by Rory Maclean
‘I guess it was all part of the experience.’
‘A dollar bought 12.50 rupees in 1970,’ he adds, eager to share again his archaic knowledge.
As he talks, the day’s heat gathers around us, coiling between the chairs and tables, thickening and condensing before our eyes. Shadows of sea birds sweep across the bamboo sunscreen, as does a black spider the size of a walnut. Backgammon tiles begin to click at other tables. Teaspoons clink on china cups beneath toadstool umbrellas. Loud Germans drop by for a late frühstück, complain about stale brötchen and coffee that’s nicht gut. English tranceheads in ripped loincloths fall into the sea. Crowther snaps a flame to his cigarette. ‘I only started smoking when the dope ran out. Possession got you ten years in Turkey.’ Then he details the ride-by-ride bus fares from Istanbul to India. Total 1971 cost: $15 to cross Asia.
His recall does impress me. His interest in my questions eases my anger. He suggests that I read Pope’s Persian Architecture and Naipaul on India (who wrote off the hippies’ fascination with Hinduism as a ‘sentimental wallow’). He speaks of the world as if it truly were a village; dawn in Sri Lanka, house prices in Bali, sundowners in Marin County book shops.
Around noon, when I buy him his sixth drink, Crowther says, ‘Siggy’s served the coldest beers in Iran.’
‘Siggy’s was in Kabul.’
‘Don’t fucking tell me about Siggy,’ he spits back. ‘I knew him, knew his place; not you.’
I let it drop, but he goes on, ‘There were bottlenecks on the trail, places everybody turned up and hung out: the Pudding Shop, the Amir Kabir, Siggy’s place. Siggy’s was in an alleyway behind the White Palace so I’m not about to forget it.’ The White Palace was in Tehran. ‘We’d hang out with Siggy, then crash at the Yogi Lodge.’ The Yogi had been in Varanasi.
When he starts to slur his words, I leave him at the bar. His lucidity has darkened for the day. Along the beach are fishermen, volleyball players, tourists smoking, sunbathing and scolding their children. Underfoot the sand is oil-stained and litter washes into the coves. I find a quiet beach-house café, order grilled fish and write up my notes.
Later, at the house, Alice tells me he hasn’t come home yet. She invites me to share a plate of maize meal and greens with her and Joanne. We are asleep when he comes in.
On the second morning, he’s back at the Guru, a stack of cloth-bound foolscap notebooks alongside his crosswords. I buy him two beers and he talks me through the pages. Here are the room rates of Kandahar’s first freak hotel. On the next pages are the departure times of every bus from Jalalabad to Peshawar, with chai and chillum breaks noted, and a precise plan of Amritsar. Crowther walked every street for every map in his early guides. In the margin he had written in copperplate handwriting, ‘Golden Temple dorm free but treat hospitality with respect as many bad scenes with Westerners smoking.’
I ask him if he has a copy of the original BIT Overland to India guide. He says that he’s lost it.
‘At the end of each trip, I typed up my notes at the commune in the company of pythons and kookaburras. Then I’d head down to Melbourne with the pages. Andy Neilson, LP’s first employee and as mad as a snake, sat with her baby and a glass of strawberry Nesquik pasting up the layout. Maureen proofread while breastfeeding Tashi. As soon as one book was put to bed, Tony and I would take off again, visiting the countries we wanted to see, writing books for real travellers.’
Crowther researched and wrote many Travel Survival Kits during Lonely Planet’s first eighteen years, educating readers without patronizing them.
‘But every time we returned to Melbourne we’d find a new employee, then two more, then a staff canteen. Those desk jockeys started to judge us, and our sanity, by the thickness of our socks. The thicker the socks, the longer we’d been on the road. After five years’ travel, most of us went feral.’
Crowther lifts the bottle to his lips, drains it, heaves it toward the sea. ‘Something got lost,’ he says, his body tense, his eyes closed. ‘Something essential. Doing the third edition of the Thailand guide I started feeling… trapped. My last job, I was asked to write a “Highlights” section for “mature adventurers”.’
The millions Crowther made by trailblazing the globe were pissed away on alcohol, alimony and a three-bed suburban unit near Surfer’s Paradise. He, Alice and Joanne arrived penniless in Goa six months ago.
A girl brings him a couple of boiled eggs, which he rolls in his hands to cool. As he eats, I look at the typescript of his first Nepal guide, the letters typed with such manifest urgency that the ‘o’s punched little holes through the tissue-thin foolscap. His photograph in the front of Africa on a Shoestring shows a bright-eyed, curious twenty-seven-year-old with a wild beard reaching down to his chest.
‘Tony loaned me his first computer – a Kaypros – in 1984,’ he remembers, calm once more. ‘Then we moved over to DOS and Windows 3.1, Windows 95…’
I hope that the food will extend our conversation, but he soon begins repeating himself.
‘… No laptops back then. No photocopiers in Africa. In the sixties you had to believe in a better world. Now, who’s got the time? Man, the Karakoram Highway was beautiful.’
I leave him with his crossword and walk beyond Dando Vaddo for a swim.
On the third morning, Crowther isn’t at the Guru. Alice tells me he didn’t come home that night. On the fourth morning, he is back at his corner table, offering no explanation for his absence.
‘China’s the future,’ he says, before I’ve even sat down. ‘Those billions of golden boys and girls with spending power are about to hit the beach. They won’t defer to other cultures. They don’t want to be transformed. They want adventures without risk. Forty years ago, we put on kaftans and headed east,’ he says. ‘Now the East is coming back at us dressed in DKNY.’
Over the next week, we meet at the beach bar every morning, talking until noon when he becomes abusive, insensible or comatose. Often he falls silent and gazes at his newspaper for twenty or thirty minutes. One day he says nothing at all. For my part, I try not to develop too much of a taste for a morning beer.
‘At the start of every trip I used to get a mental picture of the end,’ Crowther says on our final morning together. ‘I always knew things would be OK if I could imagine myself arriving at my destination. That last flight from Brisbane with Alice, it didn’t happen. At first, I thought it was just my bloody mind. Then half an hour out of Bombay the lights went dim. Captain came on saying we had hydraulics problems. He couldn’t lower the undercarriage. We ditched fuel over the sea. The stewardesses strapped themselves in. The whole of the airfield was a mass of flashing blue and red lights. I thought, “This is my crash landing. This is the end.”’ Crowther looks out at the waves. ‘I settled down,’ he says, almost as an afterthought. ‘I let go of what I loved.’
Later that week I take a small house a few miles up the coast and start to organize my thoughts. As Goa’s autumn storms gather out at sea, their broad sweeps of lightning silhouetting the palms, I rebuild the overland journey in my head. I see Kerouac and Ginsberg listening to the Beatles. I hear John Butt singing Dylan again. I watch eighteen-year-old London girls raise their thumbs to hitch alone across Anatolia. I think of Rudy’s sense of belonging to the world and Laleh’s fear of belonging nowhere. I remember again Hesse’s ‘home and youth of the soul’ and Chatwin’s assertion that the hippies wrecked Afghanistan. I imagine Ahmed strapping a dynamite girdle around his waist. I hold Penny as she kisses me goodbye in Kathmandu.
In the silence of this room, I begin to rework experience, looking at the shadows of the unseen, trying to find an order in the pattern. I’m not filled with melancholia, pining for a distant time or place which has been lost. I’m feeling my way over new ground, gazing inside myself as much as at geography, wandering and wondering away from certainty toward something open and flowing, toward a new destination.
‘The trail across Asia is narrow and there’s only one road, one way to go,
’ wrote Douglas Brown in the conclusion to his 1971 guidebook. ‘When it broadens out in India, and you see the hundreds of cities marked in a very small area of the map, you will have at last the chance to go wherever you want, and find a place to rest and get into a way of life that will satisfy you. The one path has become many.’
Those paths spin out from this room like the threads of a vast spider’s web. In a thousand departure lounges a fresh generation of Intrepids stands on the brink of the world. Icelandic trekkers in flip-flops eye Gulf Air stewardesses in blue pencil skirts and high heels. Mumbai boys in transit chat up Filipino salesgirls at duty-free shops. A continent away, Argentinian kids board double-decker sleeper buses to cross the Andes and reach Pacific beaches. Uruguayan architecture students drive VW Campers on year-long study tours from Europe to India. In Tanzania, fledgling pilots buzz dirt runways to clear away giraffes, then try to avoid their aircraft being trampled by wildebeest. Malaysian teens fly to Hong Kong for shopping weekends. American undergrads jet into the Sorbonne for travel writing workshops. Gap-year Scots learn to enter Mongolian yurts by shouting ‘Nokhoi khor!’ – ‘Hold the dog!’ Egyptian newlyweds sleep under the stars in the Namibian desert. From the stark horizons of the Arctic tundra to the tourist deck of a Caribbean mail-boat, the new voyagers stand to greet the sunrise, Youssou N’Dour singing ‘Mr Everywhere’ in their ears.
Like them, I am a foreigner, an open-hearted, sole traveller, spiralling out from where I was born, curious for the world and taking nothing for granted: not belonging, not possessing, at home in my skin and reinventing myself at every border. Moving on. That’s our legacy from the sixties. Not simply ‘this now life… this here life’. Not just the raw experience of being. But living both in the moment and in the mind, striving to understand – and to express – how it feels to be alive.
The momentum of the sea marks off the days. Autumn makes way for winter. A bird nests under the eaves. The party people move on to Yangshuo, Saigon and Cairns. I stay behind in this packaged paradise, watching jet streams crisscross the azure sky. Then, eight months to the day after that hopeful morning in Istanbul, I pick up my pen and write, ‘My wonder at that first step moves me still, that stride into the unknown, that grasping for stars…’
Acknowledgements
Many people climbed on to the Magic Bus to help it on its way. In London, Colin Thubron was first aboard with early enthusiasm and gentle friendship. Philip Marsden and Bruce Palling opened the bus’s rear doors. Jonathon Green stepped on, bringing his original interviews from Days in the Life and All Dressed Up in a tie-dyed shoulder bag. Hetty MacLise was enormously helpful with research and all errors and inaccuracies are due to my enthusiasm for her remarkable stories. Judy Astley, Ondine Barrow, Simon Calder, David Chater, Marlie and Michael Ferenczi, Christine Gettins, Gwyneth Henderson, David Jenkins, Sue Lascelles, Richard Ingrams, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Jessie Marshall, Towyn Mason, Desmond O’ Flattery, Mary Price, Hawa Rawat and JoAnne Robertson took their seats alongside Christine Walker of the Sunday Times and Toby Latta and Josh Mandel of Control Risks Group. Joanna Prior and Barry Blackmore sat in the back, rocking to the greatest playlist of all time. On the pavement outside, Verona Bass packed us off with her 1967 diaries and banana-loaf lunches.
In New York, the Magic Bus paused to collect Joy Press and Hervay Petion from Village Voice. In Massachusetts, Danny Karlin led the way to Kerouac’s grave and bridged the Beats and the sixties. In Paris, George and Sylvia Whitman put us up between the stacks at Shakespeare and Company. In Amsterdam, Clive and Rebecca Tanquery reopened the Magic Inn, while in Berlin Dr Willi Steul helped to unpick the social fabric of Pashtun society.
In Turkey, I will never forget the kindness of the remarkable Freely family: John, Delores, Brendon and Maureen (who let me quote from her Cornucopia article on Carla Grissmann). Great thanks to them, to Jeremy Seal, Fatih Hatay, Pat Yale and to Nurdogan Sengüler of Les Arts Turcs.
Caution prevents me from naming the many generous Iranians who welcomed me both into their hearts and their extraordinary country. In Afghanistan, I openly acknowledge the assistance of my fellow Intrepids Paul Clammer, Jason Elliot, Christina Lamb, Rory Stewart, Sanjar Qiam and Tahir Shah. In Kabul, John West gave me a place to sleep. Former Indian Army Major Sunil Shetty, SM, ensured I didn’t get shot. Author and journalist Ahmed Rashid explained why no one would bother to waste the bullet.
In Pakistan, Meriel Beattie and Usman Homaira sped the Magic Bus further along the trail, as did Caro Coltman and Peter Berkeley, Norman Flach and Lory Thiessen, Fayyaz Ali Khan, Jonaid Shah of GTZ Peshawar, Neelofer Khan and Tariq Qurashi of the Canadian International Development Agency. Makhdoom Shahabuddin, gentleman and Pir, also treated me with great kindness.
Rosie Goldsmith helped me motor into India. Many thanks, as always, to her, to William Dalrymple and to Jayanta Roy Chowdhury, who guided me from Naxal to nirvana by way of Nehru. In Nepal, I am grateful to Daniel Lak and Manjushree Thapa, as well as to Ruth and Mark Segal for the great family breakfasts.
At Lonely Planet’s offices in Melbourne and London, Tony and Maureen Wheeler could not have been more helpful, as were Simon Westcott, Jennifer Cox and Andy Neilson. Along with Bill Dalton of Moon Publications, Philippe Gloaguen of Guides du routard, Stefan and Renate Loose of Stefan Loose Verlag and Mark Ellingham of Rough Guides, they changed the way we travel the world. I am grateful to drivers and enthusiasts Jonathan Benyon, Graham Bourne, Kevin Buckley, David ‘Blossom’ Johnson, Geoff Hann, Jim D. Holden, Geoffrey Morant, Brian Page, John Shearman and Chris Weeks.
Finally, with the Magic Bus now safely parked in my Dorset garage (alongside a Trabant, a Canadian birch-bark canoe and a light, white Cretan flying-machine), I wish to acknowledge the guidance and navigational skills of my agent, Peter Straus, my editor, Mary Mount and – most of all – my wife, Katrin. As they say, I get by with a little help from my friends.
www.rorymaclean.com
Text Credits
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce lyrics and verse:
Lyrics
‘Light My Fire’, Words and Music by The Doors. Copyright © 1967 Doors Music Co. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
‘Brain Damage’, Words and Music by Roger Waters. © 1972 Roger Waters Overseas Limited. All rights administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8 BS. Reproduced by permission.
‘Aquarius’, Words by James Rado and Jerome Ragni. Music by Galt MacDermot. © 1967 Channel-H-Prod Inc., United Artists Music Co. Inc. and EMI United Partnership Ltd, USA. Worldwide print rights controlled by Alfred Publishing Co. Inc., USA. Administered in Europe by Faber Music Ltd. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
‘Sesame Street Theme’, Words and Music by Joe Raposo, Bruce Hart and Jon Stone. © 1970, Sesame Street Inc./EMI April Music Inc., USA. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H OQY.
‘Trust Yourself’, Words and Music by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1985 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission.
“The Times They are a-Changin”, Words and Music by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission.
‘Gates of Eden’, Words and Music by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission.
‘Dear Prudence’, Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © Copyright 1968 Northern Songs. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Verse
‘In Goya’s Greatest Scenes…(#1)’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
�
��America’ and ‘Howl’ from Selected Poems 1947–95 by Allen Ginsberg (London, 1997), reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
‘Our Beautiful West Coast Thing’ by Richard Brautigan, from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good at the earliest opportunity any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention.
Select Bibliography
Books
Brown, Douglas: Overland to India (Toronto, New Press, 1971)
Byron, Robert: The Road to Oxiana (London, Penguin, 1992)
Chatwin, Bruce: What am I Doing Here? (London, Picador, 1990)
Crowther, Geoff and others: Overland to India (London, BIT, 1970 and Crisis-BIT Trust, 1975)
Dupree, Nancy Hatch: An Historical Guide to Kabul (Kabul, Afghan Tourist Organization, 1965)
Ginsberg, Allen: Indian Journals (New York, Grove Press, 1996)
Gloaguen, Philippe: Guide du routard (Paris, Hachette, various dates)
Gray, Michael and Bauldie, John (eds.), All Across the Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987)
Green, Jonathon: All Dressed Up (London, Pimlico, 1999)
Grissmann, Carla: Dinner of Herbs (London, Arcadia Books, 2001)
Hesse, Hermann: The Journey to the East (London, Grafton, 1972) and Siddhartha (London, Picador, 1973)
Holmes, John Clellon: Go (New York, Charles Scribner, 1952)
James, Bill: Top Deck Daze (Avalon, NSW, Halbooks, 1999)
Karlin, Danny: Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan: At Kerouac’s Grave and Beyond (unpublished paper given at Shakespeare & Co. Literary Festival, Paris, 2003)