“Hang up, I’m coming”: I got stuck in the mud on Chortiatis - and the Defender ad went up the next day

I grew up in a house that breathed cars. My father never had to tell me to read; he just left the car magazine open on the kitchen table, and I fell on it like an illustrated gospel. Three whole years before I even had a licence, I knew by heart every Mini Cooper on the road - colours, versions, engine sizes. I could read you two classified ads and tell you, in infuriating detail, which one was worth it and why the guy in the second was hiding that the car had been resprayed.

My first love was a blue Mini Cooper S. Manual. With black stripes on the bonnet. But that's a story for another time.

After several Porsches that “passed through my hands” - so to speak - a Land Rover Defender 110 HSE landed in them. For the first time in my life I wanted to try my luck where there is no tarmac. Off-road.

Saturday, late January

My first outing - and, as you'll read, my last - was on the legendary mountain above Thessaloniki. On Chortiatis.

A light drizzle, the kind that doesn't soak you but sits on the windscreen and blurs the world. A Wrangler in front, a Cherokee behind it, and me last.

As we climbed, the trees thickened, the green turned almost black, and the road - polite at first - slowly started to get wild. Potholes, water, stones shifting under the tyres. Four-wheel drive had been fully engaged for a while, and I felt that silly, pure happiness of a man who thinks the machine under his hands makes him capable. The Defender trod the mud as if it despised it. Or so I thought.

The ditch

And then the Cherokee stopped without warning - and I had to stop behind it. Without even noticing, I had settled in: the Defender's nose had dived into a ditch full of mud, that thick brown mud that doesn't let go, it sucks you in.

I turned the Terrain Response to the mud-and-sand programme, certain that technology would solve what my brain hadn't. It did nothing. Or rather - it made things worse. The tyres spun in the void, dug in, and the Defender, all bluster and two and a half tonnes of confidence, sank further forward, its side dangerously close to the drop. Ten minutes later my hands were glued to the wheel and the illusion of my own competence had rolled off somewhere down there, into the dark.

Things had turned properly dark.

I called my friend Vasilis, who had an Amarok. He came - fast, willing, with all the right intentions in the world. In practice, the Amarok looked at the Defender, the Defender looked at the ditch, and together we all understood that good intentions don't pull two and a half tonnes of Land Rover out of the mud.

“Hang up, I'm coming”

Then I called Giorgos. I didn't need to explain much; without a second thought he said just three words - “Hang up, I'm coming.” And a little later, through the trees, came a deep, bassy petrol roar. A beast. A Ford F-250 with tractor tyres that came up to my waist, a winch at the front, a petrol V8 that made the air around it vibrate, and a presence that made the rest of the cars look like toys. Nothing better could have shown up at that moment. Giorgos climbed out.

Giorgos knew that mountain the way you know your own house in the dark. He knew the routes, he knew the soil, he knew what holds and what doesn't. An all-round legend. Someone - out of politeness or fear - told him to move the F-250 a bit further off while the winch worked. Giorgos looked at him and delivered the line I'll remember forever:

“Afraid the F-250 will move? Where's it going to go? It's four and a half tonnes.”

He pulled out the cable, ran it around a tree to change the angle of the pull - because force without the right angle is nothing - and slowly, patiently, started dragging me back to life.

Eventually, I was out.

What actually stayed with me

I stood there, muddy to the knees, heart still pounding, and felt something I hadn't expected: gratitude. Not for the winch. For the people. For the Wrangler driver who waited, for Vasilis who came knowing deep down he probably wouldn't help but came anyway, for Giorgos who didn't think about it for a second - “hang up, I'm coming”, and he came. None of those connections would have happened if I'd stayed on my sofa studying classified ads. Our best moments - the real adventures - never come from inside our comfort zone. They come the moment we're stuck in the mud and someone, who doesn't even know us, stops their F-250 to pull us out.

The mountain, the drizzle, the people - that's the memory that stayed. The good one. But somewhere in there, with the rear hanging over the drop, I'd understood something else too: off-roading was not part of my character. It never was.

The ad for the Defender went up the next day. What replaced it, though, deserves a story of its own - coming soon, here.