The British have long been fascinated by the mysterious East.
In 1815, Shelley wrote Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, with the lines:
‘The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o’er the aërial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way.’
I was tiring of the London scene, in early 1968. So I looked east. It was the apex of the hippie trail’s popularity. The trail flourished from the mid-50s to the late 70s, and stretched across Europe to South Asia, via Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Thailand.
I sold my car, packed a small rucksack and headed off to Kathmandu – over land.
I had listened to sitar players Vilyat Khan and Ravi Shankar – introduced on record by Yehudi Menuhin.
Yehudi, the child prodigy, had played with Ravi and mentioned the accompaniment as ‘the inevitable drone’ introducing us to the sound of Om.
But what was that sound, exactly?
As I had already hitched to Greece when I was 17, I took the train and arrived, exhausted, in Athens. I headed for the cobblestone alleys of the Plaka, beneath the Acropolis, renting a whitewashed room from Curia Anna for five shillings a night.
How wonderful to be back in Greece: the light, the food, the language and, then, few tourists.
I made friends with some Americans: one who wrote porn novels for his home market and a black guy, Stanley, who had his own pet mongrel.
We toured around islands on kaiki – fishing boats. Stanley told me, ‘Don’t be in a rush to get to India. It’ll be there. Just enjoy all this beauty.’
I took an Italian boat from Piraeus to Istanbul and sailed up the Bosphorus, the meeting point of Europe and Asia, where the hippies going out met the hippies returning. I looked around and traded surplus items in the souk.
I then took a bus through Turkey, on past snowy Mount Ararat.
Tehran was busy and crawling with the Shah’s secret police – so on to the holy city of Mashhad.
I had the temerity to approach the beautiful turquoise mosque. A mullah picked up a rock and cast it in my direction. So I headed pronto across the border, to Herat in Afghanistan, where nobody bothered you.
Herat was filthy but charming, with the pony-and-trap tonkas trotting around as taxis, adorned with tassels and bells.
I had been inspired by The Road to Oxiana (1937) by Robert Byron, which I’d borrowed from Marianne Faithfull and read cover to cover. Bruce Chatwin described it as ‘a sacred text, beyond criticism’.
My initial problem was the runs, the curse of the Orient. A German hippie gave me a piece of opium to munch on. I lay on my bed for a couple of days, staring at the ceiling and drifting in and out of consciousness. When I came to, I was cured.
I looked at the minarets from the time of Gawhar Shad (1405-47), chief consort of Shah Rukh, Emperor of the Timurid Empire. For ten years, she had ruled the Timurid Empire, stretching from the Tigris to China. She was beheaded aged 80 (which seems a bit unfair).
Two English lads arrived in town, driving a Peugeot 404 estate – a rare thing. I took them in hand on the Robert Byron trail and, duly enthused, we headed north into the desert.
A permit was officially required, but we didn’t bother with that, as you had to go to Kabul for it. The only traffic on the dirt road was a few lorries and the odd jeep.
Arriving early morning in a village, we were invited to breakfast with the local governor, much as Byron might have experienced in the 1930s. We enjoyed cheeses and fruits, seated on a raised table in the garden.
‘Where did you stay last night?’ he asked.
On learning we had camped out, he admonished us: ‘You must not do this.’ There were brigands on the loose.
Later, a policeman stopped us outside a small town and noted our registration number on the back of a fag packet. He then got in the car and we drove to a tea house, where he paid for our refreshments!
We visited Balkh, Afghanistan, where Alexander the Great married Roxana in 327 BC. Genghis Khan sacked the city twice. Once a noble and prosperous place, it was reduced to ruins. When we were there, Russian engineers were already building tarmac roads near Mazar-i-Sharif, down which tanks would soon roll.
Finally, we reached the river Oxus via a side road, after being turned back. That was the Byron promise fulfilled!
The Khyber Pass descends with endless twists and turns and numerous fortifications. Here Tommies had perished miserable and far from home. We headed down into the stifling heat of the plains, in the pre-monsoon furnace, and to Peshawar.
Even iced mango lassis could not revive us. We lay in a cold cast-iron bath in our dak bungalow and tried to fan ourselves with the punka fan.
It was 20 years since the British had left. Some middle-class Pakistanis said, ‘We wish you had never left,’ as they made their way to the tennis courts, dressed in impeccable whites.
Like Rudyard Kipling, we headed for the hills, oriental versions of Tunbridge Wells, to Murree and beyond. A large tribal group processed to their summer pastures. The headman marched with his proud goat, silver on his horns, followed by sheep, donkeys, hens, dark tousle-haired children and the long-suffering, heavily laden women.
Finally, we drove over the pass from India into Kathmandu, beautiful and green. The people smiled at you, despite their poverty.
We were happy to do nothing. We sat on the steps of the crumbling temples in the main Durbar Square, watching the colourful processions wind their way with music and dancing, always celebrating some religious occasion.
A couple of miles outside the city lay Swayambhunath, known as ‘the monkey temple’, founded at the beginning of the fifth century AD. It stands on a hill across the river. You gradually ascend the numerous steps, taking it all in, passing three huge red Buddhas halfway up. There, as you turn around to catch your breath, the view spreads out before you.
Then you approach the vast dorje, or thunderbolt weapon, with an iron snake coiled around its stand. Behind are a pair of piercing eyes, painted onto the white expanse of the circular stupa, topped with a massive brass spire. The eyes face in the four cardinal directions. Here you must circumambulate, in a clockwise direction, turning the prayer wheels, and chant, ‘Om mani padme hum.’
I spent a further year travelling in India.
The most common question I was asked there, apart from ‘Are you a hippie?’, was ‘What is your purpose?’ It was a simple question, with many answers.
Initially, the hippies had credibility. There was almost a reverence towards them. But this changed quickly.
The media had a field day over the danger they posed to the youth of India. Stories appeared daily in the papers of them smoking chillums in holy places, smuggling drugs, being beaten up, robbed, suspected of being spies and having sex orgies.
One friend of ours, Howie, was as typical a hippie as you would ever find, a gentle American soul who had been turned on in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. He had long, black hair in a headband and wore beads.
One Indian asked him, ‘Are you hippie?’ Howie talked to him for ages, explaining what he was and where he had come from. In the end, the Indian concluded, ‘Maybe you are not hippie, but you are hippie-like.’
Seeemed like a good compromise.
Chris Jagger’s memoir, Talking to Myself, is out now
