the other side of your 11th hairpin bend in a row, only to have some loon in a tattered, rusting pick-up truck tear past you on a blind bend, honking his horn and giving you the finger as he swerves, one-handed, into the path of an oncoming lorry.

This trepidation, combined with the inability to walk anywhere without accepting an even chance of instant death, didn't help my sanity much.

Ally this to the fact we were staying in an isolated village at the bottom of a huge cliff, accessible by road only in the past 20 years and populated by the most bizarre collection of misfits and you may have some idea of my mindset.

But fear nothwithstanding, we ventured forth. Nothing ventured, eh? We soon gained nothing other than a quick lesson in humiliation. Coming down off an implausibly steep mountain pass in a tropical rainstorm with fog so thick I could barely see the steering wheel of the rented Renault Clio, nevermind anything outside the car, we had a little mishap. Swerving to avoid a local driving like he was blind and didn't care, we ended up with the right front wheel lodged firmly in a storm drain.

In hindsight, it was quite funny. Drenched, scared and completely unable to communicate, we must have looked quite a pair, the lady and I. But the poor farmer I dragged out of bed to pull us out with his truck was none too amused.

Nor were we when we realised he was obviously directly related to those populating aforementioned village, and no more knew how to help us than he knew how to play the Uileann pipes. Still, we got out eventually, the rental intact, and the farmer left happily clutching the bottle of Madeira we gave him for his trouble.

I also whacked off one of our wing mirrors while avoiding a cement truck, but that's hardly worth mentioning. God bless the rental car.

Despite these trials and tribulations, I'm actually getting quite confident driving here now. I may even try to get into fourth gear tomorrow. We'll see.