May 10th: Damascus

On May 10th 1973, or thereabouts, I was in Damascus.

After crossing the desert we stayed a couple of nights on the campsite outside Damascus.  We enjoyed the sights and wandering around the old city.  I especially liked the Ummayad Mosque, probably the oldest I've seen and in one of the oldest places I've been.  After all the travelling of that year I liked the idea that there were still more wonderful places to visit.  Damascus seemed a very relaxed place and welcoming towards tourists.  The outer suburbs were full of blocks of flats on the edge of the hills and here I felt the colonial remains of the French Mandate most strongly.

On the morning we were planning to leave for Beirut, we were all packed up and ready when we discovered that the border was closed.  Lebanon had remained fairly peaceful and Beirut had the reputation as the playground of the Middle East.  That was changing:  Israel had conducted a raid on PLO targets in April, and I believe this border closure was because the Lebanese army was fighting guerillas and Syria was supporting the guerillas.  We were just too late and Lebanon still has not recovered.

Instead we drove to the Krak des Chevaliers, the Crusaders castle to the north of Lebanon.  We still had to drive through a couple of miles of Lebanese territory but there was no border control on this road, just an endless line of traders selling goods along the roadside.  From the Krak we went on to the coast and then to the splendid city of Aleppo and so on to Turkey and back to Europe, though I wasn't back in the UK until the autumn.

There are good Patrimonium Mundi panoramas of Damascus here, including the Ummayad Mosque.  There are also some of the Krak des Chevaliers, starting here.

Gate in Damascus, 2008:  Picture by Steve Conger,  CC

The Ummayad Mosque, 2007:  Picture by Riyaad Minty,  CC

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May 6th: Baghdad

On May 6th 1972, or thereabouts,  I was in Baghdad.

After Teheran we had gone southwest to Iraq; first by a pretty back road to Saveh and on to Hamadan and Kermanshah.  In Baghdad there was a campsite outside the city.  The campsite was green and you could see the thick reeds of the river away to one side.  The city was ochre and felt quite modern if also ramshackle.  The best part was the National Museum, a large airy building from the twenties which showed all the antiquities of Mesopotamia in glass cases with clear labelling in several languages. 

The road on to Damascus was paved and in good condition but it went across the desert.  There was a place to camp by a small hotel on the edge of the desert on the Iraqi side and then there was nothing for about three hundred miles.  We had to carry fuel in our jerry cans because the distance was too great between filling-stations.  The desert was often sandy and mainly flat.  You could see great clouds of dust coming in towards you in spirals and sometimes we had to slow right down or stop and let them pass until we could see the road again.  At one point I saw a small flight of black-winged stilts which had settled by the tarmac in the middle of the sand - perhaps they thought the road was a river.  Eventually we began to see some bushes and then there were some trees and small settlements;  before long we were at the Syrian border post and then in the outskirts of Damascus.

Baghdad 1973:  Picture by Roger McLassus,  CC

National Museum, 2005:  Picture by US Dept of State, Public Demain

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April 12th: Amritsar

On April 12th 1973, or thereabouts, I was in Amritsar. 

We drove up the Grand Trunk Road from Delhi, which was not as difficult a drive as it had been in the less developed areas to the east where we had tried to avoid it, as we had other main roads.  We had a puncture and I remembered a friendly man on a small motorbike stopping to see if he could help us.   Amritsar was our first stopover on the journey back to Europe, we had been there before in November 1972 and we were looking forward to visiting the city again.

As we approached, it gradually became clear that there was unusual traffic heading for the city.  Thousands upon thousands of people were arriving from every direction.  We could see all sorts of vehicles joining from every side road, mostly trucks and pickups.  The people were mainly country Sikh men with loose white clothes, long beards and straggly turbans.  In the city it looked as if they were heading for the Golden Temple.  When we finally got to visit the temple there were long queues of these people waiting to get in, while others were leaving, carrying pieces of mud in any sort of container.  We were ushered into the temple which felt quite  different from the previous visit.  The water had all been drained out of the tanks and worship was largely suspended.  Meanwhile the visitors were all taking amorphous piles of mud from the lake and carrying it away.  The lake was being cleaned.

This process is called Kar Sewa and does not happen often.  The previous one had been fifty years before in 1923.  The lake was cleaned twice in the Eighties after army operations, to clear weapons and the bodies of victims.  There was one more Kar Sewa in 2004 and some resources are available on this, pictures and words.

I would return to Amritsar in October 1978.

March 14th: Driving in Southern Nepal

On March 14th 1973, or thereabouts, I was driving in Southern Nepal.

After leaving the rain channeled Cherrapunji which overlooks the plains of Bangladesh, we had followed the Brahmaputra west from Assam.  Now we wanted to get into Nepal and so on to Kathmandu.  We had heard about a new road from the east of Nepal running along the Terai and we believed this would shorten a very long drive across Bihar in North India.  We thought the crossing would be south of Siliguri near Naxalbari, the home of the Naxalites who were still believed to be operating in this area.  The roads were empty through thin forest.  Eventually there was a turning to the right and a river with a border.  We explained to the friendly border official how to stamp our carnet and he showed us the register: we were the first foreigners to cross here since a group of Peace Corps some nine months previously.  The track was a ford across the river, definitely four wheel drive, a couple of feet deep, the banks deeply rutted.  Over in Nepal we came to the remote town of Bhadrapur, dirty, undeveloped, poor, broken streets and not on our maps.  We wandered along a winding road through open fields and villages, always afraid that we were going too far to the south.  Finally we came to a stretch of new road, and a forest rest house for camping.

We drove on the next morning through forest but it wasn't long before the new road came to an end and we had to turn south on small roads through a river and reservoir system that made me convinced more than ever we were heading back into India.  After more twists and turns and several hours we got to another stretch of new road which eventually joined the main road to Kathmandu, the Tribuvan Highway, only finished in 1956, and itself slow and winding through the hills.

As the sun was going down we drove up onto the ridge which forms the first foothills of the Himalayas; the trees were shading red and the dim outline of mountains ahead was tinted pink.  We found a hotel near Daman which gave us some food and allowed us to sleep outside.  Then in the morning the sky was clear.  We walked around a little in the cool air and then found near the road a panorama in stone and metal, showing the outline and names of all the mountains from Dhaulagiri in the West to Everest and Makalu in the East.  We were able to see and distinguish every peak in a perfectly blue sky.

The view from Daman:  Picture by Inhabitat, CC

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March 1st: Darjeeling

On March 1st 1973, or thereabouts, I was in Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.

We slept in the Land-Rover outside a hotel in the upper part of the town.  This was just below a ridge which had churches and villas from the period of the Raj.  All the hotels seemed to have Bhutanese men in national dress waiting outside.  You could look down on the bazaar below or walk out to the Red Panda Sanctuary and rhododendron woods.  But the peaks of Kanchenjunga stayed hidden by clouds.  The journey up had been pretty too, the road as steep as any I had driven, criss-crossing the tracks of the well-known little blue train.  Much of the scenery was open green grassland with little villages and people wearing increasingly colourful clothes, and the little train going much slower than us.

 

After Darjeeling we went back up to Ghoom, the highest point on the road and railway at 8000 feet.  The monastery there was the first active Buddhist one I had seen; I remember the lamas wearing yellow costumes.  From here we drove the back road, gently down moorland with prayer flags flying off the few houses and little aqueducts made of bamboo to carry water along the roadside.  The road here was much quieter than the main road up from the south.  The final descent to the tropical heat of the Teesta valley was precipitous, with the road hurtling down through thickly wooded forests so steep that the road crossed itself on occasions; they even had road signs to warn you of these extra sharp bends.  Up the other side Kalimpong was again in open grassland spread along a ridge, with a guesthouse which seemed almost English from the outside.  From there we crossed into Sikkim and stayed in Gangtok.  Sikkim was still a protectorate and you needed a permit from New Delhi to enter and then only for a few days; it only became a state later in the year.

From Gangtok we drove north to see how far we could get.  As we approached the bottom of a steep hill which looked like it had a pass, there was a checkpoint.  The officers told us that this was as far as we could go.  They tried to point out the Chinese checkpoint high up on the Nathu La Pass, and politely I thought I could see it but I'm not so sure.  This border between India and China was one of the most sensitive in the world at this time.  One of the officers asked us to come back to his base which was up another steep mountain road, and led the way in his jeep.  Unfortunately the road was built for the Indian jeep which has a smaller turning circle than a Land-Rover and I was having to make three point turns at every corner.  Eventually we gave up and went back to Gangtok.

Good photo of Darjeeling.

Patrimonium Mundi:  Panorama of Darjeeling

Monastery at Ghoom, 2007:  Picture by Soumyasch, CC

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February 17th: East of Raipur in Eastern India

On this day, or thereabouts, in 1973, I was driving from Hyderabad to Calcutta.  This was quite a long trip and took us the best part of four days.  We were determined to try to camp free in the forests as we went whenever possible; this had been very successful in Turkey but we had abandoned the idea for safety's sake in Iran and Afghanistan.  In India we had so far largely tried to stay at places such as PWD rest houses when we were outside the more developed cites where there were tourist bungalows and so on which were used to people who wanted to camp in their cars rather than occupying a room.  There were drawbacks to rest houses: they were well sign-posted but sometimes reluctant to let us stay and this could consume a lot of time for a brief overnight; also if car camping in a more built-up area we could have people staring at us in a circle all the time we were not actually sleeping.

The first day was over the typical Deccan countryside, largely red earth, wooded plateaux and steep escarpments from one level to another, through sparsely populated parts of Andhra Pradesh and into Maharashtra where we found a quiet place for the night.  As we approached Nagpur, the land was more densely populated and the fields richer with orange plantations.  We found we didn't have to go through the centre of the city but there was a sort of ring road.  The country went back to being generally less developed as we drove east into Madhya Pradesh, and although we went past the huge Soviet-built industrial complex of Bhilai, the towns were strikingly poor and deprived.  We planned to camp after Raipur if possible and chose to find a restaurant there to eat so that we could drive on until it was nearly dark.  There was something of the Kwality sort by the main road, so we didn't have to look for the bazaar.  The map showed a fork in the road after Raipur and we chose the more direct road even though the single lane of asphalt stopped at the junction.  The country became immediately more wild, denser forest with fewer, if any, breaks, more mountainous, almost no people, no other traffic.  After an hour or so of slow driving we found an opening off the road, where there was a level clearing, set up the back of the Land-Rover for sleeping and went to bed. 

I was awakened in the night by the distant roar of a truck and a clashing of low gears; the truck took an hour to get to where we were and then another hour for the noise to dim.  Finally I woke at six and peered out to see six or so people, men and women, wearing simple undyed homespun walking slowly round the Land-Rover.  This went on for some time until they were satisfied and moved on.

The highlands lasted a bit longer and then we came to one or two small settlements where the people were mostly wearing homespun again.  At a bridge over a stream leading into another small town the Land-Rover ground to a halt, blocking the road completely.  A spring shackle had broken on the rough road and there was nothing I could do.  It was a picturesque spot but we had not seen a vehicle of any sort since before the fork in the road, apart from hearing the truck in the night.  However within a few minutes a Sikh truck driver pulled up and set to work.  Other vehicles  arrived and also a few pedestrians.  The Sikh was a cheerful sort.  He quickly removed my jack, put one of his own on to support the spring and removed the shackle.  He used the stonework of the bridge as an anvil and hammered the shackle U-bolt back into shape, so that we could secure one side properly and the other at least fitted in the slot.  He saw it as all in a day's work, especially in these remote parts, and all the other drivers were very relieved that it all got sorted easily. He said something about his family being blacksmiths.

We were able to drive very carefully on to the next town where they fitted a lightweight shackle; this lasted another day and a half on better roads on through Orissa until we got a proper one in Calcutta.  This was the only time the Land-Rover got stranded, unable to move in the 30,000 mile round trip.

This eastern part of Madhya Pradesh is now the state of Chhattisgarh, an area characterised by isolated industrialisation exploiting local minerals and tribal people living in the forests.  This area is now the focus of Naxalite attacks, although when I passed through Eastern India the movement was still mainly confined to the area around Naxalbari, near where we crossed from India into Nepal, described here.

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February 5th: Vellore in South India

On this day or thereabouts I was in Vellore in southern India.  We were there to fulfil obligations to my  relative John Cameron who had served with the Madras Sappers in Bangalore before and immediately after the Second World War.  We had met a number of people whose addresses he had given us, from a recently retired general to his driver living in Kerala.  We had stayed as honoured guests at the mess in Bangalore and had visited John's number two, called Sampangi, in Bangalore for a typically sumptuous meal.  We had made an arrangement to return to Vellore at this time to see more old soldiers.

We went to look at the Old Fort, which was a large intact space with fortified ramparts and an ancient temple.  There were the inevitable meals, which were too substantial and heavy.  There was a meal at the bungalow in Vellore where a number of old Sappers came to introduce themselves to us before we ate.  It was a very formal situation for much of the time. 

Finally we taken out to the village of Cameronpet, which was along the main road near the small town of Pallikonda as far as I can compute it.  This was a tiny settlement right next to a much more prosperous village which had a large white church.  All the inhabitants came out to greet us and showed us around.  My understanding is that John had paid for the building of this place for the impoverished families of soldiers probably sometime in the thirties - he modestly refused to discuss Cameronpet at all when I returned to England.  The buildings were simply built and looked all of the same style and could well have been pre-war.  I presume that all the inhabitants were untouchable as were most if not all of the people we were visiting in Vellore.  The Italian Catholic priest from the church was brought to meet us but unfortunately, with Sampangi back in Vellore arranging yet another feast, we had no way of doing much communication as little English was spoken.  A formal photograph was taken and I managed a less formal one as well, but not of the centre of Cameronpet itself.

We drove back to Vellore for the arranged feast and we were eventually allowed to relax on our own.  We started our journey north the next day by driving to Hyderabad.

In Cameronpet:  My picture

Near Cameronpet:  My picture

January 22nd: Trichur in Kerala

On January 22nd 1973 I was in Trichur in Kerala in Southern India.

We had the address of Sam's office in the town.  He had been my cousin John Cameron's driver and now ran a trucking agency with three trucks, as he told us proudly.  He drove and we followed to the family house which was a mile or two out of town in a semi-rural setting, a two or three room house with a farm around which could not have been much more than an acre and was probably less.  His wife equally proudly showed us round the farm, half of which was paddy which two wiry bare-chested men were working, the rest crowded and fruitful, chickens and maybe other animals. She pointed out the pepper vines and coffee and so on.  The farm was entirely her business; Sam's work was with the trucks.

Their son, called Sonny (or Sunny) asked us to go with him to meet his girlfriend's family.  He drove off with us through the palm-trees down dusty tracks in his battered red Renault Dauphine, the sporty model which still had a certain following in Europe then.  Foreign cars were more common here in Kerala as spare parts could be found in Cochin as they could be in Goa and Bombay, where merchants had found ways round the foreign goods embargo.  We ended up on an almost empty beach where a tall man in a lunghi was working over a huge pit sunk in the sand, at least eight feet deep.  He was stirring different items into a  liquid which he pointed out to us swirling in the pit below. We were shown little bottles with a lurid label which the liquid would go into - it was a hair tonic.  A few weeks later we saw some of these bottles for sale in a shop in downtown Madras.  All the while another man with grey hair and dhoti and a Brahmin's string around his chest was following us, with a begging bowl in his hand making signs for us to put money into the bowl.  Sonny explained that this was his girlfriend's uncle, the brother of the man making the tonic.

Back at the house, supper was ready, a magnificent feast, as was usual on these occasions, much more than we could eat, meat and vegetables, but with a very different character from what we were accustomed to, a different sort of heat, grey-black colour rather than red-brown.  It was explained to us that they didn't use chillies, but that everything was spiced with black pepper along with other spices.  We were in the heart of the area which was the central object of the spice trade in the middle ages, before chillies came with the Portuguese from the Americas.

Sam had bought his trucks with his pension from the army.  His wife had inherited the farm, a perfect matrilineal arrangement, which was still practised in this area.  It seemed a very good set-up to me, both man and woman living independent lives.  I saw a little of the same system in Bukittinggi in Sumatra some years later, where the Minangkabau women certainly had independence, but I have read that the matrilineal tradition there is declining in response to more normal, Islamic, views spreading from Java and Aceh. 

Matrilineal Tradition in Kerala