Overland to India 1974

  The train back across Uttar Pradesh to Delhi was a typical Indian journey , though it ran through what they called the badlands, areas where around that time, trains had been stopped and robbed by bands of bandits on horseback. Between some stops the carriages were unbearably packed with people hanging on to the outside of the train and all over the roof. Many of them got off as the train slowed before getting into the station. We went back to Delhi and the same hotel in the Paharganj that I met Hillary at and set about trying to get home. We went and visited the places we’d missed on our first visit, the Red Fort area was full of anti government demonstrations (shortly to lead to ‘the Emergency’) and one we witnessed seemed to come from nowhere, one minute ordinary bustling street then suddenly noisy and violent protest with the police wielding their batons in a seemingly haphazard and brutal way, we only went the once to the Old Town for this reason. Hillary got her father to p...

  We had to make some decisions at this point. We were low on money and could either continue our journey and run out of money or just give up and go back to Delhi with enough for 2 homeward flights. Fortunately British citizens could still get a flight home, funded by the government if they were deemed destitute in a foreign country, anywhere in the world. They simply kept your passport and made you repay the cost of the flight before you got it back. Hillary also thought she might get her father to pay for the flights if needed, so we decided to go for broke and carry on. Following the jaundice, I now weighed only 7 stone and was quite weak, severely underweight for a 6ft man and although I felt really good in myself, I was a bit more prone to Delhi Belly and anything else that was going around so we travelled a bit more cautiously and stayed in (very slightly) better digs. In Patna we had a great room overlooking the edge of the city and close to the little airport that servi...

  The next journey was a gruelling three days of buses and trains, heading up to the northern border of India near Nepal. I was feeling increasingly tired and found the lack of personal space and constant enquiries into reasons for travelling quite tiresome. We spent a couple of days at Indore and rested. Even visiting the local cinema and cafe resulted in having to fend off Hillary’s unwanted advances from Indian males of all ages and we were looking forward to some time on an ashram run by the Shri Ram Chandra mission, where an unusual teacher, coming from a Muslim background, ran a meditation centre . We had the address from mutual friends in the UK who had spent time there and had introduced us to ‘Sahaj Marg’ a more holistic form of Raj Yoga. We arrived in Shahjahanpur , a classic rural Indian town, and made our way to the mission. We were welcomed unconditionally, fed and given a small basic room but with an en suite western toilet and shower. After a couple of days we were ...

  Contrary to popular legend we didn’t smoke dope everyday and have sex with everybody we met, we were ideas people, we conversed, we debated, we explored religion, poetry, music, gender and ideology. The hashish that we occasionally smoked was mostly done in a ritualistic way, usually with prayers and chanting learned from passing Sadhu’s and Holy men. Occasionally eaten in cakes for recreation and party nights, full moon dancing or a birthday. Many abstained altogether. Some of the couples we met were, in fact, celibate, saving themselves for religious reasons or just exploring more open relationships, we certainly had a lot more sexual freedom than our parents generation and celebrated it, but the media certainly got it all wrong. A few of the popular religious teachers recognised the confusion that so many young westerners had with their sexuality and helped them explore and understand their own feelings. I’m sure that some people exploited the situation for their own gratifica...

  On the beach in Goa, we made our own yogurt , we’d bought a small live yogurt in the market at Mapusa and every other day we’d get a few litres of milk from the cafe and put it in a big bowl on the roof of our hut with a cover on. We’d share it with whoever chipped in a couple of rupees toward the milk and keep enough as a starter for the next batch. Sometimes we’d just share it with whoever was around. We picked up new starter yogurt on our way back from the west coast trip. The hut opposite ours was being rented by a young Australian doing a low budget round the world trip, he’d always scrounge a bowl of yogurt when we had some. He seemed a bit shy and lonely, we took him to the cafe on Vagator one evening soon after we got back. I remember about 15 people being there and a German guy and I were talking about a Rolling Stones album, we started a drum rhythm on one of the tables from ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, someone on the other side of the room recognised it and started to...

  The journey back to Goa was not without incident . Most states in India had prohibition, alcohol was not legal. I didn’t know this. It was one of those political facts (like the war between Greece and Turkey earlier) that I simply had no knowledge of. The bus stopped at each state border, passengers were checked, passports logged and everything moved on. Until we got about nine hours into our journey and they opened my rucksack to discover the whiskey. The state border police took us off the bus, searched all our luggage and clothing and put us in a small room close to where the bus had stopped. We heard the bus leave. None of the border police spoke English and eventually the equivalent of the town mayor came in to look at us. We sat with him at a table and chairs outside in a small enclosure, we could see the comings and goings of the rural village, it looked very poor with ramshackle huts and gardens, not neatly kept as we had been accustomed too but sparse and untidy, broken ...

  We wanted to see what the community was like on a commune just south of Pondicherry , we'd met an American couple who raved about it, some farming, some building and sustainable fishing alongside meditation and personal development, made it sound practical as well as idealistic. On the way we could visit an ashram just south of Bangalore, towards Mysore that would make a good staging post and we took local buses to do the journey. Ashrams varied from place to place, this one, dedicated to the memory of a deceased teacher whose yoga and meditation techniques were written and carried out by a team of dedicated followers. You paid whatever you could afford and stayed in simple accommodation “cells” not unlike the place in Goa but in blocks of maybe 100 or more. At any one time about 120-150 people would stay and do prescribed routines under a resident teacher, in groups of about 20.The rest of the day was spent maintaining the ashram, cooking, cleaning, gardening or whatever else y...

  The first couple of days in Chapora we just walked to the beach, swam, sunbathed and slept a lot. The few people there were a delight, an English couple, two American girls, a French family in a camper van and occasionally a few of the orange crew, who mostly stayed in their rented house with their own grounds. The third day we realised that the entire Indian family was living in a tiny outhouse because we were renting their main house. While it suited them to earn the money, we were just too uncomfortable with the idea and moved down to a tiny room, right beside the beach, one of 3 situated next to a well and a couple of latrine toilets. The rent for ours was about £1.00 a week.... It was pretty blissful, and a few weeks passed, I completely forgot to celebrate my birthday, no idea what the date was..... timeless and a bit clueless you might say. We mostly went to Vagatore beach and just spent the whole day naked in the sun, amongst like minded folk, discussing the various ashr...

The ferry from Bombay was beautifully painted but an antiquity . It had a large cabin and main deck and an upper deck. It was the end of the monsoon season and the daytime temperature was about 35c . There was no breeze or fans in the cabin so mostly people stayed out on deck, the lower one had a degree of shade from the upper deck. They just kept letting people on, hundreds of passengers, way over what looked safe. By pure chance we were on the side away from the direct sunlight and we had chosen a spot next to the cabin wall, but though it wasn’t comfortable, it was exciting and the view was amazing. All the way along the coast of Maharashtra and Goa, docking at Panjim. Rural Goa was such a delight after the big cities, we caught a local bus up to Mapusa and bought fruit and yoghurt to fortify ourselves .The market was so colourful and much more varied than in the city and cheaper too. The ex colonial Portuguese architecture such a contrast and the lush vegetation, palms and friend...

  The Delhi hotel was a haven of peace by comparison to the chaotic market below . The cheapest option was to sleep in the open on the roof, then there were the rooms, very basic with an eastern ’hole in the floor’ toilet at each end of the balcony. Cleaning your bottom with your hand and water from an old tin can was a skill to be learned and these places often showed evidence of westerners coming to terms with an Indian diet. There were a variety of different types of traveller in these hostels. Some like myself on a kind of pilgrimage to eastern philosophy and religion, dreamers, escapees with nothing much to go home for, some backpackers on a round the world gap year journey, some that we called “bread heads” who travelled out to buy clothes, jewellery, antiques and religious artefacts to ship back to their home country to satisfy the demand for the exotic by those who wouldn’t or couldn’t travel, simple low budget tourists and then the ‘narco tourists’. While probably we all h...