1972 TRIP

Overland to India April to September 1972

Matthias and I left Munich to hitch to Istanbul, the first main stopover on our trip to India. On arriving in Istanbul after three days hitching we stayed in a hotel near the Mosque of St Sophia.

Having gone separate ways that evening Matthias lost half our total saving to a money changer of which the city was full. We met some friendly Turkish students, who on hearing of our disaster, brought us to an electrical goods dealer, across the Bosphorus, who bought our large radio-cassette player and fifteen tapes for a large sum of money, which equaled the sum of money which had been stolen from us.

The famous meeting place for Hippies travelling East “THE PUDDING SHOP” was just off the main square and we met many Hippies of all nationalities there.

After five days in Istanbul we boarded a train for Teheran, the capital of Iran. The train was slow and seemed to stop at every village. It took four days to reach Teheran. We arrived in the middle of the night. The SHAH ruled Iran an everywhere we looked there were giant portraits of him. The heavy stench of excrement covered the entire city and as the city woke the poverty, misery and hopelessness of its inhabitants could plainly be seen.

The reality of life there was so bad that we decided to leave after lunchtime on the first available bus. We travelled through East Iran and after what seemed like an eternity we arrived at the Afghan border. The contrast between Iran and Afghanistan could not have been greater. The Afghans were proud, noble, magnificent warriors armed with swords, knives and guns. In Afghanistan at that time 1972 there traditional relaxation was smoking there powerful hash through water pipes.

The opium of the Afghans was the most powerful in the world. Both hash an opium were legal in Afghanistan and had been used by the noble Afghans for thousands of years. In the centre of Afghanistan were the Hindu Kush mountains part of the Himalayan chain. There were no railways in Afghanistan, only the most incredibly decorated lorries and buses.

The lorries, which travelled hundreds of miles at a time, were most extraordinary. Photographs, glass and plastic trinkets, dried flowers decorated the interiors while the whole of the out surfaces, the back, the sides, the fronts were painted with mythological scenes from the Muslim Bible, THE KORAN. The colours were pure psychedelic. Mixed in with these were paintings of jet-planes, battleships, and anything else that took the artist’s fancy.

Matthias and I split up in Kabul after meeting up in The Bamyan. In order to get to this famous location, deep in the Hindu Kush mountains one had to travel in a ramshackle bus for eighteen hours. When one reached this fertile valley, 9000 feet above sea-level what one saw was unbelievable. There were two enormous Buddhas (one 70 metres high and the other 50 metres high) carved out of enormous cliff overlooking the village of Bamyan. In the cliffs were hundreds of smoke- blackened caves were thousands of Buddhist monks lived in ancient times. In 2001 these two huge 15 hundred year old were blown up by the Taliban because they were considered unislamic.

After my hugely exciting adventures in Afghanistan I left Kabul by bus to travel through the famous Khyper Pass into the Northern part of Pakistan. Another huge cultural change. The further east one travelled the hotter it got. After a long train journey through Northern Pakistan I arrived in Lahore, the capital of Northern Pakistan. It was a poverty-stricken city teeming with people.

I felt a great amount of suppressed violence and also saw the police physically beating people everywhere. For instance, if people did not queue properly, they were beaten. I left Lahore after a few days and travelled to the great Indian city of Amritsar, the religious centre of the SIKHS. It was the first Indian city inside the Pakistan, Indian border. There I visited the world famous GOLDEN TEMPLE where the heart of the Hindu religion beats. There was free food and accommodation there for pilgrims.

I travelled by the famous Indian railway network to NEW DELI, which I fell in love with immediately. It was a paradise of SARIS, bicycles, parks and tropical and vegetation. I stayed there a week and during that time I obtained a two week visa to visit Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.

I travelled by train to the Nepalese border and then caught a bus that travelled through thick jungle slowly up the steep winding roads of Southern Nepal, to the fertile valleys, with their Paddy-fields, to this tiny capital with its richly-carved wooden houses and bicycle-thronged streets. It was a Hippie paradise and indescribably exotic.

When my visa expired I decided to hear home to Ireland while I still had some money left. I travelled back the same way I had come and never stopped travelling for three weeks, In that time I covered four thousand miles. I arrived home in Ireland in September. The entire journey cost me three thousand pounds.