Magic Bus (19 page)

‘When the moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets…'

In the box, the vet finds two volumes of poetry by Richard Brautigan – that joyous and skewed American original – and, sitting Buddha-like on a tabletop, starts reading from ‘The Galilee Hitch-Hiker' and ‘Karma Repair Kit: Items 1–4'. He skips to ‘Our Beautiful West Coast Thing' ‘… listening to The Mamas and the Papas… singing a song about breaking somebody's heart… I think I'll get up and dance around the room. Here I go!'

And he does. The vet gets up and starts to dance. The CARE
worker and Kiwi stewardess join him, as do a couple of the engineers. The Dane takes the Frenchman's hand and swings him on to the floor. The Kuwaiti boogies into the throng. I start strumming an air guitar. It all happens in a second. The pilot claims he's having an acid flashback. The Nigerian leans over to shout at me, only half in jest, ‘Good vibes, man.'

Suddenly, we are intoxicated. Because of our anxiety, because of the day's frustrations and, especially, because of Uzbek vodka, the group relaxes, lets down their hair – at least those who still have hair – and allows wide-eyed, youthful exuberance to sweep aside our suspicions.

‘… No more falsehoods or derisions…'

Do-gooders and door gunners spin on tiptoes. Aid managers and Sergeants First Class sing along to ‘Aquarius'. Our gestures become animated, our conversations flow. A commando holds a single plastic flower in his fist. A PsychOps corporal with cinnamon-brown skin tells me, ‘Actually, I'm a Capricorn.' The poems, lyrics and gracious ideals are seductive and hypnotic, deluded and naive. The words move our hearts and for an exquisite moment keep at bay our rational scepticism.

‘… Golden living dreams of visions…'

‘I have this recurring dream,' the Nigerian yells at me, as he drums on the Formica bar. ‘I'm in the mountains, caught in an avalanche. I touch a warm body. I grab it, then see I'm balanced on a precipice, holding a Taliban fighter. If I let go of him, he'll tumble to his death. If I keep hold of him, he might kill me.'

‘What do you do?'

‘I hold on to him, of course. I hold on.'

Then, four minutes and forty-eight seconds after it began, the song ends. The music stops. We stand self-consciously at the centre of the tent, arms raised to the canvas roof or held out at our sides. We slip off the wigs and rose-tinted glasses and retreat to our tables. I hang up my imaginary Stratocaster. Beyond the screen door, the 455th Air Expeditionary Group launches an A-10 Thunderbolt II patrol into the dusk.

*

Not much later, the party breaks up. The lieutenant asks if I want to walk with him out to the perimeter. ‘It's truly amazing how many stars you can see even when the moon is out,' he says. ‘I counted four comets yesterday alone.'

The handmaiden of the stars sends me a single comet that night. At first light, our white UNHAS Fokker lifts off the scorched runway for the five-minute flight to Kabul.

The white Fokker circles a sprawling, ruined world. Rolling streets of shattered tarmac skirt cruise-missile craters fifty feet deep. UNHCR plastic sacking wraps khaki compounds which have ‘eaten a rocket'. Skeletons of civil aircraft serve as temporary shelters for refugees. Early in the twentieth century, King Aman-ullah instructed his architects to create a ‘monumental' new capital. Italian villas, formal gardens, a narrow-gauge railroad and the vast white Dar-ul Aman Palace were built. When the first Intrepids reached Kabul, pausing at Siggi's for a puff on a hookah and a glass of his
amazing
mint tea, they wondered if they'd found paradise. Of those buildings and days nothing remains now save a monumental sense of loss. Our wheels touch the tarmac and I realize with a shiver that I want the security of a guidebook.

In the translucent, powdered morning light, I blag a ride into town with three others from the flight.

‘They were executed on the Kandahar road,' says the tall Norwegian, turning around to tell me and the other passengers. CAR-IAS's Kabul chief has an exaggerated facial tic, his mouth puckering as if to make a lonely, one-sided kiss. His news of yesterday's killing of two Afghan aid workers didn't reach us at Bagram. ‘The Taliban made them kneel on the road and shot them.'

Around us, every tenth vehicle seems to be another NGO LandCruiser. UN Toyotas jostle with Shelter for Life pick-ups. Arab Aid trucks negotiate pot-holes the size of garden ponds. A six-wheeled ISAF armed personnel carrier pulls out of a side road and pushes into the traffic behind us. The front gunner smokes a Gauloise beneath the French
tricouleur
.

‘Let him pass,' the Norwegian orders our driver. ‘He's the target, not us.'

Pedestrians – in battle fatigues, in lilac
burquas
, shouldering
Kalashnikovs – cover their mouths against the dust. Bicycles clatter between
karaatchiwaan
handcarts. Savvy, Mister-One-Dollar beggars circle us waving smoking tin cans of incense. Pedlars sell petrol at the kerbside, decanting it by hand into one-litre cans. Behind them, metal shipping containers have been turned into barber shops and greengrocers. An old man washes his face in the drain outside the Hospital for War-Wounded. A legless veteran levers his crude cart forward, propelling himself with a stone in each hand to save his knuckles.

‘I hear you're writing a travel book,' the Norwegian says to me, his mouth puckering at the irony. ‘Do you want to ruin Kabul?'

‘Tourism is the future of Afghanistan,' the driver, a local man, interrupts. ‘And Afghans are the most hospitable people in the world.
Chans-e khub
.' Good luck to you.

‘Just don't write about the beaches,' advises the Norwegian, deadpan again. ‘The surfing here is rubbish.'

The LandCruiser drops me at the Mustapha. A US soldier in full battle kit strolls by its iron-grille entrance. Around the corner is the Chelsea Supermarket where bin Laden used to shop. Above me rises the country's single billboard: ‘Enjoy the Taste of America – Pine Cigarettes'. I step inside Afghanistan's only surviving Intrepid hotel.

In 1970, Penny stayed here. Two years later, the Mustapha was Tony and Maureen Wheeler's favourite place in town, ‘new and built around a central courtyard, more like a college residence than a hotel'. Rudy was a frequent guest, his busloads unrolling their sleeping bags on its roof. The Mustapha caught the first wave of independent travellers, was closed during the Soviet occupation and for most of the Taliban years, then reopened when the owner's son returned from twenty-one years' exile in New Jersey.

‘Where the hell's the security guard?' an AP stringer complains on the stairs. He and a fellow journalist wear identical flak jackets and rimless peaked
karakul
caps. Both are off to find a Pulitzer-winning story before lunch. ‘There's supposed to be a security guard at the door.'

In the sixties, there were no guidebooks to Asia, at least none
that suited young shoestring travellers. No one on the hippie highway carried a copy of Fodor's
Islamic Asia
. The route to spiritual enlightenment wasn't revealed in the pages of the latest Baedeker. Intrepids were on a journey of spontaneity and reinvention. Kids simply arrived in a town, dropped by the freak hotel, hit on other Westerners for advice and checked out the travellers' noticeboards. Don't pay more than twenty Afghanis for the ride to Jalalabad. The Crown Hotel in Delhi smells of roses. Bhagwan Rajneesh has moved his ashram from Bombay to Pune. If the best bus didn't run for another day or three it didn't matter; the Intrepids just hung out, went with the flow, absorbed the moment – and were absorbed in it. Few were ever in a hurry. Most spent months, even years, on the road.

Come the seventies, travellers had less time but more money. They were less inclined to leave arrangements to the vagaries of chance. They weren't as trusting either, and with reason. The Vietnam war and the commercialization of the East hadn't only disillusioned them. The promise of fast money had drawn rip-off artists and passport thieves to the fringes of the trail. People were robbed and raped. Curries were made with dog meat. Hashish was cut with horse manure. The seventies overlander needed guidance.

Let's Go
was first published in the early sixties as a pamphlet for Harvard students heading for Europe. Almost a decade passed before it reached over the Bosphorus. Likewise,
Europe on $5 a Day
and the
Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe
(subtitled
How to see Europe by the skin of your teeth
) didn't raise a thumb towards the east either.

The first travellers' guidebook to step into Asia was printed on a Gestetner in a derelict squat in Notting Hill. BIT – from Binary Information Transfer, the smallest unit of computer data – was an information charity on Westbourne Park Road co-founded by the irreverent social inventor Nicholas Albery. Freaks and runaways dropped by his ‘energy centre of the Alternative Society' for free advice on crash pads, legal aid and cheap food (when available, the girls who did the cooking were often out bringing kids down from bad trips). Its precarious, hand-to-mouth existence was sustained by donations from Paul McCartney, The Who and the Gulbenkian
Foundation, as well as by sales of fake student-cards (issued in the name of the imaginary ‘London Institute of Structural Anthropology: Department for External Studies', Albery being a follower of the French social anthropologist Lévi-Strauss).

The charity's idiosyncratic magazine
BIT man
– ‘a survival manual for activists and deviants' – disseminated do-it-yourself information on matters ranging from rebirthing and plumbing a squat to independent travel. In keeping with the ideals of an alternative lifestyle, many Intrepids wrote to the magazine on their return home from India, sharing their anecdotes and advice. One of BIT's volunteers – a Yorkshireman named Geoff Crowther who had done the trail himself – collated this material with his own experiences and in 1970 printed the BIT travel newsletter. Its first edition, printed in purple ink in a dingy room smelling of meths and running to a dozen mimeographed pages, sold out as soon as it hit the street.

That same year, less than a mile away across London, another Englishman, Tony Wheeler, met Irish-born, would-be stewardess Maureen on a park bench. Wheeler had been bitten by the travel bug during his time as an engineer at Rootes Cars in the Midlands. Rootes had modified a Hillman Hunter for the
Daily Express
London-to-Sydney marathon. On its front seat lay an open map of Iran. Wheeler had seen it and was captivated by the unfamiliar place names and swathes of desert. Maureen had caught her first glimpse of the greater world through the Indian pedlars who called at her Belfast front door.

The young couple fell in love and decided to go travelling together. They bought a 1964 Minivan for £65 and drove it across Asia, reaching Sydney penniless the day after Christmas 1972. Wheeler pawned his camera to buy food. Maureen refused to sell her typewriter. ‘I bet we could do a book,' he said and, in a month, he wrote
Across Asia on the Cheap
.

Lonely Planet's first guidebook had a print run of 1,500 copies. Wheeler flogged them to Sydney book shops and, like the BIT newsletter, it sold out in a week. He then did two more print runs, flying some of them in suitcases to Melbourne. He caught the
airline bus into town and peddled the lot in a day, writing out invoices while eating his sandwiches in a park. The ninety-six-page pamphlet provided basic and practical travel advice in an enduring and chatty style. Wonder whether to buy supper from a certain Asian street-hawker? ‘If he looks like he's about to drop dead, eat elsewhere.' Thinking of smuggling dope into Iran? ‘Forget it; Mashhad has a large, new and unpleasant jail especially for foreigners.' Considering soliciting locals for spare cash? ‘The Indian spiritualism drug freaks begging in Delhi from people who know about
real
poverty do enormous damage to the overland scene.'

The overland guides were not exclusively an English or Australian phenomenon. In the same month that the Wheelers left London, a French student, Philippe Gloaguen, began to hitchhike to India. His
Guide du routard
was printed within days of American Bill Dalton's first Moon Publication handbook. Stefan Loose returned home from Kathmandu determined to encourage fellow Germans to question their values by writing the
Südostasien Hand-buch
. Mik Schultz's
Asia for the Hitchhiker
came out in Copenhagen just as Douglas Brown's
Overland to India
appeared in Canada. In his introduction Brown wrote of – and for – his readers:

There's two or three of them sitting on the platform of the railway station in Istanbul, calmly waiting for a train, wearing Moroccan
jellabas
, carrying cooking pots, playing flutes. If the crowd goes away they'll probably smoke some dope in a chillum. Maybe they come from a communal house in Copenhagen; or from the caves in Matala on Crete; or from Essaouira near Marrakech; or from Berkeley or Toronto or Paris. They're going to India. It'll probably cost about thirty dollars or so. If you sat with them, you'd find out how to make it too; how to cop in Afghanistan, where to stay in Tehran, how to say thank you in Pushtu. This book is a result of lots of days of travelling and talking and smoking with these people.

Each guide was distinct, and their authors were on individual quests, yet the synchronicity of their vision was extraordinary, as if a single ideal had been plucked out of the air.

‘
Lorsque vous étes à l'étranger, l'étranger, c'est vous
,' wrote Gloaguen in his first
Guide du routard
. Speaking for a generation of travellers, he went on, ‘Sartre said, “One changes the world by revolution.” But
le Routard
' – the archetypal, open-minded Intrepid – ‘tries instead to better understand the world by reaching out to its people, their customs, and understanding their right to be different.'