Travel from the 70's onward
By Ian Hall
The adventures of twelve people, in their own words – drivers, tour leaders and passengers – in the late seventies and early eighties around Europe and Asia in double decker buses. Everyday life. Accidents. Breakdowns. Border hassles. Riots. Being held up at gunpoint.
Crew came from different backgrounds and with varying skills but all showed professionalism, imagination, creativity, improvisation, ingenuity and audacity in getting passengers safely to their destination.
By Steve Walker
Take a Transit Minibus, a full-sized roof-rack loaded with camping equipment, 14 passengers, plus a driver armed with road maps of Europe, Asia and Africa and you have a phenomenon that was to be a character-forming and life-changing experience for a generation of travellers. That phenomenon was “overland”. For the first time, young people had an affordable way to travel in the relative safety of a group to what, for many, had previously been inaccessible, and possibly dangerous, places. Overland brought together larger-than-life characters, involved some epic journeys and created unforgettable memories. The late 60s and early 70s was a period of Woodstock, peace, love and flower power – and a feeling of freedom was in the air. The fruits of the post-war baby boom were discovering and celebrating this new-found freedom and the time was ripe for this travel phenomenon to take off.
This is a story of how a broken relationship and the urge to break out led the author, in his early twenties and raised on an Essex council estate in the 50s/60s, to take his first trip abroad as a passenger on an overland trip to Morocco in September 1969, (he admits to being so naïve at the time that he thought Morocco was somewhere in the South of France), encountering an individual who happened to be a master at concocting a cock-and-bull story which eventually landed him a job as an overland driver.
He suddenly found himself inducted into the University of Life, spending the next four years on a hectic, challenging and adventurous journey across three continents, travelling extensively through Europe, Asia, India and Africa; watching the sunrise over Mount Everest, driving overnight through winter blizzards in the Anatolian mountains of Eastern Turkey and waking in the Sahara just before dawn in a complete sound vacuum. Along the way, he met some amazing, interesting and colourful characters and made lifelong friendships – and went ten-pin bowling with the Prince of Afghanistan!
By Ian Hall
The adventures of a Top Deck Tour leader in 1979 and 1980 travelling from Kathmandu to London on double decker buses. It’s a volatile time in Asia with the Soviets invading Afghanistan, revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein campaigning in Iraq, Hafez al – Assad quelling rebellions in Syria and a coup d’état in Turkey. Ian’s winter overland tour, where temperatures in Iran and Turkey drop to minus 30 degrees contrasts vividly with his summer Overland – monsoons in India and temperatures in Pakistan and Iran rise to 45-50 degrees
Overland crew needed a blend of resourcefulness, initiative, audacity improvisation,problem solving and rule bending to get their passengers safely to their destination. This is a fascinating book full of keen observations, everyday people he meets, Kiwi and Aussie characters, adventures and misadventures, big and small, ordinary, extraordinary, exciting and dangerous.
By Brian Thacker
Brian Thacker, bus tour-leader extraordinaire, tells it how it really is in this funny, rollicking, absurd, ride through Europe.
Crew Manual Rule No. 5 : Crew must not engage in sexual activity on board the bus with passengers or fellow employees.
Crew Manual Rule No.2 : learn all names on day one.
Crew Manual Rule No.3 : don’t get lost.
But then, who follows the rules?
Brian Thacker confesses all as he reveals the best (and worst) of 20 trips as a tour leader around Europe. He tells how he fed passengers horse meat spag bog, hamburgers made from breakfast cereal and roosters’ testicles. How he left a passenger standing by the side of a motorway in France for three hours in his underwear clutching a purple toothbrush and how, along the way, he lost his driver, his cook, his bus, 10 brightly coloured canal bikes, a large church and eventually his patience.
It’s the late 1970s and Simon Tobin knows he wants a life of adventure after he finishes college in England. But when he answers an ad in the paper to become a Tour Guide, he’s not sure what he’s getting into.
“Get your shit together, have a shave and a haircut, buy some clothes that don’t make you look like a stupid hippy,” his boss tells him after the training trip around Europe. “You take the first three-weeker leaving on Monday. Good luck, you’ve got potential. Don’t fuck up.’
Travelling in a coach painted with a big yellow sun across Europe, through Russia and down to North Africa until the early 80s, ‘Tobes’ survives both an earthquake in Montenegro and the traffic in Paris. He runs an Austrian ski resort and converts a chateau in the Beaujolais. He smuggles jeans in Russia, lunches (and lunches, and lunches…) in Tuscany and drinks tea at sunrise in the Moroccan desert.
Through it all, he makes friends – food-and-drink loving Italians, Austrian skiers, and a vast network of young, down-to-earth Aussie and Kiwi travelers and tour guides all with outlandish nicknames. Tobes’ life of adventure turns out to be above all, a life of friendship and fun, giving him more than a few ‘Big Yellow’ tales to tell.
In the late 1960s a young New Zealander, who had always known he would travel, first set out into the big wide wonderful world. His first journey was a voyage on the ‘banana’ boat which then regularly visited some of the smaller South Pacific Islands. It was the first step and the wider world beckoned. There was now no stopping him and the Asian Overland was the first magnet. At the time the route between Kathmandu and London was the ultimate adventure. Nepal was still a mysterious Himalayan kingdom at the end of the hippy trail, India and Pakistan were tolerating each other in an uneasy peace; Afghanistan was still a peaceful kingdom and Iran was under the tutelage of the Shah. It was a journey of discovery with a wealth of wonderful places to visit – great elaborate marble tombs, erotic temples, ancient ruins, underground cities, awe-inspiring cathedrals… Europe & particularly England was then the ideal venue for a working holiday, and for a kiwi who had never been near a farm, he soon had employment as a farm labourer! Other adventures followed – a visit to the Soviet Union, which, at the height of the Cold War, and mainly due to Western propaganda, was then thought to be a place to be avoided, after all you could disappear without trace into the maw of the KGB! There was grape-picking in France, and further travels in Spain, Morocco and throughout the United Kingdom before eventually the decision is made to return home, this time on another epic Overland journey – through Africa, travelling by truck to Nairobi then hitch-hiking south to Cape Town to catch a ship back to New Zealand. Again there were many the experiences. There was the vast fascinating expanses of the Sahara with wandering Tuaregs, the rainforests in the post-colonial Congo & the occasional glimpse of Pygmies, the game parks of Tanzania and the tranquil beaches of Portuguese Mozambique, then in the throes of a guerrilla war and of course much more.
This narrative has been compiled from diaries, personal articles, photographs and memories of the happy days of my first travels. This book is also serving as a background to another book which will recount my experiences as a tour leader on the Asian Overland routes to Europe and the later years as a special interest tour leader/guide in India, Turkey and the Middle East in the days before terrorism, international politics and vicious local wars have made many of these fascinating regions no-go areas to the average traveller. All the photographs in this edition were all taken at the time of the events narrated. The photos have helped me immensely in recalling many of the events that took place. This book is a cameo of the golden days of travel before international politics destroyed or restricted many of the places I feel fortunate to have visited in happier days. I know my sentiments are shared by many of my peers.
By JD Chadwick
Around The World In A Double Decker Bus 1979 – 1983.
Chad went into the small travel agency in London to deliver a letter. To his surprise, he came out as the driver of a double-decker bus with 19 paying passengers on a 6 week trip around Europe. The problem was he didn’t have a licence. He didn’t speak their language. He had never driven a vehicle larger than a mini and had no idea where he was going. None of that mattered, he was broke and needed a job – any job! But first, he had just 24 hours to learn how to drive a vehicle that resembled a two-storey building on wheels, without any training or instructions. Then came the daunting task of driving it on the wrong side of the road through France surrounded by renowned crazy French drivers who hated the English.
For the next four years Chad solved crisis after crisis in some of the most challenging situations and countries imaginable in his bid to keep the wheels rolling and his punters happy. What makes this story even more enticing – it is set long before the advent of mobile phones, computers and travel guides. Once you left home you were on your own.
Could you talk your way out of jail by playing cards with your arresting office? Pose as a journalist to gain entry to Ashes Test Match at Lords. Attempt to sell thirteen cartons of illegal whiskey to the chief of police in Pakistan, a devout Muslim and anti-alcohol country? Fix a bus engine with a box of cornflakes? These are just a few of the adventures you will delight in when you read Deckers, Punters & Dead Ants.
Will Chad learn to drive in time? Can he find his way around Europe before his passengers pull the pin demanding their money back? Does he ever master their language? Will he spend time in a Pakistani jail? What has Dead Ants got to do with driving a bus?
by Trevor Carroll
Top Deck double deckers offered a revolutionary form of long-distance transport from the 70s to the 90s. The large British Lodekkas carried under-35s vast distances through SE Asia, the Middle East and Australia in a new innovative mode of no-frills adventure tourism.
Taken on by Top Deck as a double decker bus driver in early 1977, Trevor Carroll conducted European tours for a year before he was set loose on his first overland tour, London to Kathmandu and return. A three-week dash to Kathmandu had the tour stumbling into the start of the civil war in Afghanistan mixing with a government crackdown and soldiers and tanks on the roads. Trevor describes his exciting and sometimes harrowing experiences on six overland trips as both driver and courier.
Finally, he embarked on the massive 20-week Sydney to London tour in 1980 with its third and final leg aboard ‘Casper’ and its 20 occupants across India, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy. The tour passed through 21 countries and covered 34,000 kilometres, conquering places where the buses’ designers never meant it to go.
Trevor met his future wife Hilde on tour, and they have now been married for 34 years.
Skroo Turner the founder of Top Deck and today’s Flight Centre provides an introduction to these stories, his foresight has continued his travel revolution from those lumbering old buses to today’s conglomerate, The Flight Centre Group.
By the late 1970’s & early 1980s the classic Overland tours between London and Kathmandu, which had had their beginnings in the mid-1960s, were drawing to a close. The Soviets had occupied Afghanistan, the Shah of Iran had been deposed and an Islamic State established. In Iraq Saddam Hussain was about to embark on a devastating war with Iran and the seeds of unrest were lying latent in Syria. This was the scenario when the author embarked upon his career as a tour guide on the Overland routes across Asia to Kathmandu. This book is a continuation of the author’s previous Kindle book – One Foot in Front of the Other – First Steps, which recounts his experiences travelling the Overland routes in Asia, Europe and in Africa in the halcyon days of the early ’70s.
After 3 years back in New Zealand & a year working on a uranium exploratory drilling-rig in Wyoming, the author completed a training trip with Sundowners in Europe then, as a rooky tour leader headed to Istanbul with coach & driver to collect clients flying in from Kabul before setting off for the Middle East. It was a memorable trip and a precursor for further tours and the Overland routes to and from Kathmandu.For the next 3 years there were the ups and downs of political vagaries to content with, the frustration of border crossing and the sudden introduction of visa requirements. There were happy times and sad times although the happy times always outweighed the sad.
Moving on to Explore Worldwide, the author became involved in operating Camel safaris across the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, leading tours to Kashmir and Ladakh, to Darjeeling and Sikkim as well as Turkey, Jordan and Tunisia.
This book documents the highs & lows of tour leading: the funny incidents and the, not-so-frequent sad episodes. The frustrations dealing some passengers and with bureaucracy on borders, at embassies and elsewhere. But also an insight into the information a tour leader/guide was expected to impart on the places visited.
In the late 1970s, adventure bus journeys were the most exciting form of international travel. Buses crossed continents to the fabled cities of Asia, Europe, Africa and South America, carrying adventurous travellers across scenic lands and harsh deserts. Many of the passengers were Australians and New Zealanders, going to and from Britain and Europe.
Tours lasted weeks and months and crossed borders freely – until they were blocked by unrest and warfare in the late 1970s, and the golden age of overland travel came to an abrupt end.
Faraway Places with Strange Sounding Names brings this magical era back to life, thanks to Gerald Davis’s determined efforts to gather people’s stories, photos, maps and mementos.
His book tells the story of the leading operator at the time, the Penn Overland Company, which pioneered the Asian and African overland travel routes in the 1950s, and spread to five continents and 50 countries, taking people on the journey of a lifetime.
This book is a window into that time, and for the thousands who travelled, a chance to relive their journeys. Drawing on memories and mementos of former Penn staff and passengers the world over, Gerald Davis has saved the story from disappearance, and told it in this evocative book.