SANTA SLEIGH

DESPERATELY SEEKING SANTA

What better way to tour some festive-sounding places than in the appropriately named Hyundai Santa Fe? STEVE CROPLEY is your seasonal guide

All self-respecting Christmas stories start in one of two places: Bethlehem or the North Pole. The former is firm favourite if the Almighty is featured in the narrative; the Arctic Pole is the preferred option when Santa Claus is the name in the frame. He is alleged to live there.

For this impromptu Autocar Christmas tour, we were going to have to fit the whole thing into a single November day. A trip to the Middle East was out of the question and Bethlehem a definite no-no. The North Pole might not sound so easy, either, but luckily there are several North Poles, mainly drinking establishments, conveniently located in London. Google can be so helpful.

Our destination decision was made even more obvious by the fact that our chosen transport was to be the recently launched Hyundai Santa Fe SUV, a plug-in hybrid version of the Korean maker’s biggest and most imposing softroader. It was the only car we could find, sold in the UK, with a truly Christmas-oriented name.

My job was to ride shotgun with my Autocar colleague Sam Phillips, who came up with the idea of connecting a disparate collection of around-London locations with Christmassy names in a day-long journey. He found the places, laid out the route, chose the car and elected to do most of the driving.

Funnily enough, this idea isn’t quite as frivolous as it may sound. Sam and I are both keen devotees of amateur motorsport (he and his dad do classic trials in a quick and capable Subaru-powered car), and he soon explained that this day’s exploit was akin to a “scatter rally”, popular with car clubs, in which entrants find obscure locations and are required to note even more obscure details about them. Those with the most right answers win. Thinking of this as a Christmas-themed two-bloke scatter rally suddenly gave it legs.