Is BMW’s X5 more soft-roader than off-roader? We leave Singapore and drive one to an active volcano to find out…

JAWA TIMUR, INDONESIA — The main thing you need to know about Mount Bromo: the most famous volcano in Indonesia is still active, spewing angry plumes of hot ash now and then, waiting for a reason to blow its top like some demanding, magma-filled girlfriend.

In fact, the people in the area still do what they can to appease the volcano, tossing offerings of fruit, veggie, rice and meat into the steaming crater once a year. That didn’t stop Bromo from erupting a little over three years ago, though. And the year before that.

Which is just the sort of thing to prey on your mind as you leave messy tyre tracks all over the fine powder surrounding the volcano. Still, here we are in a BMW X5, with an enormous plain of soft, slippy volcanic ash to play on.

Cars aren’t even allowed up here, except with special permission from the people of the area. In the distance there are pristine Toyota Land Cruisers, ferrying tourists to the base of the volcano more quickly (and with cleaner emissions) than the horses doing the same.

This is their turf, but just for a couple of days our convoy of BMWs have been allowed to intrude. What would you do, in the circumstances?

What you can’t quite do, whatever your intentions, is drive up from the base of Bromo itself to the summit, or down into the crater. You need legs for that.

Mind you, I stopped a passing dirt biker for a chat, and asked if he could make it all the way into the crater on his Husqvarna 250. “Oh, police not allow,” he said, grinning slyly. So, have you done it? “Oh yeah, three years ago.”

Given that the locals get up to the odd bit of naughtiness, where’s the harm in doing a bit of the same, I wondered? We’d been gently cautioned against drifting on the sand by Pak Gerry, the convoy leader from BMW Indonesia. “No drifting,” he said. “The land here is considered sacred by the locals.”

This seemed like pretty rich stuff coming from him, I have to say. I’d seen him merrily whipping up clouds of volcanic ash in an X5 xDrive50i, and I’m pretty sure I saw him catch air a couple of times, launching himself over a crest like Indonesia’s answer to Evel Knievel.

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Maybe one little tailslide, then. I jab a finger at the X5’s stability control button and hold it there until the warning lights flash, and set off for a bit of fun.

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I get the X5 up to speed, ease off the throttle for a moment while I jink the wheel left and then hard right as I bury my right foot in the floor carpet. What happens next is the neatest tail slide of my life, the BMW holding a slow, steady drift while I feed in the tiniest bit of opposite lock. The X5 may be a huge, tall seven-seater, but when it comes down to it, if you’re driving on what is effectively a sea of talcum powder, it handles like an Evo X.

I’m not sure how relevant that attribute is in Indonesian traffic, mind you. To get to Bromo we set off from Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, and even with a police escort shooing locals from our convoy, the going is white-knuckle stuff.

Roads marked with two lanes are suddenly crammed with three lines of vehicles (seven if you count bikes), and everywhere I go, suicidal motorcyclists appear from out of nowhere, as if determined to end up under the X5’s wheels for the reward of some insurance money.

Driving a BMW X5 through the roads of an Indonesian city is pretty much like trying to jog through a corridor filled with running, screaming sugar-loaded children without accidentally kneeing one of the hyperactive bastards in the face.

Out here on the Sea of Sand at Bromo, things are altogether more pleasant, of course. I’ll say this much for BMW: when the X5 came out 15 years ago, the company made the error of pointing out that around 90 percent of SUV owners never take their cars off-road.

This of course prompted the press to heckle the Bavarians about how soft the X5’s mud-plugging abilities are. (BMW, for its part, effectively stuck to its guns by letting journalists drive the first X5 on a racing circuit at its launch, so there.)

Yet, while an X5 isn’t going to follow a Land Rover Defender into the wild green yonder, it gave a decent account of itself in Indonesia. The powdery stuff at Bromo is so fine that it gets in between your teeth.

And there’s probably a good reason you only ever see Land Cruisers horses in action here.

Or maybe you don’t even need xDrive to get to the moon-like surface of the place and savour the spectacular views of Nature at her finest. Assuming you can catch her between the periods of heavy, cloaking fog that shield Bromo from view when the volcano is feeling coquettish, that is.

Perhaps what counts most in the end is the spirit of adventure that a car like the X5 brings with it, the sort of character that makes you want to do a bit of exploring in the first place.

Mind you, even in the base xDrive35i petrol model, you have enough power underfoot to get to 100km/h in 6.5 seconds. That's handy enough in the battlefield of urban traffic, I guess. But it's even nicer at the foot of a smoking, volatile crater with a track record of explosive violence. Just in case.

Pictures Leow Ju-Len and manufacturer

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