Regular readers know I generally travel by whatever bus, shared jeep, or occasionally questionable local transport gets me to a remote Himalayan village. Cars, in my usual travel writing, exist mainly as things I photograph parked outside monasteries. So it will surprise absolutely no one that when a rental car I was using in Dubai started making a noise I did not like, my first instinct was to simply pretend I hadn’t heard it — a strategy that has served me poorly in the past and did so again here.
What followed was an unexpectedly educational afternoon at Golden Horse Car Service in Al Quoz, which I’m now writing up mostly because several readers who also occasionally end up driving in places outside their comfort zone asked me to.
The Problem With Car Trouble When You’re Not a Car Person
I don’t know anything about cars. This is not false modesty — I genuinely could not tell you what most of the components under a bonnet do, and I have made peace with this in the same way I’ve made peace with not understanding cricket statistics. So when something started sounding wrong, my research process was the same one I use for everything else: find the highest-rated, most consistently reviewed option and trust the aggregate judgment of strangers over my own instincts.
Golden Horse Car Service in Al Quoz Industrial Area came up repeatedly — 4.9 on Google from thousands of reviews, which for someone with zero technical knowledge of cars is about the only signal I know how to trust.
#Himalayas & #Northeast
Cinephile, Misanthrope, Anti-selfie
Atlas Obscura/Mint/Discover India
