Rough Ride to the East

By Ivan Brackin

‘A funny thing happened on my way to the billabong...' Sure did. In fact, a lot of funny things happened on the 3rd Altrincham Rover Crew Australasian Expedition fifty years ago.
Here's how my expedition from the UK to Australia missed its target by 5000 miles and ended up in Tokyo. In an old van it was a rough ride - few roads, but enough interesting memories and amusing stories for a lifetime

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivan Brackin
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458041531

Ivan Brackin

Born in Cheshire, England, in l941. Left those sunny 'hic' shores in l963 to drive to Australia. Should have bought a map. Made it to Karachi and eventually by foot and boat to Japan where I started a small ad agency. Wrote ad copy for 35 years and typed out about a dozen or more books on an IBM Selectric. Mostly humor accompanied by my cartoons. Discovered computers two years ago and now converting dusty manuscripts to the books the world has been denied for thirty years, using the marvelous opportunity presented by Smashwords.Now retired on a small island called Yoron. Enjoy gardening, messing about with a boat, writing, Googling, golf on a sweet little nine holer, par 27 , and ogling at the marvelous sea.

Book preview

Rough

Ride

to the

East

by Ivan L.Brackin

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright ©2011 Ivan L.Brackin

Contents

Chapter 1 - Europe l963

Chapter 2 - Tito's Land -- The Refugees

Chapter 3 - Greece -- Marathon Men

Chapter 4 - Istanbul -- Nicely Loaded

Chapter 5 - Into Asia -- Big Bad Kurts

Chapter 6 - Lebanon -- Paradise Lost

Chapter 7 - Syria -- Into Antiquity

Chapter 8 - Jordan -- The Dead Sea -- Sodom? Sod of -- Jericho Cut & Riot

Chapter 9 - Iraq -- The Old Legionnaire -- A Miracle in the Desert --

The Sun's Anvil

Chapter 10 - Persia -- Just Desserts -- A Cash-eating Cur --The Limits of the Sky

Chapter 11 - Pakistan -- Beatlemania-- Conquest of a Quetta Cop, Some Stats’

Almost Muzzafrabad -- Retreat -- The Mighty Mice of Murree,

Kashmir 2nd attempt -- Abbottabad -- Off to War -- Jungle Mangal

Chapter 12 - India -- A Sight for Sore Eyes

Chapter 13 - East Pakistan -- How to Manage a Mob

Chapter 14 - Burma -- Affluence in the Air?

Chapter 15 - Thailand -- Wild Williams

Chapter 16 - Laos -- Horse Trading -- Life Class -- Life Class, Lao Style --Up,Up

and Away

Chapter 17 - Saigon -- The Fast Fiddle

Chapter 18 - Japan 1964 -- Mrs L. and the Bath -- A Flight of Fancy --The Wrecker

It was the maps that did it: those vast expanses of blended browns; remote dots where life had settled; mountains like serpents’ spines; rivers looping crazily through jungle green; names spiced with eastern mystique - Isfahan, Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur, Luang Prabang - all begging to reveal their secrets.

Poring over the maps in the smoky fug of a British pub I was gradually captured by this world of waiting wonders and, inescapably, dreams became things of substance.

A destination was needed, a target, and almost half-a-century ago where better than Australia, many an Englishman’s anchor on the other side of the globe. Little did I realize that journey’s end would not be a camp by a billabong, but on a Japanese straw mat, or that a young oriental lady, snoozing under her futon ten thousand miles and two years away, was blissfully unaware that her future had just changed.

Today I cannot count all the incidents and adventures that turned my course from its intended destination and how many twists in the track led me to Japan. Here are a few of the more interesting ones that were met in a rough ride across yesterday’s world

Chapter 1

Europe 1963

Summer had been delayed, as usual, forcing people into their macs and plastic raincoats as they flocked onto a school playing field in Cheshire, northern England. They were there for the celebration of the Third Altrincham Boy Scout Group’s fiftieth anniversary, an event overlooked by the world’s media but which had built up to its own local crescendo. The historical happening was to lead up to a finale that sent bolts of fear and excitement through my innards.

In a corner of the field, attracting the curiosity of visitors was a ten-year-old Austin A35 van. Most doubted it would survive a rugged ten thousand mile journey; one skeptic even taking bets on its two passengers not making it as far as France.

As evening approached the little vehicle crawled slowly across the green field, away from the crowd, away from childhood, boyhood, youth and into... the world. Before reaching the opposite side lay a lot of places and a lot of luck.

After driving through hundreds of well-wishers there was one last, painful call before the long journey. It was to the home of my foster-parents who had wrapped their lives around me and now didn't know how to release me. It was the most difficult stage of the departure. My motives behind the venture were well beyond their comprehension. They had worked to gain a comfortable, secure home, why did I want to leave it?

When the van pulled away from the red brick house where I had been raised it left two old people looking dazed. Would they ever see their son again? Promises to write seemed so inadequate. A few neighbours offered them comfort, some looking on disapprovingly at such madcap adventurism. How could a boy hurt his parents so? But the burning inner excitement and the magnetic pull of the long road ahead were too strong for any change of heart.

On both sides of the van, in purple and gold paint, was proudly emblazoned ‘3rd Altrincham Rover Crew Australasian Expedition’. Quite a mouthful, and hardly enough space for it on the panel of the little van. In retrospect, ‘3rd Alt. Oz Trip’ would have sufficed.

The venture had attracted a flurry of interest in the local press and sponsors were many. Inside the van were spare tires donated by Dunlop; a huge medical kit and hundreds of water-purifying tablets provided by Boots the big drugstore chain (some of its medicinal contents would, today, land the traveler in an Asian prison); a spare battery and other electrics, compliments of Lucas; gear oil from Shell Oil Co.; countless cans of the sticky things Englishmen ate in those days from local stores; survival rations - packs of dehydrated foods - supplied by the Royal Air Force, and two man-sized mosquito net bags, supplied by our Mums.

Foolish lads that we were, numerous cartons of cigarettes, enough to fumigate a battalion for a year, were also packed inside, but not all for self-inhalation - a useful mode of currency and bribery we had been informed.

Shell had also provided us with a route itinerary, however, there were no highways lacing continents and there were no super-service gas stations. There were no travelers' lodges. There were plenty of little known tracks but, as the route itinerary revealed, all the way from Italy to Pakistan only about 2% of them were surfaced. Most went through territory unknown to western wheels. Since the military convoys of the Second World War very few people had traveled by vehicle out of West Europe. Most European cars weren’t built for long distance travel - soft springs, no air-conditioning, small fuel tanks. Tourism was practically unknown east of the Alps. Yugoslavia was a dark enigma; under the strong boot of Tito it wavered on the cold brink of the communist empire to the north and welcomed few visitors. Across the Bosphorous was largely wilderness. Towns in Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran were still dusty habitats where paved roads stopped as the last huts disappeared.

Distances and days were long and lonely; for two days on the Iran-Pakistan stretch of desert road only one other vehicle appeared- a truck. His dust cloud appeared on the horizon at about ten o’clock in the morning and we passed each other at lunchtime. We waved. His truck swerved slightly off the track as he ogled the van. No doubt, for the past two hours he’d been wondering about our dust cloud. But the 3rd Altrincham Rover Crew Australasian Expedition? Something he hadn’t expected.

Hours of pre-trip research had turned up scant information on Asian routes and the blueprinted itinerary supplied by Shell Oil Company, each slim page showing fifty-mile segments, became indispensable. Also useful was a book written by the l959 Oxford Cambridge Australasian Expedition - a caravan of Land Rovers driven from London to Bombay. It gave valuable information on where to stop and where not to stop, what to expect and what not to expect and, more importantly, the availability and cost of vital fluids in unfamiliar places - petrol, oil, water and beer - the lifebloods of such an exhibition.

Europe was a breeze, a holiday on wheels. We did the Black Forest; we did the Alps; we did lots of places seen in tourist brochures. In Baden-Baden came our first headache - nothing undeserved. At a local beer festival a whole football team of Bavarian lads adopted us and, until the early morning, we clicked steins, toasting everything there was to toast now that we were all pals together and didn’t share enough language to ask what our Dads were doing twenty years back.

Then it was over the crown of Europe with the van purring as if it had just left the assembly line, and down into the eastern buttocks of Italy.

Chapter 2

Tito’s Land

Evening dusk was enveloping the woods when our first sniff of adventure arrived. Somewhere ahead lay the Yugoslavian border but the empty, blackening road showed no signs of any frontier. While wondering if a wrong turn had been made, from out of the gloom stepped bearded ruffians with real rifles slung on their shoulders and red stars in their caps. Bandits? So soon? Our alarm was unwarranted, they were Slavic border guards. ‘All papers in order, thank you for the cigarettes,’ and we continued heading east.

Where the road split at the major town of Rijeka a lively discussion broke out. Ed, the pragmatist, wanted to take the safe, spring-saving route to Belgrade, according to our information a well-paved road. Me, the reckless idiot, wanted the wild ride along the undeveloped coastline where ran a hairline of a track, dotted in places on the map where conditions were uncertain. Like gentlemen, we tossed a coin for a decision. The idiot won.

So it was toward the Mediterranean coast I triumphantly turned the wheel. The hairline on the map soon appeared as a beaten earth road and where the dotted lines started so did the rough track - chewed up earth and rocks crunching frighteningly against the differential casing, earning the driver sour looks. Luckily, it hadn’t rained for a while or our journey might have ended right there. The mud would have been two feet deep.

The rewards, however, made it well worthwhile. The scenery brought gasps of wonder: spectacular cliffs cascading down hundreds of feet to a lime green sea effervescing in rocky gullies. Hidden fishing coves sent out fingers of rock into the sea from where small boys dived for shellfish, their bodies bright as goldfish five meters below the surface.

For three hundreds miles the only other form of transport sharing our route was the donkey, often pulling a cart loaded with hay as wide as the track, and in the hay the sun-raisin faces of Slavik peasants.

People in the villages at first looked at us in amazement but turned quickly away when we stopped, lest the wonder and yearning in their eyes betray non-conformist feelings to their comrades.

With the incredible, ancient beauty of the Roman port and fort of Dubrovnik behind us we regretfully left the coastline to the only road that would lift us up over the mountains and around that unappealing wart on the western flank of the Balkan peninsula - Hoxha’s Albania.

The Refugees

The road up into the hills of Montenegro and all the way around to Macedonia was another foreboding dotted line on the map, unpaved, as had been the whole stretch of coast road from the Italian border. As we progressed further into the mountains the road became the worst encountered so far - sand, rocks and the deep ruts from centuries of cartwheels.

Pastoral life continued by the track, the usual small boys yelling at us with outstretched hands holding water melons; peasants looking up from the fields, some waving cheerfully, some staring blank-eyed, expressionless, many of them wearing colourful national costumes topped by bright fezzes. The first hundred kilometers from the coastline took five hours, in which a thick layer of yellow dust gathered everywhere.

The Muslim influence became stronger as we progressed and at Pec the first minarets speared the horizon.

It was a labourious drive over the mountains, a slow crawl to prevent overheating the old engine. As we climbed the track became a rock shelf, hung onto the side of a steep valley and narrowing alarmingly. There was space for only one vehicle and we wondered what would happen if a truck or bus came from the opposite direction.

It’ll be a disaster if anything comes the other way, said Ed.

He didn’t realize how prophetic was his remark.

The first cart met us just after noon. Luckily, at that point on the track we were able to pull over slightly and the cart squeaked by, loaded with rough furniture, brown blankets tied over everything. There were two little girls on the pile, their mouths hung down and their eyes were listless, not the dancing eyes of other Bosnian children, showing none of the usual pert excitement at seeing two strange foreigners. Perhaps they’d recently been scolded, we concluded.

The two adults - a woman with a red cloth bandanna around her head and a man with only a black waistcoat above pajama trousers - looked numbly ahead. After the cart had rumbled past the man turned and, almost as an afterthought, shouted something and waved back up the road. He seemed angry.

Gypsies, probably, said Ed.

Or anti-capitalists, I added.

Half a mile further up the road another cart confronted us as we rounded a bend. The road was getting narrower, the van almost scraping the cliff face on corners. As Bosnian mules weren’t fitted with a reverse gear we had to perform a dangerous maneuver down the slope until reaching a wider spot. Behind the two animals pulling this cart were three old women in black, craggy faces poking from their shawls like ancient lizards. One of them was holding a baby. An equally ancient man drove the mules. He looked exhausted.

No one spoke while they passed.

Gypsies? I wondered aloud.

He shucked his head in response, Strange family. Bit old for childbearing.

It was indeed an odd group. They too had their cart loaded high with peasant furniture. A goat tethered behind the cart nodded along wisely.

The van rounded another sharp curve - ahead the road swept along the cliff side and up the valley. Where it disappeared two more carts were emerging from around a bend. Ed groaned but managed to get to a point where the road widened slightly and waited for these two carts to pass.

It’ll take us a week to get to Greece at this rate, he sighed.

The two carts laboured closer and as they did another cart appeared round the far bend. They were all loaded with household goods; baskets of chickens and one had an ancient bicycle tied on top.

I think we’ve stumbled across one of the lost Gypsy tribes of Central Europe, I suggested.

Ed shook his head. They don’t look like Gypsies, Gypsies have caravans. They look more like refugees. As he spoke another cart nudged around the far bend, closely followed by another. The procession looked endless. A migration? A local war? The peasants were as silent as their mules, tromping heavily along as