Less is more, as anyone who has compared Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky to Double Black knows. It is useful to be reminded, as the Kombi reminds you, that a car is a metal container whose function is to get you from A to B. It is enough.

It is also wondrous to find Proust’s madeleine, after which we all seek in order to defeat time, and particularly so as we grow older, in the form of a light-blue-and-white Kombi Last Edition in São Paulo state.

The weight of the huge steering-wheel posed almost flat, the driving position above it and forward of the front axle, the view unobstructed by anything as superfluous as a hood, the crude handbrake, the nothing dashboard, the painful uphill progress — everything (except a windscreen no longer split in two) hoisted me out of Brazil and, as if by magic, placed me back four decades at the wheel of a Kombi on the road from London to Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif by way of Iran, before Islamic revolutions and sundry wars cut off that particular hippie dream, its roads without maps, its chance encounters, its random meanderings and its lucky escapes. We called our minibus “Pigpen,” after the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead, who had died just before we set out, and of course we had it painted with naïf scenes along the sides at a Kabul truck depot, and a royal straight flush on the front.

Our stay in Afghanistan coincided with the coup that deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah after a 40-year reign and set in motion the enduring Afghan agony, but we paid little attention, being diverted by matters such as sitting on the heads of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, since destroyed by the savagery of the Taliban, and contemplating a lovely strip of fertile land along a river against a red and arid backdrop, or, later, gazing at the white doves of Mazar in the bleary dawn.

“How do you like it?” asked Luis Felipe Figueiredo of Volkswagen.

I was speechless. It is wonderful — it is important — it is vital — to be transported.