Part 3. Going east

 Arriving in Istanbul was an absolute eye opener, I'd travelled a bit in Europe and been to Greece and Yugoslavia before, but Turkey was the first place I'd been which felt genuinely "foreign" both in terms of its architecture, culture and general feel. The first fully Muslim country I'd ever experienced , the beauty of the Mosques and public buildings, the smells and sights of the huge bazaars and the rich tapestries and brass work were really new and exciting.

My dormitory style back packers hostel was full of Australians doing overland in the opposite direction to me, with loads of stories and travel advice for my forward journey. I spent a whole day just wondering about the city taking it all in, even caught a 'son et lumiere' at the Blue Mosque in the centre.
'The Pudding Shop' was the place that everybody "on the road" visited to meet other people doing journeys, the notice board was packed with notes asking for lifts, offering petrol sharing journeys and quite a few lone travellers looking for companions. Especially large numbers of girls looking for blokes to travel through Turkey and Iran with ( these were seen as a bit risky for unaccompanied females). I offered to travel on with a couple of English girls who were going to hitch through Turkey but get a bus through Iran, so I'd be solo again once we got to the border.
As it turned out the girls had a really easy trip with me (they dressed respectfully, long trousers, headscarves etc), we got lifts from salesman, soldiers, lorry drivers and farmers and I was the only one who got propositioned by an overweight farmer who kept trying to get his hand in my pants , he kept pointing at the girls in the back and making faces like he didn't like them and then pointing at him and me and doing the JIGAJIG motion with his hands, he may have been trying to tell me something....
I went with the girls to the railway station and felt a bit glum when they left, but a lone Irishman emerged from the station carrying a mandolin case and approached me to see which way I was going. I had a pair of bongos in my rucksack and we busked at the train station for a couple of hours, much to the astonishment of the rural townsfolk passing by. We hooked up to do the journey together as far as Afghanistan .


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 17. Back to Goa. Another brush with the law

Image
  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 ...
Read more

Part 1 Leaving the UK

Image
  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 ...
Read more

Part 8. Into Central Afghanistan and the Bamian Buddhas

Image
  All the cheap beds in Afghanistan were simple wooden frames with woven tops, something like cane or wicker. Functional but needing some soft covering to stop you being marked by the woven pattern on any part of you that was exposed directly to it. It was hot both day and night in the city, my sleeping bag was too bulky so worked just as a mattress cover. We’d shared one to avoid paying for two rooms and were both heavily marked by the weave, I remember. It was easy to rise early during Ramadan, the call to prayer from the local mosque was accompanied by clattering from the resident family as they prepared food before the fasting began at sunrise. We walked across the city, having picked up the English girls travelling companion nearby and got to the bus station, if you could call it that. Basically, a huge empty area filled with trucks and busses parked in a seemingly random manner. A local lad showed us to the truck which would take us to Bamyan, another open pick up style truck...
Read more