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From a youthful eld , Simon Fairlie decided to go off the beaten path , also have sex as “ the hippie trail . ” After attending an all - boys embarkation schoolhouse , Fairlie decides to cut attending Cambridge and search the world .
The following is an excerpt fromGoing to Seedby Simon Fairlie . It has been adjust for the web .
‘ If you do n’t want to go to Cambridge do n’t go , ’ my father had drop a line . ‘ I mean that . Go and drift wherever you please . Go and sit on a beach and become a Beachcomber , not just for a holiday , which is delightful , but for the rest of your young person . ’
We did go where we pleased , to India . Perhaps I was just pursuing a fashionable tendency , but for Carol , who was born in India and leave when she was 13 , this was about retrace her root . But before we go we had to put some money aside . I encounter work as a impermanent jack on a enceinte construction situation in Cambridge . They must have been desperate . The uninitiated run to cogitate of a building laborer as ‘ amateurish ’ , but that is far from the trueness . However I was unskilled . It took me more than three days to chisel out the half bricks in a doorway that was to be block up , a job that should have taken a morning . The foreman did n’t complain ; I think he thought it was a beneficial place to put me when they did n’t need me . They pierce a pneumatic drill in my hands which immediately got stay put in the asphalt . One of my pet jobs was unloading brick . They had n’t come along to palette and forklift in those days , so we moved the bricks from the lorry to the stack by lob them one at a meter to one another in a chain . I was n’t too bad at this ; I guess cricket practice at school helped .
I managed to roll up £ 125 , the equivalent of about ten weeks ’ work . We hold for visas at the Afghan Embassy ; Carol was give hers but I was refuse . Friends aver it did n’t matter , you could get one in the Afghan Embassy in Tehran for a bribe . We packed our bags , have the sauceboat to Calais , and stuck out our pollex . Five days afterward we were in Istanbul where we rested for a few days before undertaking the four thousand - mile journeying through Turkey , Iran , Afghanistan and Pakistan to India .
If you did the whole head trip by local bus , it cost £ 9 , providing you haggled and change your money on the black market , and you could reduce this further by incumbrance - hiking some of the way . This itinerary became untouchable after the revolution in Iran , and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan , and stay unadvisable today . But in the seventies , when fly was expensive , it was the highway between South Asia and Europe , shop by American and European backpackers , Aussies take the trashy route to Europe , various wheeler and dealers normally in Mercedes , and an elite group of hippie with a source of income , such as export lapis lazuli , that enabled them to hop-skip more or less indefinitely between the more good for you hotels in places like Kabul and Kathmandu . Most locals were used to noncitizen , friendly , and happy to supply any service that might earn them money .
In Iran , which was then under the rule of the Shah , we see little foretoken of the turmoil to come . True , nobody we satisfy dared to fume dope , because the sentences if you were catch were draconian , and we were keen to get out of Tehran , which was live , noisy and crowd together . We felt sorry for a bunch of travellers who had been maroon there for ten days because their so - telephone ‘ Magic Bus ’ from Istanbul to Delhi had broken down , but in a means it serve them right for taking a software trip . The local autobus were reliable , flexible , and you foregather people . The provincial who made scant hops on the Iranian coach , sometimes with a few goats or sheep , were often favorable and talkative , trying out the left Word of God of English on us , making refined hand gestures as they spoke .
We took a diversion , by jitney , to a resort on the Caspian Sea and were astonied to find beach field hut , selfsame to those you might find in Bognor Regis . We lease one , and while we were changing a wispy soprano voice came from the side by side hut :
Row , row , run-in , your boatGently down the streamMerrily , mirthfully , merrily , merrily Life is but a dreaming .
We looked outside and there was a six - year - old Iranian girl and her parents , come in to savour the sand , sunlight and sea . The father spoke good English , the mother some , and the whole family was delicious . They invite us back to their flat in Tehran where they fed us sumptuously and put us up for the night . The Father of the Church was a well - heeled man of affairs , presumably a beneficiary of the Shah ’s unpleasant regime , educated , as was his married woman , and tolerant . They were Islamic , but they were n’t run to lease that get in the fashion of a western modus vivendi . I enquire what became of them after the rotation .
The country I fell for , however , was Afghanistan . It was an extraordinary spot before it got done over increasingly by the Russians , the Taliban and the US . We entered on a bus from Mashhad in Iran , to Herat , the first city in Afghanistan . As we approached the delimitation the omnibus driver hand out a duplicated sheet that lean all the goods that you were n’t give up to fetch into Afghanistan . The inclination did n’t let in things like watches and transistor radios , which you were allowed to wreak in , but had to give tariff on . It consist of banal items like blankets , bucketful , saucepan and mattresses – all thing that Afghans were capable of manufacturing themselves , thank you very much .
When you got to Herat you could see why this protectionism was enforced . Despite the motorcar and the backpackers it was still a ego - sufficient knightly city , for the most part because it had never been colonise . sure streets in the city were allocate to a particular craft such as weaving , leatherwork or blacksmithing . The most striking of these was the copper beaters ’ street , where in a scotch of adjacent workshops men were beating out huge cauldrons up to three hundred litres in size . The noise was phenomenal . These workmen ‘ competing ’ next to one another must have been tend by society that regulated prices , set standards and oversaw apprenticeships . It was the opposite of a capitalist thriftiness .
forward-looking products had been absorbed into this system of indigenous product . You could buy tailor - made tobacco cigarettes in a packet boat , but the ‘ tailors ’ who made them were a line of men squat in a street rolling them all by hand . There was a topically produced boozing called Afghan - Cola that was even more loathsome than the American original . The food was wholly trammel to what the country could grow : rice , straw , lamb , spinach , onion , mung beans , sugar , fruits , afternoon tea , egg , yoghurt and Gallus gallus . That was it , and you got the same menu in every restaurant , but it was wholesome and adequate . Everything , even a fried egg or a dish of Spinacia oleracea , came swamp in a pool of ardent grease , carved from the two base of avoirdupois that flap like bosoms on the croup of the sheep that could be seen hanging in butchers ’ shops . It was substantive sustenance for a shepherd on the slopes of the Hindu Kush , but not so good if you were a foreigner suffering from stomach flu .
The problem with Afghanistan was the way women were treated . It was the only rural area we visited where many women wore a chadri , which is the ultimate kind of burqa , a conical tent with a grid in front of the eyes . If you were searching for right things to say about it , it was plausibly airy and coolheaded , and woman could do what they liked inside it without being abide by . But it was alien and abhorrent to our western sensibilities and reinforced the mind that a char was a chattel of her married man .
I wanted to stay in Afghanistan longer , and go round the country by the more outside northern path . But Carol ’s visa , obtain in London , was valid for only ten days , while mine , larn for a v payoff in Tehran , was indefinite . And worst of all , we were getting on badly . This was because I was n’t doing what was necessary , as a manly companion , to protect her from torment by Muslim men . When they enquire me ‘ Are you married ? ’ I should have said ‘ Yes . ’ alternatively , being naive and politically correct , I answered , ‘ No , she ’s an autonomous woman ’ , which in their heart mean loose .
We moved fleetly to Pakistan , where if anything it was worse . Carol , who could have been false for Pakistani , was spat at more than once in the street . The country was stream with soldiers and the atmosphere tense . The only mass we had protract conversations with turned out to be from East Pakistan , now Bangladesh , and they told us that a war was brewing . It come a twelvemonth later .
Recommended Reads
All In the Question : What If We Started Asking Better Questions ?
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Going to Seed
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