” A Ripple passin by.” by Adrian Lipscomb
Readers may be interested to read my account of my journey on the Hippie Trail in 1972 (as described in my autobiography entitled “A Ripple Passing By”) … THE HIPPIE TRAIL
It was March 1972, and I had just spent six months on Kibbutz Misgav am, in northern Israel (right on the border with Lebanon). But the lure of the open road became just too strong and I decided to move on — so I caught a flight from Lod Airport near Jerusalem (later renamed Ben Gurion Airport) bound for Istanbul. Two months later the Japanese Red Army terrorist group attacked the airport terminal with grenades and machine-guns, killing 26 and wounding 78.
Nevertheless I arrived safely at Istanbul airport after a short flight.
Several months earlier a young American back-packer named Billy Hayes had tried to depart from that same airport (I was to learn years later). The Turkish police searched him and discovered two kilos of hashish strapped to his body; the subsequent events served as the basis for the 1978 movie “Midnight Express”, produced by David Puttnam. Turkish gaols had a bad reputation even then, and poor old Billy suffered terribly before his escape.
In the 1970s Istanbul was a honey-pot for Western travellers in search of adventure or excitement. It was full of history and cultural ambiguity situated as it was midway between the occident and the orient. Like Billy, I stayed at the cheap Gungor Hotel – indeed the hotel was full of middle-class Western kids, all out to see the world and have a good time.
Nearby were the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, and next door was the Pudding Shop which, even then, had a reputation of mythic proportions for travellers embarking upon, or returning from, the “Hippie Trail”. It was constantly crowded with long-haired hippies sporting beards, beads and floral shirts, eating, drinking and smoking. One could hear a multitude of languages through the din: English, German, French, Danish, Italian. In one corner a black-market deal would be in progress, and in another two long-haired Americans would be engrossed in an animated game of chess. Puddings and tarts were the café’s speciality, but I was especially enamoured of a delicious drink they offered of puréed strawberries. It was smooth as silk.
A large notice board in the café bore messages from travellers seeking lifts or trying to track down lost friends: “LIFT WANTED TO AMSTERDAM – willing to pay. Leave message with Ahmed” or “CHUCK AND MARY – if you see this notice we are staying in the Gungor, Greg & Sue.” In the middle of the notice board was a large printed warning: “IF YOU ARE CAUGHT WITH ONE SMOKE OF HASH YOU GET 7 YEARS”. Billy Hayes should have been warned.
Black-marketeers lurked in the streets and alleyways around the Gungor, and surreptitiously approached young Western travellers with offers to exchange foreign currencies at far better rates than could be achieved in the banks, or to buy unused travellers’ cheques (which could then be claimed as stolen), or even to buy their passports (which would then be passed on to forgery rings). Many young travellers succumbed to these temptations, and more often than not they were ripped off. Fortunately I was a little more cautious. But temptation abounded.
I visited an old Turkish bath-house which Lord Byron had reputedly frequented – all marble columns and steamy antiquity. As I rubbed my finger down an ancient wall I could sense the muses resident in the ancient sweaty patina. A nuggetty little Turk in a loin-cloth scrubbed me down with a loofah and proceeded to break my back with one of the most excruciating massages I have ever had – he even walked very pointedly up and down my spine. I slept for an hour afterwards in my own little private chamber, and floated for the rest of the day. An American girl I met visited a female bath-house at the same time, and (she told me later) she had to object strenuously to prevent the women attendants from shaving off her pubic hair – which apparently was customary for Turkish women.
Next day I caught the train and started on my easterly journey.
My objective now was to head to Asia as fast as possible. Europe was far too expensive, and my funds were limited. On the railway platform, for the first time in my life, I was spat upon as an infidel – not a pleasant experience. I gritted my teeth and moved on.
Once aboard the train I linked up with a group of young travellers, two English and three French, who were also headed east. This group bore all the hallmarks of exactly what they were: 1970s hippies. Long matted hair tied back with bandanas, paisley shirts, flared jeans, sandals, beads, and carrying large H-frame packs. Two were very pretty French girls who spoke quite good English, and were most amused at my poor attempts at French. Their names were Christelle and Isabelle. The third Frenchman was a gaunt young fellow named Marcel; he wore thick spectacles, spoke very little (in either French or English), and was constantly immersed in a French paperback copy of Das Kapital. The two Englishmen, Neil and Patrick, were both from Liverpool and had been travelling in some pretty remote places in North Africa and Greece for over a year, but (curiously) had never actually been to London.
We all had similar objectives, and so we shared our collective intelligence of the route ahead (bear in mind, dear reader, that this was over a decade before travel guides such as Lonely Planet became available). The six of us spread ourselves out over two compartments in the train to share the facilities with the local travellers, much to the disgust of some large black-clad Turkish women who wanted to exclude these infidel hippies from their presence. They complained to the conductor who checked our tickets and politely declined to get involved. The women glared at us for several hours across the compartment until they disembarked at Ankara.
My hippie acquaintances were, however, good and cheerful company, and we were to travel all the way to Pakistan together.
The train took us to Ankara, and then across the Anatolian Plains, and on to Erzerum, the scene of great horrors during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The countryside was flat and desolate, but with mountains constantly skirting the far northern horizon. One particular peak stood out, and a friendly Turk I met in the corridor of the train smiled and conveyed in broken English that it was Ararat, where Noah had supposedly landed his ark in biblical antiquity.
Erzerum was the largest town in eastern Turkey, and was refreshingly devoid of high-rise buildings and modernity. In winter it became a snowy tourist Mecca for many Turks, but in summer it was just a drab and dismal settlement. Most houses were built of stone or mud, although a few ugly concrete structures were starting to appear here and there. We scouted around and found that there was a cross-border coach leaving soon. We booked seats, crossed uneventfully into Iran that afternoon, and spent an uncomfortably cramped night travelling on to the capital.
We arrived at Teheran early in the morning, and soon learned that the connecting bus departed in a few hours for our next destination: Mashhad, in the north-east of the country. So my friends and I wandered off for a quick “recce” of the city while we waited.
Iran was, of course, far from an egalitarian society. The Shah was very keen on western technology, but on his own strictly autocratic terms. And that meant that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. There was a semblance of deference to western values – people wore jeans and pants suits, and most women foresook the hijab; even mini-skirts could be seen occasionally on Teheran’s streets. But all was not as it seemed. America wanted Iran’s oil – so it was happy to applaud the superficialities of change and leave the Shah in charge so long as it continued to have access to the oilfields. Nevertheless a die-hard reactionism seethed beneath the surface. Six years later a revolution would depose the Shah and bring the Ayatolla Khomeini to power in Teheran with a grossly repressive Islamic theocratic constitution – and a burning hatred of America.
But in the early 1970s Iran was ostensibly taking tentative steps towards “modernisation”, and had adopted some very strict laws regarding such things as sex and drugs. So I was quite surprised to come across a couple of rough-looking guys in a city park openly smoking ganja. They smiled and beckoned me to join them – but I politely declined – I didn’t savour the prospect of a long sentence in an Iranian gaol.
My hippie friends and I travelled on by bus, and spent two days in Mashhad – best known for its magnificent Gosharshad Mosque, the focus of pilgrimages for hundreds of thousands of Shi-ites annually. The town was also famous for the intricate Persian carpets that were woven there. I visited one workshop where little boys as young as eight or nine delicately repaired antique carpets (and in the process ruined their eyes!).
Sixty kilometres west of Mashhad was Nishapur and the tomb of Omar Khayyám. My great grandfather, William Simpson, had visited there in 1884 and had souvenired a rose-hip from the tomb. He took it back to England, cultivated it, and planted it on the grave of Khayyám’s English translator, Edward Fitzgerald, in Boulge, Suffolk. The Omar Khayyám rose, a pale pink damask, spread from there and later became popular in Victorian gardens. It can still be obtained in nurseries specialising in old-fashioned roses – and I currently have one growing in my own garden, as I write this. These historical connections were exquisitely interesting.
A further day’s bus trip to the east, through rugged mountains, took us over the border into Afghanistan, and I spent a night on a stretcher-bed at a lonely little hotel beside the border post. It was a desolate spot with few other signs of human habitation. The friendly border guards grinned and offered some unexpected gifts in extended hands as the bus took off again – small farewell offerings of hashish! Yes, Afghanistan was a very different culture.
Then on to the ancient town of Herat, with its towering fifteenth-century mud-brick citadel and streets echoing to the clip-clop of horse-drawn tongas. We travellers rented a palatial villa to rest up for a couple of days, and the friendly Afghani owner proudly showed me his collection of American hard-core porn magazines that night. I marvelled politely at the athleticism depicted.
Four more hours by bus through a featureless landscape brought us to the drab town of Kandahar, in the south of Afghanistan, where obliging blacksmiths could copy any weapon you desired – AK47s, M16s or Lee Enfields. The Taliban was to find the metal-working skills of these artisans most useful thirty five years later as they engaged the US-led occupation in a weary war of attrition and sabotage.
And then to Kabul, high in the Hindu Kush – nestling in the gentle lap of snow-capped peaks and barren wastelands. As with all Afghani settlements, this was a drab place, where hashish was as common as tobacco, where hippies shot up on the roof tops and meditated in the corners of chai shops, and where the Russians competed with the Americans to see who could provide more foreign aid. The Americans had built the airport and the Russians the main roads, and both jockeyed for favour with King Zahir Shah.
The population of Kabul comprised mainly two ethnic groups known as Tajiks and Pashtuns. Men usually wore turbans or pakols (flat caps) on their heads, and sported flowing beards; women were sometimes clad in burqas or chadors, but a surprising number (given the Muslim traditions) wore no head coverings at all.
The centre of Kabul was a market-place teeming with stalls and shops overflowing onto the narrow footpaths. Its wide streets held few cars, but burqa-clad women and turbaned men (often carrying rifles) mingled with laden donkeys and camels. We were met at the bus terminal by a host of hawkers and touts, mostly young boys, one of whom obligingly led my group of travellers to a very basic adobe hotel named incongruously The Holiday Inn. Its flat roof was littered with spent needles from a decade of itinerant Western druggies, but its rooms were cheap and basic. Nearby was Chicken Street, the hippie centre of activity in Kabul, where a profusion of chai shops, cafes and handicrafts could be found. Western travellers from a multitude of countries frequented Chicken Street. They were heading in both directions on the Hippie Trail, east and west, and one could trade stories of the road ahead over tea and a joint in the numerous chai shops.
On the outskirts of the city was the zoo, which I visited with my English companions, Neil and Patrick. It housed an uninspiring little menagerie, the highlight of which was a moth-eaten lion stretching lazily in his pit. I fear zoos did not feature very highly in Afghan government budget priorities.