Getting tough with Land Rover’s Discovery Sport in Sichuan

Being 4,830 metres above sea level, at the snowline atop the pass over Mount Zhuodala, was not the best place to get a puncture. It was, however inevitable; while huge sums of money are being poured into transport infrastructure in rural Sichuan province, transforming the area with new tunnels and bridges, there are still old and temporary roads where construction is under way, and this section of the Ganbai Road is no exception.

We were relieved to discover that the Land Rover Discovery Sport we’d rented from eHi Car Hire came with a full-sized spare wheel. Despite the Discovery Sport being produced locally by a joint venture in China, our SE trim SI4 version was an import.

At a tyre store in the nearby town of Ganzi, a Tibetan woman, small and strong like a yak, threw the wheel around like a balloon and found the problem, a large gash from a rock.

Setting off from Chengdu a few days earlier, we soon ran into traffic jams on the winding roads up to Kangding city thanks to China’s October holiday exodus. Diving down a quarrying track near Kangding Airport, we left the crowds of mainly Chengdu-plated cars behind. The track finally disappeared into faint tyre marks in a field.

The Discovery Sport comes with a number of set off-road programmes, such as mud-ruts and sand. Impressively, it is able to climb very steep grass inclines, but its biggest shortcoming off road is the limited ground clearance, so you have to be ever vigilant to avoid scraping the undercarriage.