I do not recall exactly when the notion arose that I should drive overland from India to England. From early school days I had wanted to travel, to escape from the constraints of suburban Brisbane where I grew up and see more interesting places like Sydney or Melbourne – the ‘Big Smoke’ in Australia - or even far-away London. My maternal grandfather was born in the United Kingdom, coming to Australia as a baby in 1883. He always referred to England as the ‘Old Country’ and in 1953, following the death of his wife, he went there to meet some of his relatives. He returned with Kodachrome colour slides of the exotic places he had visited. In addition to the more familiar British tourist sights, there were photos of bum boats in Colombo, the Suez Canal and the back streets of Aden, the ruins of Pompeii and the fjords of Norway. It was all exciting stuff for a 10 year old lad from Queensland.
In those days it was already quite common for young Australians to go overseas on a ‘working holiday’; it is a rite of passage which continues today. A lad from across the road, who was probably 10 years older than me, had been firstly to New Zealand and then to the United Kingdom in this way. From time to time news of his travels would come from his mother to mine and was then passed on to the rest of our family. I dreamed of doing something similar too.
My grandfather was also, in those pre-television days, an avid reader and every fortnight my sister and I would go with him to a nearby public library. After I had read every Biggles book available, the fiction section did not interest me much, but the non-fiction included some wonderful, real life travellers’ tales. I recall particularly a book entitled Get Up and Go: Round the World on Twenty Five Pounds. Another was A Long Way South by an Australian author, Geoffrey Dutton, describing how he had driven overland from London to Ceylon in 1951. Perhaps the most influential was the account of motor racing driver David McKay. In his autobiography Behind the Wheel, he describes his journey in 1955 in a VW Kombi van travelling in the reverse direction, from Bombay to London. By the time I was 16 or 17, the idea that I would do the same was firmly established in my mind. But first there was my education to complete.
I finished my university training as a geologist in late 1966 and commenced work immediately with the Commonwealth Bureau of Mineral Resources, based in Canberra. As a field geologist, I would spend five months each year during the winter season mapping in western Queensland. We lived in a tent base camp and would then range out for days on end in a Land Rover to more remote areas. Each geologist had a field assistant/driver with him.
During 1967 I met one of these drivers from another visiting field party. His name was Stuart Harper and I discovered that he too had plans to drive overland from India to England. Stuart was about 10 years older than I was, he was English and had come to Australia as a seaman. He had ‘jumped ship’ to stay on for a while. His original intention was to travel alone, but I was welcome to join him if I wished. Although I had not been long at the BMR, I was disappointed to have been assigned to a field party working in Queensland, not so far from home. The Bureau had much more exciting operations at that time in places like the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea and in Antarctica. I would have gone willingly to either place. I was keen to see the world. The geological work in Queensland was also rather routine and I could not see much prospect for improvement in the near future. The overland trip was an attractive alternative.
Stuart already had a car for the journey, a strange little van-like thing called a Fiat 600 Multipla, circa 1960, a precursor of the modern Multi Purpose Vehicle (MPV). Multiplas were commonly used as taxis in Italy. They had a tiny 633 cc four cylinder engine and a top speed of about 50 mph. To be honest, I was less than impressed with the Multipla. At the time I owned a VW Beetle, which I thought was much more robust and better suited to the journey, but Stuart was going whether or not I joined him. There was some sense in using the Multipla. Despite its small external dimensions, it had remarkable storage space inside. In fact, Stuart had planned to sleep in it if he had gone alone. It also had cost only $175, although much mechanical work was subsequently needed to prepare it for the trip. The engine, clutch and brakes were thoroughly overhauled and the rest of the car was checked. We then took it on a test drive south from Canberra into the Snowy Mountains and up to the top of Mt Kosciusko, Australia’s highest peak. A snow drift finally stopped us just short of the summit. The little car was painfully slow, but it passed the test with the only apparent problem being that it boiled on the long ascents. We fitted a temperature gauge on our return to Canberra.
Another benefit of the Multipla was that we had a receipt documenting its purchase price of $175. In order to temporarily import a car into certain foreign countries on the overland route, a carnet was required. To obtain this document, a cash deposit equal to 170% of the value of the vehicle had to be left in Australia and could only be recovered at the end of the journey. This was to guarantee that the car would not be sold illegally en route. It was therefore in our interest to minimise the value of any vehicle that we used.
In the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, the normal way to go to Europe was by ship, as my grandfather had done. Until it was closed in 1967 due to conflict between Egypt and Israel, the most direct route was through the Suez Canal, typically stopping off in Colombo. By the late 1960s, passenger ships visiting ports in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) or India were uncommon. In addition, there was a preferred season to travel the overland route, avoiding the monsoon in India and the bitter winter in Afghanistan and Iran. The ideal timing was to arrive in India late in the northern winter, traversing Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey in the spring and arriving in Europe in early summer.
We finally discovered plans for a P&O vessel, the Oriana, to depart from Sydney in February 1969, visiting Hong Kong, Singapore and Colombo before going on to Southampton via the Cape of Good Hope. No sooner were bookings open than it was overbooked, even though the departure date was still a year away. We were put on a waiting list with assurances that we and the car would most likely be successful, as indeed was the case. The timing also was virtually perfect.
There were, of course, other ways of making the overland journey, as many young people were doing in 1969 on what has become known as the Hippie Trail. Some would use a combination of local public transport and, where practical, hitch hiking; these were the antecedents of today’s backpacker generation. Otherwise, there were overland bus services of varying quality coming out from Europe to destinations like Delhi or Kathmandu, and then returning with a fresh load of travellers heading in the other direction. Such services had been operating since at least the late 1950s; some of the better known operators at the time included Penn Overland, Indiaman and Sundowners. A couple of my friends, David Bennett and John Ingram, who were also working at the BMR, were so taken by the idea of our trip that they booked passages on one of these bus services and left as well. The Director of the Bureau would not have been pleased. I later flatted with both of them at different times in London.
The hippie aspect of these times has possibly been overemphasised. Certainly there were those travelling to India, as the Beatles did in 1968, seeking some sort of spiritual enlightenment and a more satisfying alternative to Western materialism. Even more were lured by tales of cheap and abundant supplies of hashish, especially in Afghanistan and Nepal, where it was legally available. Kathmandu and Goa in particular were havens for hippie dropouts, but the majority of travellers, at least in my experience, could not be described as hippies. They were simply quite normal young people taking advantage of the open borders of this time to see a truly exotic part of the world.
For some time I had been seeking out maps, books and other material related to the overland journey. The Royal Automobile Club of Queensland had been able to provide detailed route charts of much of the Asian sector, albeit a little out of date, and they were subsequently put to good use at times when we had nothing else, such as in Afghanistan. There was even a little booklet entitled The Overland Journey from Australia to Europe and the United Kingdom, published by the Australian Automobile Association, which provided much useful information on exactly the trip we were undertaking.
In the 1960s, the concept of a Pan-Asian Highway was being promoted and important segments of this grand plan were being upgraded or established. In particular, the Americans and the Russians were competing with each other through their aid projects in Asia, and in the early to mid-1960s had built a superb highway across Afghanistan from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat, then on to the Iranian border. These were finished by 1967. Never mind the general lack of cars in Afghanistan, these roads - built to military standards - opened up the southern part of the country and became the preferred route for overland travellers; indeed they were by far the best roads in the region. Formerly the route most used was through Kerman and Zahedan in southern Iran and Quetta in Baluchistan (southwest Pakistan), entirely bypassing Afghanistan. This ‘golden era’ of overland travel continued until 1979 when, almost simultaneously, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and the Shah of Iran was deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. The overland route was then no longer viable, and unfortunately it has never really been restored since.
Before we left Canberra, however, there was another significant event, the London – Sydney Marathon car rally, which was held between November and December 1968. Ninety eight cars started in what was, in effect, a road race across Asia and Australia, much of it over our intended route. It was interesting that the drivers found the tracks they travelled over in outback Australia were far worse than anything they experienced in Asia. The event, backed by major newspapers in London and Sydney, captured the public imagination and I was fortunately able to drive into the mountains near Canberra to see the last competitive stage of the event. The condition of many of the surviving cars was not encouraging, but then we would not be racing against the clock.
By another happy coincidence, just a month before our departure, I noticed a young couple in a Commer van with British plates driving through Canberra and flagged them down. They were overlanders headed for Sydney who gave me all sorts of up to date and practical advice on the trip. They humorously related how they had cut a hole in the floor of their van so that they could relieve themselves in privacy via a funnel in order to avoid the gaping crowds that invariably gathered around them in India.