August 22nd: Alexandroupolis in North-Eastern Greece

On August 22nd 1972 I was in Alexandroupolis in north-western Greece.  After a month lazing around Greece we were now driving to Istanbul.

We had stopped in Kavalla to buy food in the stalls around the harbour and drove on through the increasingly Turkish looking towns and villages of Thrace.  We stopped for a coffee in Alexandroupolis, a modern town on the coast, did some shopping and drove back a few miles to find an empty spot by the sea to pitch our tent.

Everyone in Greece who knew we were heading for Turkey implored us to be careful and take better security.  One thing which bothered them was the fact that the Land-Rover had no lock on the bonnet so you could easily get in and steal things or change the settings and so on and so forth.  So in Alexandroupolis we found a padlock in a general store and the next morning went to a garage to get it fitted.  The garage owner absolutely refused to let us pay anything for this, arguing that it was his duty as a Greek to ensure that we were not robbed by any of those Turks.

We carried on across the border at the Evros river and into the empty barren hills of European Turkey.  After an hour we saw our first camels and drove on to the Londra Campsite in the western suburbs of Istanbul.  We quickly discovered that Turks were every bit as friendly and helpful as Greeks.  They were amazed that we had managed to spend a month in Greece without having all our belongings stolen.

Road in European Turkey, 2008:  Picture by Dimitirs Kilimis,  CC

July 27th: Sivota on Lefkas in Greece

On July 27th 1972 I was in Sivota on the Greek island of Lefkas.

Sivota in 1972: picture by Pete Brown, in my possession

I was driving the Land-Rover around Greece with Hilkka, looking for nice spots to stay and pass a final month before entering Turkey for the drive east.  At Kalambaka we had picked up a hitchhiker, an Australian dentist called Pete, and he stayed with us a while.  We crossed the Katara Pass to Metsovo and Ioannina, and then we went on to Dodona to visit the ruins of the oracle.  This area was full of a party of French people driving Citroen Traction Avants; there must have been sixty or seventy of them spread out over a wide area.  Finally we hit on Lefkas as an island we could drive on to and ended up at the little village of Sivota where we asked to pitch our tent near the water's edge and were welcomed.  By chance we found there Vasilis, a Greek Australian passing the summer back home while his family tried to find him a wife.  He became our host and we were able to offer transport to him or his family and friends.  I remember taking Vasilis on a tour of villages; the main purpose was to go to Madorochoria so that he could check out, incognito in the Land-Rover, a girl his family was proposing for him.

On this day we took another man from Sivota, Iannis, and his family to visit his mother in Poros, a pure white little town built on a low cliff above the sea some miles to the north.  We were served baklava and ouzo in the house, went to a cafe to buy some ingredients for lunch and then went to the beach for a swim.  Lunch was chicken and chips and salad.  After coffee on the balcony we split up:  Hilkka went with the women on a house to house social call while I took a stroll with Pete over the hill above the town; I remember coming back and standing by the church eating russet pears which were just getting soft.  A perfect day in a town unused to foreigners.

There was a little cafe on the waterfront in Sivota where we took coffee and wine, and a taverna a little way apart which catered to the yachters who liked to hitch up here and were the only form of tourism.  The villagers were genuinely sad I think when we left.  The women came to visit us bearing gifts including  a huge bottle of olive oil for sunbathing.  They also took us to pick a large bag of rigani (wild oregano) which caused the odd moment of consternation at customs checks in the following months.

Sivota in 2007:  Picture by H.P.Burger,  CC

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May 28th: Bayeux

On May 28th 1972 I was in Bayeux in France.

I remember thinking as we drove off the ferry in Cherbourg that there probably were not that many others who were planning such a long journey - to be going to India.  It seemed a very big moment, an ordinary ferry, the 12.30 from Southampton.

This was not really the first night of the journey.  We started off by driving north to Durness in the far north of Scotland where we had friends.  We wanted to test the Land-Rover and the camping gear before leaving the UK.  We actually spent the first night pitching the tent free somewhere near Keilder Forest, on a branch of the North Tyne.  But crossing the channel was the big moment.

We spent that night on the Camping Municipal outside Bayeux.  It was just a convenient (and cheap) place to stay the night.  We had covered about 86 miles that day from a campsite above Southampton, plus the Channel crossing.  We wandered a bit more the next day, shopping in Putanges for lunch which we took at a green and sunny spot off a tiny road by the River Orne.  That night we camped in a free site by a canal outside Chartres.  We didn't see the Tapestry in Bayeux but we did visit the cathedral in Chartres.  The pattern was set for cheap living, simple camping, self-cooked meals, minor roads.

It would be another three months before we reached Asia.

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December 25th: Margao in Goa

On December 25th 1972 I was in Margao in Goa.  I think we'd expected Christmas in Goa to be a matter of relaxation and swimming, but it turned into non-stop socialising.

Earlier in the week we were in Margao looking for car parts and were stopped in the street by a Finnish woman who noticed the SF sign painted on our roof-box.  She was married to a Goan man and living in Margao and they kindly invited us to Christmas lunch.  This turned out to be a most sumptuous affair, a roast suckling pig (possu) stuffed with all sorts of goodies and washed down with cashew fenny and wine.  Our hosts had a son about eight years old; he spoke Finnish with his mother, Portuguese with his father, English with the two of them together, Konkani with the other kids around, and Marathi formally in school; he was also learning Hindi as the national language and had just started French as a first foreign language;  he would start a sentence in one language, switch to another and then tail off into a third.

There was no question of going back to the spot between Baga Beach and Calangute where we'd been staying after all the food and alcohol, so we went out to a bar for more fenny before coming back to our friends to stay the night.  The next day we made a quick visit to the then empty expanses of Colva beach, had another go at the possu for lunch, and then set off back north.  The ferry across the river had a long queue so we took the scenic route through the hills, through Ponda and the Hindu villages and got to Mapusa around dusk, still in time for our next engagement.

One of the addresses we'd been given in Bombay turned out to be a judge and we were announced at his office earlier in the week as "two hippies to see you".  He turned out to be charming, when he realised we had not been arrested, and invited us for Boxing Day supper.  We were treated to vindaloos of prawns and duck as genuine as I am likely to find anywhere and an appearance by Father Christmas.  We managed to drive back to our spot on the beach in the dark.

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December 17th: Bijapur

On December 17th 1972 I was in Bijapur in India. 

The day before we had driven across a big river into Karnataka, still called Mysore State then, and so we were now officially in South India.  Bijapur was just a place to stop over really, but it is one of those towns in India which is full of ancient monuments and makes a good place to look around.  We drove in to a fine sunset over the old domed buildings, an auspicious start.  We found a place to stay outside the Circuit House where the Christian caretaker and his daughter offered to cook us excellent food.   The town had remains of a Muslim dynasty from the 16th and 17th centuries.  The Gol Gumbaz was a tomb with a huge dome and remarkable sound and echo properties, especially up in the Whispering Gallery, and an interesting museum with porcelain books and a Sufi guide to the body.  The Jama Mashid had an ornate prayer niche which was the only decoration that remained.  It was good to walk about this town through the back streets which had ruins at every corner.

Since climbing up over the Western Ghats from Bombay to Ajanta and Ellora, we had been driving across the plateau known as the Deccan.  This remains in my mind as the most characteristic Indian scenery.  The country was not densely populated, but open and sometimes rugged. You would drive along and every fifty or seventy miles the road would rise or fall by a hundred feet or so.  I loved driving these roads.

Gol Gumbaz in 2007, Picture by Jasvipul Chawla, CC

Jama Mashid in 2007, Picture by Jasvipul Chawla, CC

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November 9th: Amritsar

On November 9th 1972 I was in Amritsar in the Indian Punjab, after driving across the border from Pakistan.

When we left the UK, we didn't even know whether the Indian border had reopened after the recent war with Pakistan.  We met someone in Athens who had driven from India, so after then we knew that the border was open but only on Thursdays.  We had also seen groups of refugees who we believed to be Bengalis.  We knew that it would take a long time to get across, and therefore the only thing was to allow a whole day for crossing and not be anxious.  We were off from Lahore at 6.30 and to the border at Wagah around opening time at 8.  It took three hours to clear the Pakistan side and four hours later we had finished on the Indian side.  The queues were not long: it was more that there was no urgency to get things moving, something we were fairly used to by then. 

Baba Atal:  Picture by Jasleen Kaur, CC

We took two Australian hitch-hikers to the Tourist Bungalow where we were able to camp, and later went for a meal with them.  The next day we took a rickshaw to the Golden Temple where we sat and observed the music and food ceremony from the balcony.  Two Sikhs kindly showed us around the rest of the building and courtyard and then took us up the adjoining tower of Baba Atal.   Afterwards we wandered, gingerly, through the lanes of the old town and found rice and chickpeas with salted lemon juice for lunch.  In the evening we went out again on foot and ran into a wedding procession with a band and a horse.  We met the groom and stopped to drink tea with his relatives at his insistence, but they were a bit dull.

This was my first full day in India and was as good as I had hoped.  The weather all that autumn was perfect, sunny and hot in the day and fresher at night but not cool.  India fascinated as much for the richness of its scents as for its sights.  I felt like there was nowhere at the time I would rather be.  As we drove out of town next morning a boy entirely painted in blue ran from the road into a house and this gave a feeling of mystery - I had no idea what this vision was about.

I was back in Amritsar the following April, and again in 1978.

Patrimonium Mundi:  Panoramas of The Golden Temple.

October 24th: Kabul

On October 24th 1972 I was in Kabul.

Just to get to Kabul was something of a relief. We drove into the city with, as I recall, only two gears working, fourth low ratio to get started and fourth high ratio to drive along. I didn't want to stop anywhere because moving off was difficult. The gearbox had started to play up coming down off the spectacular Salang Pass with its tunnel and colonnaded sections passing under the snow-covered Hindu Kush at 3400 metres, the highest point on our journey.

There was a Land-Rover garage in Kabul and we found it easily. They opened up the gear-box the next day and discovered that a pin which had been replaced before we left in London had sheared after the pressures of the Northern Route. It was going to cost about £60 to fix and take three days plus the weekend. This completely broke our budget, which had already suffered from the flotation of the pound and rising oil prices. On top of this we had to stay in the Ariana Hotel for several nights, at £1 per night for the room, instead of camping outside at much less. To celebrate this misfortune we ate out with friends at the Intercontinental Hotel, where we had camel steak, red Afghan wine (produced by an Italian family) and good desserts for a total cost of about £1.50 for the two of us. These were huge prices in Afghanistan at that time.

The stay in Kabul could have become miserable, but it was still a picturesque place if you didn't look too closely at the Kabul River running through the middle. We visited the museum which was great with all the Gandhara art, and also the zoo which was interesting if not fun. We went shopping in Chicken Street and the Silver Bazaar. It was also a social time as the Ariana was the place where many overlanders parked up and swapped stories. We enjoyed meals at the Khyber Restaurant and the Marco Polo, both of which I think still exist. In fact most of these landmarks have been in the public eye over the years, the Intercontinental being the journalists' centre during the civil war, the zoo became famous for the lion called Marjan which survived the ravages of the Civil War and the neglect of the Taliban, and the museum was ransacked by the Taliban. The Ariana may be the same building that became the headquarters of the CIA, but I'm not so sure.

Video from Kabul in 1972 by Erich Siegel on YouTube.

A street picture of Kabul in 1972 here.

Kabul River in 1972: picture by Ard Hesselink, CC

Kabul shop in 1972: picture by Ard Hesselink, CC

October 20th: Shibergan

On 20th October 1972 I was in Shibergan in northern Afghanistan.

Arriving in Shibergan felt like an achievement: we had finished the hard bit and crossed the desert. We found a reasonable hotel to camp outside of and the first running water since Herat. The road outside was paved and there was good pilau at the restaurant near the hotel. After the meal we ordered melon as usual. Beside the restaurant there was a huge pile of melons and other customers had been making their way through them. Serving the melons was quite a procedure: the waiter picked out one he thought was good, he carved it into pieces in a trice, holding it with one hand and cutting it in quick strokes with a carving knife which was more like a sword; if he did not think it was perfect, he threw it away for passing goats and carried on until he found the perfect melon for his guests. These were the best melons I have ever eaten.

It had taken us six days to get from Herat, through what felt like open, untouched country, passing little towns and bazaars. The road was not easy anywhere, but it was exciting to drive it. The most difficult bits were before Bala Murghab and the last bit into Shibergan. From Qala-i-Nao to Bala Murghab the road was earth rather than gravel and deeply eroded and rutted. We stopped for lunch in the gorge of a tributary of the Murghab and then continued along the Murghab itself, finally crossing a broken ancient bridge and finding a humble hotel and a poor meal in the town. The next day we passed two fine caravans of camels going across the plain in the same direction as us, the riders and the camels both dressed in rich colours. In this area people would stop us to ask for medical help; usually they had been to a clinic and were carrying packets of medication and the help they wanted was to know what to do with it. We tried to give instructions in the few words of Farsi we had between us. There was very little other traffic on this route, though several times we saw overturned trucks, whose drivers sat anxiously beside them and whose passengers were fleeing or had fled.

After Maimana, we knew we had to get to the little town of Dalautabad and then cross the desert of Dasht-i-Leili with the help of a guide. That night I recorded: 

Found Dalautabad, and got ourselves a guide there who showed us his previous testimonials - not bad, he got a 2CV and VW bus through - but he charged us 500 afghanis. Hans got stuck in mud soon after and we towed him out. Driving fairly easy through the layer of sand - not too many turnings - lots of squirrels and gerbils which burrowed in the sand as we drove over it, lizards and a scorpion - also lots of larks and wheatears. Had lunch on top of hill with good view - whirlwinds or dust devils. Several bits where our guide took us straight through the bush. Road gets much more difficult just before the first gas drillings. Then very thick sand.

When I got back to England I bought a copy of Marco Polo, Penguin, translated by Robert Latham; I dated it 3rd September 1973, so it was very soon after I returned. Marco Polo wrote at the end of the thirteenth century of crossing a desert for six days and arriving in Shibergan and finding there the best melons in the world. Shibergan is an ancient place.

The place names for this area have varied transliterations in English. I've followed the names I wrote down at the time, following for the most part Nancy Hatch Dupree's Guidebook, published in 1971, which we had bought at the Tourist Office in Herat.

I've not found any photographs to illustrate this section, but there are excellent photographs of northern Afghanistan by Luke Powell, taken in 1975, here.  Noor Khan also took interesting pictures along this road in 1978, at a much wetter time of year.

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October 16th: Qala-i-Nao

On October 16th I was in Qala-i-Nao in north-western Afghanistan.

Qala-i-Nao was quite a lively place, when we arrived the night before, with most of the centre strung along the main road. There was a hotel where we were able to camp outside and a restaurant where we sat on a carpeted bench and had good stew and soup for pennies. We met a teacher who spoke decent English and had tea and cake followed by melon with him.

In the morning two boys from the teacher's school took us south-east of the town to the spring they called Khardasi. The road was earth and very dusty, but the valley was fertile, and there were many Uzbek or Turkmen yurts in the little villages along the way. The spring was something of a beauty spot, if that makes sense in such a remote part of the world.  For us it was interesting enough to be even further off the beaten track: the Northern Route was scarcely mainstream, but we would have believed it dangerous to take detours like this off the road on our own.  Hans had a fishing rod I don't think he had used since leaving Alkmaar and so we had fresh fish to go with the bread and melons we had brought. Meanwhile flocks of fat-tailed sheep and goats were brought to drink water at the spring and its little stone and earth dam and reservoir.

This was incomparable richness after the difficulties people were having on the Herat side of the of the Sutzak Pass the day before, where there was a full scale famine in progress. Groups of children came up to the car with swollen bellies with their hands out for food, most of them coming from black tents of nomads camping by the streams from the pass. We knew about the famine as we had met an Afghan general in Herat who was trying to alleviate the problem along with some young American Peace Corps volunteers. Unfortunately the bread shops had been closed in Herat that morning, and we had nothing more than old bread to give which quickly ran out. The top of the pass is very beautiful and richly forested and the land at the foot seemed richer.

Robert Byron recounts in "The Road to Oxiana" how he crossed the pass (he calls it Sauzak) three times, all with different means of transport, all with spectacular difficulty, in 1933 and 1934.  The road was newly built but carried trucks.  In November 1933 he got stuck in Qala-i-Nao with dysentery and the onset of winter; he returned to Herat and came back in the spring.

At The Spring.  Photo by H van Riel, in my possession

Noor Khan took interesting pictures along this road in 1978, in a much wetter season.

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October 6th: Babolsar in Iran

On October 6th 1972 I was in Babolsar on the Caspian Sea in Iran.

It was good to get away from Teheran, which had seemed too busy, too full of traffic, the hardest place to drive, the high air becoming polluted and hanging over the city. And we'd only seen the better side of it, the centre and the northern suburbs: I'd pass through the grim southern suburbs by railway six years later. We drove into high clear air over the Haraz Pass under Mount Damavand and down the long descent on the other side.

The Caspian was different, humid and forested after weeks of driving through the bare high plateaux. The people were open and friendly. The towns were still built largely of mud bricks, with new parts in the centre decorated with rich tiles. At Babol we asked about camping and were directed to the emerging resort of Babolsar. We camped on the beach by a restaurant which served us sturgeon and beer. Swimming was fine and the water not too salty. The difficulty was getting between our Land-Rover and the water, for the beach seemed to double as a highway, with cars being driven at great speed by the holiday-makers from the capital driving in their usual style. You had to run and hope you got to the water.

In the morning we drove on along the plain and had pomegranates for lunch. Then it was slowly back up into the mountains and on to Gonbad-e-Quabus for the night camping outside a petrol station.

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September 28th: Dogubayazit in Eastern Turkey

On September 28th 1972, I was in Dogubayzit in eastern Turkey.

After the drive north from Lake Van, we reached the main route to Iran at Dogubayzit. As always we wanted to camp out in the country rather than to stay in the town, but this time, so near a sensitive frontier, we were not going to get away with it. We stopped first at a Jandarma, a police station, 10 kilometres before town, and after an hour we were told that we couldn't stay because it was a military area. So we drove past the town and up into the hills where we had a good view of Mount Ararat. First some shepherds told us it was forbidden to camp, and then the police arrived and told us to go to a hotel as the area was dangerous because of Kurds. So we camped outside the hotel where there were other car campers.

In the morning we drove up to gaze at the wild and romantic Ishak Pasha Palace, high on its promontory. I can't remember if the public could access the building itself, but the view was enough. We didn't linger and went back down the mountain and over the border into Iran.

Ishak Pasha Palace in 2003, picture by moondroog, CC

September 21st: Recep Koyu in South-East Turkey

On September 21st 1972 I was in the village of Recep Koyu, driving to Nemrut Dagi, an ancient site on the top of a mountain in the south-east of Turkey.

When we left Malatya we wanted to find a more direct road to Nemrut Dagi than we could easily find on our maps. We asked a few people but got conflicting information. We decided to give it a try as we had previously driven in parts of Turkey where the maps didn't conform to reality. We were quickly in glorious country on gravel roads passing through Yesilyurt and Celikhan, well tended fields, people wearing fine traditional clothes, increasingly mountainous. The road became narrower and more earth than gravel. We went through a beautiful ford and hoped we were going on a through road in the right direction. As evening drew in we got stuck behind a dolmus taxi which kept sputtering to a halt. We helped it once and eventually had to tow it off the track so we could get by. Finally we found a spot where we could pull off the road and sleep with enough space for other vehicles to pass, although I don't think any did.  This was beside a torrent which fell down the hillside into a gorge somewhere below us in the darkness.

We were up at 5am to watch the sunrise and soon a party of men came down the hillside to talk to us. They were extremely hospitable, offering us water first of all, as so often in Turkey. The older man, the headman of the village, was interested in the water we had in a jerrycan, tasted it and told us which spring we had collected it as we had driven along the road past Celikhan. The water in his village, Recep, was the best in Turkey he assured us. He then invited us up the hill to his house. The steep paths were built of stone, the house of stone and wood, light and airy. His wife was delighted to entertain us and to talk to the women in our party, a strong good-humoured woman, wearing a similar costume and headdress to ones we had seen the day before. They served us ayran, fine bread and butter. As we talked on about the directions in our simple Turkish and their simple German - one of the sons had been to work in Germany as so often in rural Turkey - the plan arose for our host with one of his sons to accompany us first to the next village and eventually to Nemrut which was in his patch but which he had never seen.

Slowly we wound down the valleys as we made our way towards Adiyaman, with frequent stops early on as the headman was greeted by friends and checked on directions. We turned away from Adiyaman towards Kahta and eventually crossed a river on a bridge built by the Romans but still in use. By Kahta we were in a more populated area and the roads were becoming more developed. They went to a hotel for the night while we camped nearby.

Nemrut Dagi was already on the tourist trail by 1972 with a more or less motorable road up and dolmuses available. The site is at the top of a mountain at 2100 meters, where Antiochus, a first century BC king of Commagene, built himself a sanctuary. Antiochus had kept his kingdom fairly independent of the Romans and I had some memory of the history. The top of the mountain has been levelled and huge heads and a tumulus placed there. It is a spectacular place to visit, especially soon after sunrise, and a suitable end to two days of driving through a remote and unspoiled mountain area.

The Roman Bridge

Stone heads at Nemrut

Pictures by Mariurupe, Creative Commons, 2 of a great number worth looking at


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September 12th: Fethiye

On September 12th 1972, I was in Fethiye while driving through South-West Turkey.

From Tavas (after Denizli), where the good road ended, to Antalya took three days, much of it on poor roads, about 300 miles in all. This took us through open valleys and pine-covered mountain roads, through small villages with picturesque wooden houses, and small towns where we tried to shop for food, or find a bank or petrol. It was an empty, undeveloped part of the country, and the roads did not conform to the maps we had.

One highlight was arriving at the sea in Fethiye. We stood on the jetty and looked back at the caves on the cliffs which might have contained some of the famous Lycian tombs. This was the only part of the journey where there was any evidence of tourism as it was a harbour for yachts. Unfortunately the town was shut up that day and there was no-one around. There was some asphalt road on the way east out of Fethiye but it was poor and intermittent and had ungraded gravel stretches. It was a relief to get back on to the mountain roads again.  We drove up through the poor town of Kemer over pine-tree passes and through quaint wooden farming villages to reach the town of Korkuteli and down to the sea at Antalya.

We camped off the road each night, undisturbed. I remember one lovely spot in a grassy valley with running water where we cooked lamb cutlets on an open fire and drank wine. Another highlight in my memory of this journey was passing a travelling band as we came down off a pass, three musicians, one playing a pipe of some sort, one a beating a drum, one with some sort of stringed instrument. They danced along playing and had a bear running with them. They paid no attention to us.

I don't imagine much of what we saw remains. We must have passed close to where Dalaman Airport now is, and not too far from Olu Deniz. Here is a modern picture from Fethiye:

Lycian Tombs at Fethiye.  Picture by Andrew382, CC

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