Photo Courtesy of Curt Gibbs
Prologue.
I came across this photograph of a tea shop/ rest house up in the mountains of Afghanistan ( Bandi-Amir ) , that I stayed in in 1974 and have decided to do my winter reminiscence posts of 2018 on the Hippy Trail adventure, hitching to India through Europe, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan , India and Nepal 1974/75, trying to get the timeline right for a bigger piece of writing.
Part 1 Leaving the UK
The journey started in Wales , where my girlfriend Hilary had left me to go to Scotland with my friend Andrew. I had £500 in the bank and thought that if I spent less than £10 a week I could travel for a year. I had a crush on a girl who had taken a year out of Uni, studying law, to hang with the hippies in Wales and she had invited me to join her and some friends in a little village in central France where they had rented a ramshackle villa for the summer.
I hitched down and spent a week with them, but soon realised that if my money was going to last I would have to get out of Europe soon.
I hitched up to Amsterdam with one of the guys who was staying there, had a couple of nights in the Vondelpark and caught the 'Magic Bus' down to Greece.
I had got my passport amended to say I was a student, purely so as to get cheap fares and deals, there were loads of useful booklets like "overland to India, a freaks guide to travelling cheap" "India on $5 a day " etc. offering advice on this kind of ruse,The magic bus was a new hippie run bus service that cost about a tenth of a standard rail or coach fare.
I picked up the bus in a backstreet along with 10 other slightly stoned backpacking folk who'd been at the park. The driver was a very wide eyed speed freak who was trying to get as many journeys done as possible to pay for his return flight to the states, where he lived.
It was a 24 hour drive, if there were no delays at borders and he intended to do the trip on one go, courtesy of a small pot of pills in his glove compartment. I slept the first 8 hours in the seat next to the driver and when I woke at each border I realised that he was beginning to flag, so I worked with another passenger, a very clever blonde German girl, to do shifts keeping him chatting and awake. It was pretty bizarre, because at the German border anyone with any nefarious substances was advised to swallow them as the border guards here had sniffer dogs and were particularly keen to control the flow of the great unwashed. The conversation got progressively more existential as the journey progressed.
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