daveBarrett^@

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It was 6.20am on the morning of Thursday 4th October 1973. Unusually for me I was not lying deep in the arms of sleep. Instead I was sitting in the train standing on platform 3 of Dorking station. With me in the carriage was John, who was leaning out of the window making his final tearful farewells to his girlfriend Diana and her father. Most of the passengers on the train were early-bird commuters, but for us this was to be no ordinary journey from the heart of commuter land to the day's toil in the city. For John and I it was the start of a journey that lasted fifteen months, a journey through strange and foreign lands, sometimes dangerous, often beautiful, but always rewarding in one way or another. Strange though they were, these lands turned out to be not so far removed from our own. John and I had known each other for some while before our journey. He was at school with a good friend of mine, and we had occasionally kicked around together without really getting to know each other. It was coincidence that brought us together for this trip. For a few months I had been planning a coach trip following the Hippy Trail through Europe and the Middle East to India and Nepal, ending up in Kathmandu, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Like many others at the time I had made up my mind to get away from all the pressures of Western Society and head off towards the rising sun, lured by the mysteries of the East. East and West had been converging from opposite ends of the Global Village. In the West "Tune in, Turn On, and Drop Out", Timothy Leary's philosophy of instant chemical-induced enlightenment, echoed the mantras repeated a thousand times a day by Lamas in their temples in the Himalayas. The music that played such an important part in my life had opened itself up to the sounds of the East. I loved the sound of the sitar used by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many others in the Sixties, the ragas of the Third Ear Band played on oboe, cello, and tablas, the soaring flute and electric guitar in the devotional music of Quintessence, and above all I loved the eastern flavoured music and images created by the Incredible String Band. All these influences, and the accounts I had read in the Underground Press about the Hippy Trail, coalesced into the inspiration for my journey. At the same time John had been making plans of his own to head off East to Australia to seek his fortune. His motives were a lot more down to earth than mine, but we both wanted more of a taste of adventure than the quiet Surrey countryside could give us. He had heard that I was thinking along the same lines as he was, and had contacted me through my sister whom he had bumped into in the High Street one day. We got together, compared ideas, and quickly agreed to travel together. The times we spent together organising our route, arranging visas and passports, or just playing the guitar and talking about the days ahead were, for me, full of excitement and anticipation. Soon we had ironed out any disagreements and had decided upon our travel arrangements. John's idea of getting a couple of motorbikes was ruled out after firm persuasion from my parents. Our departure date was just after my 21st birthday, and they had agreed to give me some money towards the trip as a present instead of contributing towards a party, and this money would have been forfeited if we had insisted on going by motorbike. As I had never been on a bike at that stage, and did not know the first thing about anything mechanical, it was probably just as well. Instead we planned to hitch through Europe to Istanbul, stopping off for a couple of days in Germany to visit John's sister Margaret, and then use local transport across the Middle East and Asia as far as Singapore, by way of India and Nepal. From Singapore we would catch a plane to Australia. This part of the journey would take three or four months and most of our money, and so we intended to find work when we landed in Australia. That was as far ahead as we had planned. What would follow then neither of us knew, least of all me. We had said most of our farewells - not all of which were dry-eyed - during the final days before our departure. Our parents took it well on the surface, though they must have thought that this could be the last they saw of their sons, neither of whom had been away from home for long before. I had been at college for a year, staying in digs in Portsmouth during term time but John was three years younger than me and had not had time to go anywhere. Our friends were very sceptical at first, and treated it all as a bit of a joke, but in the end they were convinced that we really were mad enough to carry out all we had been talking about. There was even a touch of envy in one or two of them when they told me that they wished they could be doing the same thing as us. The fact that there was nothing stopping them doing just that was quickly ignored. On the whole, though, they wished us well and carried on with their own lives and ambitions. All the preparations had finally been taken care of. My possessions were whittled down to the essentials, plus a few small luxuries, and crammed into a backpack, and all that I would have for the next few months was in the luggage rack of the train above me. I sat waiting apprehensively for the next phase of my life to begin. After an uneventful ride into London we encountered the first hitch in our plans. We had intended to catch the 8am boat train to Dover, but we had to hang around at Victoria until 8am to buy our tickets. We eventually caught the 11am train, and spent the entire journey sitting on the floor of the corridor as there were no seats available. We did not know it at the time, but this was a foretaste of the travelling that was in store for us. Before we really knew it, we were standing by the roadside near the docks at Ostend with our thumbs hanging out hopefully, without any real idea of why we were there. We looked at each other and laughed. We were not kept waiting for long. A large Ford Zephyr pulled up, and the middle-aged woman in the driver's seat told us to hop in. She was not in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, she said, but she got the impression we were good lads, and decided to give us a lift. I thought to myself that she must have seen John first - he was always one to make a good impression when there were members of the opposite sex around. It turned out that the lady was the wife of a Consular Official in Dusseldorf, and so our glimpses of Belgium and Holland were very brief as we sped on down the motor way to Germany. The two countries flashed by in a blur of flat cabbage fields fading into the gloom as night fell. We reached Dusseldorf by mid evening.

The first few days in Germany were mainly uneventful, and after a brief stay with John's sister, Margaret, who was living in a small northern town near her husband's British Army regiment, we started to hitch our way south in earnest. The Germany we had seen so far was neat and orderly. The streets were clean and tidy, the gardens neat, and the people lived orderly, hard-working lives. Relaxation came in the form of large frothing jugs of beer and participation, either as a spectator or as a musician, in the traditional brass bands that were much in evidence. We made reasonable progress to start with, and were helped on our way by a number of friendly drivers, most of whom spoke good English, who were willing to share their journeys with us. By the evening of the first day heading south, though, the light was beginning to fade, and our luck appeared to be running out. The cars seemed to speed past us without a thought, and Australia seemed as far away as the moon. Our thoughts were turning to the more immediate consideration of where we were going to spend the night. Just when we were beginning to give up all hope of getting a lift a car pulled up, and we climbed in gratefully. The occupants were a charming couple in their twenties, and we were soon caught up in their cheerful mood. Franz, the older of the two, was a psychology lecturer at the university nearby, and Carla was a student social worker. They told us not to worry. They knew of a place where we could spend the night, and so we carried on talking to them, thinking to ourselves that they would drop us off at a hostel they knew of. We began to have second thoughts when we turned off the autobahn, drove down a side road, and then onto a bumpy track that appeared to go nowhere. The thoughts that were going through my head at the time seemed at odds with the impression I had of the couple. As it turned out, my fears were totally unfounded. The car pulled up outside a beautiful old farmhouse, and we were told by Franz and Carla that we were to be their guests for the night. They had acquired the farmhouse from a farmer nearby. It was uninhabited, and hardly habitable, but they had spent a lot of time and effort on the place, and now it was their home. Our first priority was to get a warm meal inside us. Soon we were wandering around the fields, with a beautiful clear moonlit sky above us and a crispness in the air, filling buckets and bowls with mushrooms. When we had picked all we could carry we returned to the house, cleaned them up, put them in a large pot on the stove together with some potatoes, and sat down to a delicious dinner. We felt completely at home with our hosts, and they made us feel like old friends. We had been asking them about themselves, and though they were not married they decided that they might as well be for the night. The next thing we knew we were witnesses to a spontaneous marriage ceremony. After eating, we went into the main room of the house and sat around an open fire, talking and listening to medieval music. There was no electricity in the house, and the room was lit only by the fire. The flickering light sent our shadows dancing across the walls and over the many books and musical instruments that filled the room, and the music seemed to come out of the walls themselves. It was one of those times and places where all lines converge at the centre of the universe.

Later on in the evening we were given a musical treat. Franz picked up a violin and stalked round the dark shadowy room playing an intense classical solo. The mood lightened up after that when Otto, a friend of our hosts, dropped by, and he accompanied Franz amusingly on the piano. By the time we retired to our beds in the draughtier upper floor of the house we could not have felt more contented. Next morning, after a delicious breakfast of fried mushrooms and potatoes, Franz and Carla dropped us off on the autobahn on the way to their college. With warm goodbyes behind us we were back on the road again, our backpacks beside us, and our thumbs outstretched. This typical pose can say a lot about the mood of the hiker. On a bad day, when the wind is blowing cold rain in your face, and the cars and lorries are hurtling heedlessly by with their drivers in a different world, your thumb droops dejectedly on the end of your arm.That day, however, it was as though we were giving a thumbs up to the whole world. It did not take us long to reach our destination for the night, Munich, that city famed for its Olympic Games and its annual beer festival. Unfortunately for us, the Oktoberfest, as the beer festival is called, had finished the weekend before we had arrived.We were not too disappointed, though, as we had not given it any thought until we arrived there. After checking into the youth hostel, an establishment distinguished only by its massive electrically-operated gates, we caught a tram heading into the city centre to get something to eat and to see a bit of the nightlife. Our tram journey was rudely interrupted when the tram rammed a car, but with the help of a local girl and three Canadian girls we were soon sitting at a long trestle table amongst the noise and bustle of the Hofbrahaus, drinking deeply from large earthenware steins. The atmosphere was very friendly, and the conversation lively. There was no language problem since most of the people around us were British, American, or Canadian. They had all come for the festival, enjoying it so much that they had stayed on for a few days more. The evening passed very enjoyably, but none too cheaply. On the way out the Canadian girls decided to get their money's worth by smuggling out their steins, but after consideration, more on the size of the bouncers at the door than on the moral issues involved, they gave up the idea. Once outside we headed on back to the hostel to beat the curfew, when the gates clicked tightly shut, impassable to all until morning.

Munich in the summer months is a bottleneck for travellers on the move around Europe. Because of its situation, near the Bavarian Alps and near the borders of Austria, Switzerland and Italy, many people pass through travelling East and West, North and South. Consequently, the competition for lifts out of Munich was stronger than usual. We took our place in the well-spaced queue on the road to Austria and waited patiently for something to happen. We had not been standing for too long when a car stopped by the hiker in front of us, and he called us over, telling us to get in. The driver was a young German with a decidedly cool manner, in the hip meaning of the word cool, and with a good knowledge of English. Our journey continued through the beautiful greenery of the Bavarian Alps, with modern American folk music on the radio, but our talk was of India. The hiker who had called us over to the car was a Belgian called Erik, and he was on his way out east for the second time, having spent some time in India before. Our conversation was interrupted when we were dropped off some way down the autobahn, but though we split up with Erik to make things easier as far as the hitching was concerned we met him again in the next car that stopped for us. Coincidence is a strange phenomenon, but it proved to be a frequent companion during our travels, alongside Lady Luck. Without luck we could have been in serious trouble on a number of occasions, and coincidence provided a thread which embroidered the whole journey. The driver of our latest lift was a young Swiss man off on his holidays. He spoke no English, but with Erik as interpreter we soon got on very well. He seemed very free of cares, not worrying about where he was going as long as he was heading in the right direction. We spent the rest of the day in his company meandering through the mountains that had by now become the Austrian Alps. The sky was blue, the air clear, and the scenery breathtaking, with snow-capped peaks crowning the lush green of the valleys. By early evening we were in Graz, a town which I took an immediate liking to. The houses seemed very old but far from run down, as though many generations had lived in and looked after them lovingly. A respectably-sized river ran through the town, overlooked by a castle which was floodlit by night. The whole place seemed as though it had not really given much away to the 20th Century. The mixture of peasant, hunting, and religious influences, long part of medieval Europe and much in evidence in Graz, were typified by a painting that hung from a wall in a local Inn, depicting a Saint dressed as a peasant, bowing down before a stag with a cross between its antlers. We stayed the night at the local youth hostel, and next day the three of us split up as before to make the hitching easier. Erik stood some way in front of us down the road in readiness for the first lift. Once again it made no difference, and we were all picked up by a policeman off to work on the Austrian-Jugoslavian border. Once over the border our luck changed. After spending two frustrating hours at the dusty roadside John and I decided to catch a bus into the next town. This act would be frowned upon by hitchhiking purists, but to us it was just a way of keeping on the move towards our final destination. Jugoslavia proved to be inhospitable and unfriendly to us from start to finish. Maribor, the first town we came to, was very dull in appearance. The local population on the whole looked serious or aggressive, with the men continuously heckling the young women as they walked by. Late in the afternoon, after an unsuccessful attempt at getting a lift on the road to Zagreb, we returned to the bus station where we waited amongst the dossers and drunks before boarding a bus to Zagreb. There, at last, we met a couple of friendly faces who directed us to a student hostel. This turned out to be too expensive for us, so having considered the alternatives, we boarded the tram going to Zagreb University. We reasoned that the brotherhood of students would solve our accommodation problems for the night. Surely there would be no difficulty in finding someone who would help fellow students from a foreign land in their quest for a place to rest their weary heads? After all, our passports said that we were students, and we possessed International Student Travel Cards. The latter turned out to be nothing like the real things, hardly surprising since we bought them at a small travel firm in London before setting out on our journey. Our illusions were shattered when we found out that no-one wanted to know us. It was getting late by this time. There seemed no chance of finding cheap accommodation for the night, so in desperation we made camp behind a levee by the river, with the leaves of a silver birch tree for our roof, and flattened cardboard boxes for our beds. All night long a dog barked nearby, trains rattled noisily along the bridge almost above us, and the cold seeped up from the ground, through my thin sleeping bag and my clothes, and into my bones. A fitful night's sleep was finally shattered by the realisation that the barking was coming from just the other side of the fence behind us. We packed our sleeping bags, tried to stamp some warmth into our legs, and headed off for the main road to Belgrade, hoping for better luck that day. As so often happens, a change of day brings a change of fortunes. Soon we were speeding on our way in the comfortable cab of a french juggernaut. The driver was on route to Athens, and when he saw us he took the opportunity to share the monotony of a long tedious drive. The countryside was flat and uninspiring for most of the day, and the traffic was heavy. The quality of driving seemed to deteriorate the further east we went. A nasty accident outside Belgrade delayed us for what seemed like ages. Patience amongst the drivers was in short supply. Once the traffic started moving again the drivers set off even more recklessly than before to make up for lost time. I could only assume that the sight of mangled cars at the roadside was too common for them to pay any heed to, or to the wreaths that were placed by the road every few kilometres, presumably to mark the sights of fatal accidents. We were dropped off at 4am the next morning having reached the town of Nis, not far from the Bulgarian border. It was very cold as we watched the traffic passing us by. From the number-plates we could see that all the traffic was local. The only thing to do was to catch the train to Istanbul. Luckily for us Nis was situated on the route of the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. We did not have to worry about changing trains anywhere which could have been a difficulty as neither of us spoke a word of the local language and few of the locals spoke English. We had aimed to hitch at least as far as Istanbul. The decision to catch the train was an admission of defeat, but we were not too unhappy about it. We knew that next day we would be in the old capital of Byzantium, the gateway to the Orient, and the first leg of our journey would be finished. As we walked into Nis we could already see the influences of the East in the people we came across. Many were peasants heading for work on foot or on oxen carts. Even though it was some time before dawn the day was well under way for many of the local inhabitants. We spent some time that morning whiling away a few hours wandering about the town. We passed through a small market full of peasants selling peppers, cabbages, potatoes, and other farm produce, or holding up squealing piglets by their back legs offering them up for sale. Their faces were full of character, lined and tanned by years of toil on the land, but not beaten by the hard work. The area was poor, and few of the comforts of Western civilisation had made impact enough to change a way of life that had been the same for hundreds of years. We experienced language problems again at the station, but eventually succeeded in getting our tickets, together with the knowledge that the train was due at 1:30pm. The station was chaotic, and there seemed to be people everywhere wandering all over the tracks and platforms, but no-one seemed to mind as long as the tracks were clear when the trains came in. The train finally arrived two hours late, but by then we were beginning to get used to the waiting.

The journey to Istanbul was a long one, memorable only for the frequent interruptions during the night by the humourless Bulgarian police who were checking that our passports and papers were in order. Dawn broke over a flat open countryside which we knew was turkish. Istanbul was now only a short ride away.