Some time ago, John found me through my web-site and emailed me in response to my interest in stories of about the Hippie Trail overland to India. Recently, he and I visited on Zoom. His story follows.
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On Christmas Eve in 1968, John and Brian, sat in the Hazel Pear pub in Cheshire, England. They raised foaming pints, and talked of what the coming year would bring. Though both young men had recently established respectable careers (John was a Chemical engineer and Brian a Solicitor), they discovered a mutual desire to make a change and do some extended traveling.
“Let’s do it,” John said. “Where shall we go?”
Like many Brits, the two mates first considered somewhere that was part of the broad expanse of the British Commonwealth. “We could go to Canada, but Australia is further and the journey would be more interesting,” posited Brian.
Soon they had made a plan to drive overland to India the following autumn and travel by boat on to Australia. In the Hazel Pear, an adventure was born.
John and Brian bought a ten-year-old, left-hand drive Mercedes sedan (an odd thing to find in the UK where right hand drive is the norm). They named it “The Royal Wave” because friends commented that the car seemed quite regal. Brian had a late August social commitment in France, so John was at the wheel for the first test drive from Wales to Le Havre, where he picked up his mate. By the 3rd of September, the friends were in Switzerland and heading toward Italy and Yugoslavia.
Just south of Dubrovnik John’s prize travel purchase, a primus stove fueled by regular petrol, revealed its tendency to erupt into a flame-thrower. After inspection and cleaning of the non-return valve, the stove was tamed and served well for many more months. John told me during our Zoom conversation, that the cooker brought them instant popularity at the tedious queues at border crossings. They would set up the stove, boil water in their kettle, and offer hot tea to other travelers.
As Tom and I experienced in 1972, the long trek overland to India along the Hippie-trail was always a series of adventures. For a detailed account of John and Brian’s trip, check out John’s web-site at Overland Home (johndefig.net) His memories, like mine are helped by his travel diaries.
Tom and I knew that many Hippie youth who traveled the road sold their blood as a way of augmenting their finances. Luckily, we never needed to do this. However, I was surprised to read that John gave a pint of blood in Athens in exchange for five English pounds.
The British friends made the regular stops along the way—Athens, Istanbul, Ankara—to Tehran. Similar to Tom, John was a good mechanic and was able to make most needed repairs to The Royal Wave as they occured.
In the Iranian capital, John and Brian settled into a cheap hotel. “Really more of a back-packers hostel,” John told me. They arrived in time for a public holiday celebrating the Shah’s 50th birthday. The mates hoped to find temporary work in Tehran. In between job hunting, they made friends with other travelers at the hostel. But little work could be found other than short gigs tutoring English conversation. Their travel funds were dwindling faster than they had expected. Heinz, a German resident at the hotel who was full of ideas, suggested they sell the Mercedes. He was sure he could find a buyer and he did.
With the influx of cash (a few dollars more than they had paid for the car) and some fancy document footwork including mysterious Farsi writing on John’s passport, the two friends became bus travelers. John is fairly sure they joined a bus group mentioned in Sharif Gemie’s book, The Hippie Trail. (see blog: Hippie Trail Adventures – Klang Slattery) “A Safaris Overland coach [that left London] . . . October 1969 had 15 women and 10 men,”(The Hippie Trail; Gemie, Sharif; Ireland, Brian; 2017; pg. 73) a ratio that was changed when Brian and John boarded.
The Safaris Overland bus offered travel well below the luxury threshold. Besides basic seats, over-night sleeping
arrangements were a free-for-all. Each evening, the bus would try to find a cheap hotel. Some of the passengers rented rooms, but others stayed in the bus and slept across the seats or on the floor. John told me he could often be found sprawled in an open space just behind the driver’s seat. Soon the passengers became, if not friends, at least cohorts and companions. One of the women passengers was a young, Latvian born, Australian raised, school-teacher named Inta. John and Inta soon formed a romantic attachment slowed down only by her plans to return to Australia by plane from Delhi. (John and Inta later married in Australia, a union that lasted for twenty-five years.)
The bus ticket covered getting to Northern India and several side trips, including Kashmir, Jaipur and Agra, with the final stop in Delhi. Some of the passengers convinced the driver to take them as far as Calcutta (Kolkata). Our two friends went along on this jaunt, but returned to Delhi with the driver.
The cheapest way to get to Bombay (Mumbai), where they had connections to family friends, was by third-class train. Though they had seat assignments for the overnight trip, the accommodations were spartan. The two Brits shared an open, sleeper compartment with a group of two old ladies and three girls, including one very pretty young woman in a sari. Besides more people than bunks (two women shared one bunk), the compartment floor was piled with luggage: a huge tin trunk, three smaller trunks, four bulky bedrolls, hand-luggage, not to mention the backpacks of the Brits.
The train traveled south, across the high, dry plateau of central India. Luckily, food was available. A surprisingly good evening meal of soup, fish, bread and fruit arrived (yes, served by a train employee) around 8:00 in the evening. At one of the stops, another woman and her “bearer,” an old man shouldering two giant bedrolls, boarded the train. They claimed the last two bunks. After dinner, everyone spread out their bedrolls. In his web-site diary, John writes, “We soon realized why they [their Indian companions] had these huge bedrolls. In the third-class sleeper, the bunks are made of wooden slats. A thin sleeping bag provided virtually no padding. . . Compared with sleeping on the floor of the bus, the wooden slatted bunks on the train were comfortable.” The next day proceeded with breakfast, a lunch of mutton chops, afternoon tea, and naps. The entire trip from Delhi to Bombay took about twenty-four hours.
John and Brian enjoyed two weeks in Bombay feted by their local friends over the Christmas holidays. Getting to Australia by boat as they had planned turned out to be very complicated and expensive. Finally, they opted to fly from Bombay to their final destination. (In Wherever the Road Leads, I describe a similar experience trying to get across the Darian Gap in Panama.)
John planned to stay in Australia for at least two years, but from the beginning, he knew he might choose to stay there. His marriage to Inta sealed the deal. When I spoke to him last week, he sat in a sunny window nook in his home near Melbourne where he lives with Judy, his second wife. Though he worked as a Chemical engineer his first year in Australia, John soon had the opportunity to become a physics instructor at the same private high school where Inta taught. John taught high school teacher for twenty-five years. Later, for a further thirteen years, he served as a staff trainer and on-line system administrator at the college level. He continues to travel and explore the world, first with Inta and later with Judy.
These days, John travels towing a caravan (trailer). He and Judy love going to the Australian outback where they offer their services teaching children who live on remote cattle stations.
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