by Alan Douglas (06 Mar 05)

Here's a word of warning: if you are in a distant land and try to hire a Mini Moke as a fun runaraound be very careful about what you sign up to.

Anyone who knows anything about these things is quite clear exactly what a Mini Moke is. It was probably the most bizarre derivative of the original Mini but also a brilliant piece of salesmanship on the part of whoever came up with the original idea.

Take a Mini, strip almost everything out of it, including the doors, roof and almost all the bodywork, and then sell it as a fun car for almost the same price as the original fully-equipped Mini. It sold well - more than 14,000 were built at Longbridge in the four years until production stopped in 1968.

But that's only part of the story. because BMC and then British Leyland offshoots in Australia, the US and in parts of Europe such as Portugal continued to churn them out. In Australia alone, they were made right up until 1981 and more than 26,000 were turned out.

So quite a few were created and many still survive, mainly in tropical climates where they have avoided the ravages of the British weather. In practical terms, these are also the only places where you can drive a car without windows and doors.

But here's my word of warning again. If you want to hire a Moke, be very clear about what you are given. While there are still many Mokes around, the Japanese have cottoned on to their appeal and you are more than likely to be offered a Daihatsu, Nissan or Toyota equivalent which has the same basic elements - but it is not a Moke. It's like asking for a Jeep and being given an Isuzu.

I've just returned from a very enjoyable couple of weeks in Barbados - a friend of mine has a house there and I charitably offer to check it out every year to make sure it's tip-top for his paying guests - and it gave me the chance to sample again the driving in this island paradise.

I wanted a Moke, largely to renew the experience of those hazy days of the Sixties when it was the height of fashion and I was lucky enough to drive one, and so I spoke to those nice people at Holiday Autos. "No problem," they said and put me onto a local car hire company in the south of the island. Unlike some others who claim to offer Mokes - which are in fact the modern Japanese versions - these guys came up with the real thing for around £20 a day. They weren't sure of its heritage but it was definitely a Moke.

You can tell quite easily. It is basic motoring in the extreme, very reminiscent of the original Mini but with any trace of comfort stripped out. You have two seats at the front and a bench at the back, a steering wheel and pedals, an ignition key and speedo - and that's about it. But in the Barbadan climate you don't need anything else.

One of the first things I did was to fold down the canvas roof (spot the tourist - that's the one enduring the blazing sun while the locals have all got their windows shut and the aircon on full). Ah yes, this was the real thing, from the crunch of the gearbox to the whine of the transmission, this was definitely a Mini through and through.

In Barbados, of course, as in any tropical climate, you do get the occasional and fortunately brief downpour which can cause a problem when you have no roof or side windows. The secret, apart from sheltering under one of the few bridges, is to drive faster, so that the - albeit warm - rain passes over you. But on more than one occasion I did find myself sitting in a warm pool of water - not for the first time, since I competed in rallying for a few years, only now the water had come from the sky and was not produced by me.

This car must have been at least 20 years old but it still gave all it was asked and was absolutely perfect for tootling around the islands roads, from the main arterial highway - which like everywhere else in the world is choked at rush hour - to the very rough and barely surfaced side roads linking the scattered communities.

The most useful piece of equipment on the car, apart from the brakes and accelerator, was the horn. In Barbados everyone drives on the horn - not aggressively as in Rome or Paris but as a warning to every other road user. The problem is, the Barbadans are a friendly bunch, everyone seems to know each other and they use the horn to say hello. The result is that the whole island reverberates to the sound of car horns as everyone acknowledges everyone else.

So long live the Moke - which was the centerpiece of the classic 1960s drug-induced drama, The Prisoner - and I'm keeping a close eye on the new people in control at the HQ of the new MINI to see if they have any plans up their sleeves. Last year, the gravel-voiced boss of MINI, Trevor Houghton-Berry let it slip that he'd like to see a Moke as one of the derivatives of the second generation MINI. He quickly retracted that - no doubt on the advice of engineers who must have sweated buckets thinking of the safety implications of a new Moke (how do you build in airbags when there's hardly any structure?) - but it is clearly in their minds.

Personally I - and thousands of others around the globe - can't wait. In the meantime, I found a 1987 Moke with only 11,000 miles on the clock for sale on Ebay for only £5,500 - that's almost 14 times the original price! How many other £400 cars can claim that level of appreciation?

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