When television presenter Kirstie Allsopp allowed her 15-year-old son Oscar to go Interrailing with a friend last summer, it sparked a heated debate. Did her decision constitute a ‘child protection concern’ as the social worker who contacted her contended? Or was Allsopp rejecting the ‘risk averse’ culture that she believes is damaging Britain’s young people?
It got me thinking about my own solo travels in 1970 when I was just months older than Oscar. In a pre-internet age, I was unaware that my plan to travel overland to India would take me through some of the wildest and most lawless places on earth.
Post travels: a now worldly-wise Alan, 17
The route was sketched out with my friend Rod over a pint of Guinness at a Worthing pub named the Thieves’ Kitchen. My parents didn’t object, but they clearly thought we’d be home in a few days.
Rod and I set off in November, taking a ferry to Holland before hitchhiking into Germany. I had £120, the clothes on my back, some paperbacks (Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train) and a sleeping bag.
Delhi… the city of ‘life-changing’ mango lassis and vegetable thalis
Those first few days were freezing. We spent nights sleeping under autobahn bridges as we sought our next ride, waking up with bed rolls frozen solid. Sometimes movement was the only way to ward off the cold and we’d finish a half-empty bottle of wine then walk ten miles to get the blood flowing. One night we watched a lorry crash on the icy road, its wheel bouncing past us. Rod gave up after four days, leaving me in Belgrade, then still behind the Iron Curtain. It was the loneliest moment of my life, like being lost on the moon.
Pressing on alone, I got to Thessaloniki in Greece before catching a train to Istanbul. With all the unfamiliar smells of spices and incense and the intense heat, I had my first taste of the East. I washed up in a hotel called the Gulhane, which was cheap, although mostly frequented by Italian junkies. I wandered around the Grand Bazaar, saw the Blue Mosque and visited the legendary Pudding Shop – a popular restaurant that was something of a bulletin board for travellers looking to message, meet and head east in the days before online. It had recently hosted a couple of ambitious hippie types, named Blair and Clinton.
In Kathmandu, Alan endured a monsoon – and dysentery
After a few days I mustered the courage to take a train through Turkey, including a trip on a storm-tossed Lake Van. Crossing the Iranian border, I headed towards Tehran with the Elburz Mountains providing a lovely and unexpectedly alpine backdrop. The city, with its American cars and modern buildings, surprised me after the Oriental atmosphere of Istanbul. It was all very modern as the Shah was yet to be deposed.
I was travelling with no maps and, of course, no mobile phone. Nobody in the world had any idea where I was. In Herat, in Afghanistan, it was as if I’d entered a time machine and travelled back centuries.
There didn’t seem to be any cars. Dramatically attired horsemen with bullet belts appeared on the horizon. My room, in the only guesthouse, contained a dirty hammock and a hole in the floor that turned out to be the toilet. It was certainly en suite.
Lahore? more like Lahot thanks to a heatwave
On a bus in Afghanistan I had my first brush with danger. Two bandits with guns boarded. They rifled through people’s pockets, looking for money (I had a small money belt under my shirt and about £50 stuffed in it). One sat behind me, poking his rifle at me. There I was, a 16-year-old who looked about 12, bumping down the Herat-to-Kandahar Road, a musket resting menacingly between my thighs. I sat still, praying the flimsy wooden flintlock that looked like it might go off at the slightest jolt didn’t finish my chances of fatherhood there and then.
Then, as suddenly as they’d arrived, they were gone, melting into the dunes.
I went for days without speaking to anyone. Crossing the Khyber Pass on an empty bus riddled with bullet holes, more than once the back wheels skidded over a precipice. I booked into a guesthouse in Lahore, but didn’t get much further because a heatwave hit and the thermometer reached 136 degrees Fahrenheit. I lay on the bed soaked in sweat, looking at the fan.
Annapurna, where the mountains wowed and leeches sucked
On the ‘down junction’ train to India it felt like I was in a Rudyard Kipling story.
In Delhi, I gravitated to Connaught Circus and discovered mango lassis and vegetable thalis, life-changing as a non-meat-eater – this was in the wake of the late 60s, after all.
Somehow I navigated the complexities of buying a railway ticket and found myself a little space in the luggage rack for the journey to Benares (now Varanasi). Once in a while the train arrived at a station where hundreds of people camped out. The shout of ‘chai!’ went up and I’d buy a little cup of milky tea before retreating to my cubbyhole in the roof of the carriage.
I was overwhelmed by the kindness of Indian people who, despite living in a country struck by famine, would offer me a bowl of dhal. They wanted to hear about life in London and whether it was raining ‘cats and mice’.
Kathmandu in Nepal was like something out of Tolkien. I visited the Eden Hashish Centre, which sold different strengths of the smoke from various altitudes, like a fine wine shop. The monsoon arrived and streets became rivers, which was how my stomach felt with my first bout of dysentery.
From there I travelled to Annapurna and breathtaking views of Everest. One morning a line of Buddhist monks drifted by in the mist as if in a dream. Less pleasant were the leeches that attached themselves to my arms and had to be burned off. At night I slept in a hut with a fire in the middle. In the morning I’d wash in an icy-cold stream flowing from the Himalayas. I’d been gone seven months and the UK already seemed strangely distant.
Varanasi – city of kindness and lots of dhal
In Delhi, I cabled my father asking for £50 to get home and began the long trek back. Under seven stone and suffering from the first case of typhoid on the South Coast for 15 years, I was sure my parents would be shocked. But Dad said, ‘Oh, where have you been?’ as if I’d returned from the pub.
Yet I was completely changed. Somewhere along the Great Trunk Road from Kabul, I’d left my childhood behind. Years later, when dealing with superstars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, the Spice Girls and Prince in my career as a manager, I’d cast my mind back to my Indian adventure. Buses full of bullet holes. Being held up at gunpoint. Begging for a banana. A bad review of an album wasn’t the end of the world by comparison.
Kids these days are nervous of travel, but they don’t know what they’re missing.
My advice? Get yourselves down to the Thieves’ Kitchen in Worthing (yes, it’s still there), order a pint of the black stuff and start planning a great adventure.
Alan will be talking about his memoir I Was There on 6 and 7 February in London and Brighton; more details at myticket.co.uk
