by Bob Flaws

We arrived in Luxembourg very early in the morning with another young American in tow. This younger guy was as green as I had been the winter before. When he found out that I had been to India and back and that Jim and I were heading East again, he latched onto us as de facto guides. We went to the train station in the middle of downtown Luxembourg and caught a train in second class to Munich. Munich was where we planned on catching the Orient Express to Istanbul. When I was 15, I had traveled down the Rhine valley in a VW Microbus one summer. That summer had been an awakening for me in a number of ways, and I had lots of memories about that trip. So I was excited to see the castles and the riverside towns and villages again. Jim had never been outside the U.S. before, and he was wide-eyed and more nervous than I had ever seen him before. When Jim felt nervous or uncomfortable in social situations, he often had a tendency to act very outrageously, I suppose as a way to diffuse the tension he felt. In any case, he was acting more eccentric than usual to the Europeans we came in contact with.

...

When we got to Munich, we had to wait in the train station for several hours till the Orient Express was ready to depart. We bought some bread, cheese, and fruit for the ride, and the American kid pestered me with questions about India as we sat on our packs on the railway platform. The ride from Munich to Istanbul in second class was extremely uncomfortable. The seats in the compartment we were in were hardbacked and straight up and down. There was no dining car, and the train only stopped for a few minutes at each stop. In addition, as we went from Germany to Austria, Austria to Hungary, Hungary to Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia to Bulgaria via Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, and Sofia, we neither spoke the language of the land nor had any local currency. To make matters worse, we had not bought enough food to make it to Istanbul. Thus we went for two days with only some tea and oranges and hardly any sleep. Passengers would get on and off as the train passed through central Europe, and one family in Hungary shared some bread and salami with us. At each border, customs and immigration officers would come on and check and stamp everyone’s passports.

We arrived at the border of Bulgaria late at night. Bulgaria was still a very backward and very hardline Communist country. As we looked out the train window, we could see barbed wire fringed guard posts. The Bulgarian soldiers were dressed in woolen great coats and fur hats with red stars on the front just like the Russian soldiers we had grown up seeing on tv. Because it was during the height of the Veitnam war, any Americans on the train were subject to special scrutiny and a certain amount of deliberate harassment. Before we were allowed to continue, we were “fined” a war tax because of our country’s “aggression and colonialism” in Viet Nam. Jim started making funny faces at and asking nonsense questions to the granite-faced Bulgarian customs officer. This officer was not amused by Jim’s antics and I told Jim to cut the crap and shut up, that we were not back in the U.S.A. This was the first time I had ever lost my temper with Jim, and I think this really took him back.

When we got to Istanbul, Jim, I, and the kid tagging along with us were exhausted. I led the other two to the same hotel near Hagia Sophia in the Sultan Ehmet district where I had stayed at on my way west the previous spring. The next day I told the other American that, under no circumstances, was he going to follow us all the way to India. If he wanted to get to India, he would have to get his own ass there; I was not a guide service. That being said, Jim and I went to the Iranian embassy to get transit visas through that country. In the afternoon, I took Jim to the big covered bazaar in Istanbul, and we wandered through the maze of carpet sellers and brassware shops. Due to my previous travels through this part of the world, I had become relatively inured to the constant harangue of shopkeepers and touts trying to pull us into this shop or that or trying to get us to buy this or that, and I felt pretty relaxed and at ease in my surroundings, foreign though they were. Jim, however, was becoming noticeably more and more nervous, which meant that his behavior was becoming more and more erratic. Finally at one point, he had started dancing up and down and spouting jibberish to a merchant who had latched onto his arm trying to pull him into his storefront. We were to only Americans in sight and all the Turks went dead silent as Jim pranced about pantomining crazily. I also was dumbfounded. I was used to my friend acting weird sometime, but not like this. When I tried to tell him to calm down and cut the crap, he simply ran out of the bazaar.

When I got back to our hotel room, Jim was sitting on his bed. The other kid was nowhere around and his pack was gone. Jim said that the kid had decided to head to Greece, that India on his own was too scarey. When I tried to talk to Jim about what had happened in the bazaar, Jim said he didn’t want to talk about it. At that time, I had not yet heard the term “culture shock.” Looking back, I can now appreciate the stress of someone traveling for 72 long and exhausting hours from middle-class New Jersey to the slums of Istanbul. Jim was a person who needed to be in control. I think his eccentric behavior was a way for him to exert control in otherwise threatening and out of control situations.

After hanging out in Istanbul for a couple of days waiting for our transit visas for Iran and Afghanistan, we left by bus for Ankara, and Jim seemed ok on this leg of our trip. From Ankara we took another bus to Erzurum. Still things were ok. From Erzurum, we set off towards the Iranian border. Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere in eastern Turkey in sight of Mt. Ararat, the bus stopped to pick up two European guys about our same age. Although it was still only late September or early October, the wind was chill and cold, and we were surprised that these two guys were not wearing any jackets. All they had on were thin cotton shirts and jeans. It was also peculiar that they had no packs or other belongings. When they got aboard the bus, we saw that they were barefooted. The two made their way to an empty seat in the back of the bus next to us. When they sat down, we asked them where they were coming from and what had happened. Their hands and feet were blue with cold and they were both shivering uncontrollably. As it turned out, these guys were a couple of Brits. They had been hitch-hiking across Turkey on their way to India. They had gotten a ride with a couple of Turks the day before in a small town east of Erzurum. Once they were far from any towns or villages, the two Turks had robbed them of all their money and possessions, including their packs, jackets, and even their shoes. They had no passports, no identification, and didn’t know what they were going to do. They had almost frozen to death over night as they had huddled together for warmth on the stone-strewn ground waiting for a car or truck to come by.

The bus stopped at the next town where there was a police station. Two Turkish cops came on the bus and motioned for the Brits to come with them. The Turkish police couldn’t speak any English and the Brits couldn’t speak any Turkish. However, after all the other Turks on the bus motioned for them to go with the police, they reluctantly did. I can only assume that they were put on a bus back to Ankara and that the British embassy there repatriated them. In any case, this was a sobering experience. Later the bus driver told us that these two were lucky that they hadn’t had their throats slit.

When crossed the border at Dougubayazit, a medieval looking fort on a ridge overlooking the border of Turkey and Iran. After going through customs where all our bags were completely taken apart and searched, we had to wait for a bus from the Irani side to come and take us to Maku, the first town on the Irani side. There were a half dozen Western hippies waiting with us, Europeans of one nationality or another, both male and female. We sat by the side of the rode on our packs for some time waiting for the bus, talking and sharing news and information. Eventually the bus arrived. Maku was a small town nestled under a huge rock outcropping somewhat reminiscent of Anasazi ruins in the American southwest. All the hippies went to the same cheap hotel where we were given beds in two large rooms, the males in one room and the females in the other. After finding dinner at a small restaurant nearby, we returned to our hotel and began undressing for bed when one of the girls in the next room let out a shriek. We all rushed into the girls’ room to see what was the matter. A large scorpion had crawled out of one of the girls’ backpacks when she was getting ready for bed. One of the guys crushed the scorpion with the heel of his boot and threw the flattened body out the window. Everyone decided that the scorpion had probably crawled into this girls pack while we were sitting on the side of the road at Dougubayazit.

The next day we caught a bus to Tehran. It was a very long ride, and we arrived in Tehran late at night. Jim had said that he was feeling feverish that afternoon, and he was delirious by the time we climbed down from the bus. I led him to the same hotel with the golden toothed whore I had stayed at before. However, there were no available rooms upstairs. Instead, we were taken to a large dormitory room in the basement which was very dark and dank. I quickly fell asleep, but Jim developed dysentery and spent the night shitting and puking. The next morning it was obvious Jim was very sick and we wouldn’t be heading anywhere for a couple of days. Having had dysentery myself the year before, I tried to help him the best I could. However, mostly Jim laid in the dark by himself in the dormitory.

There was an Irish guy heading to India staying in the same dormitory with whom I became friendly. We bought Jim some medicine and got him as clean and greaseless food as we could find. After several days, Jim was somewhat better but still kept to his bed. He urged me to go on to Afghanistan with the Irish guy and that he would meet me in Kabul. Jim knew that I had planned on going from Herat up north to Maimeneh, Andkhvoy, Sherbergan, Balkh, and Mazra-i-Sharif and then down to Kabul rather than the more usual route of Herat-Kandahar-Kabul. Balkh is the place where Zoroaster was born and Mazar-i-Sharif is where Hazrat Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Mohamed, fourth Caliph of Islam, is buried. I figured that, since it would take me longer to get to Kabul this way than it would for Jim to go the more usual route, we should arrive in Kabul at approximately the same time.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about this proposal. One part of me felt like I was abandoning my friend. On the other hand, Jim was behaving strangely and seemed to be almost malingering. Therefore, I eventually agreed to Jim’s idea and set out for Mashhad and Herat. In Herat, I visited a mosque where an old man informed me Sufis gathered every Friday evening. I asked him if I could come to the service and he said that I would not be welcome. I had 50 or so words of Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi or Persian. After hanging out in Herat a day or two, the Irish guy and myself caught a bus for Mainmeneh, a four day journey through the mountains and deserts of northwest Afghanistan. We were the only tourists on the bus which was mostly filled with Afghan men in traditional dress, many of them carrying old bolt action rifles of one sort or another.

Several times each day, the bus would stop and everyone would get out. Sometimes these were “pit stops” for what the Afghans called “the return of the tea.” On these occasions, everyone would fan out to pee. The Afghan men would squat down to pee, throwing a handful of sand down the pajama bottoms as a kind of body powder when they were through. The Afghans were scandalized by our standing up to pee, and I tried to pee the same way the Afghans did. Other times we stopped to pray. On those occasions, all the men would line up facing in the direction of Mecca and pray. One of these times, it was clear there was a difference of opinion about the exact direction they should face. There was a bitter argument and the two men most involved almost came to blows. Finally the situation was resolved by some of the men lining up in one direction and some of the men lining up in another.

We would also stop at teahouses or chai khana for tea. The choice was either chai sia or chai sow or, in other words, black tea or green. Both came in clear water glasses a third filled with sugar. As one refilled their cup, the tea got less and less sweet. In the evenings we would put up at tea house. Everyone would troop inside to the central room where we would sit on carpets and eat dinner. After dinner, everyone would simply go to sleep on the floor where they were. In the morning we would buy dried fruit and nuts and flat pieces of bread called nan to eat that day as we bounced around the hills of Afghanistan. At most villages, there were round watermelons for sale which were especially delicious.

One day on this trip, someone pointed to something out the window on our side of the bus. There was much shouting and gesticulating in Dari and suddenly a half dozen rifles were sticking out the window followed by a ragged volley of shots. On the side of the hill was a fox running for its life, puffs of dust rising all around it as the bullets on my fellow travelers missed their mark. Although none of the Afghans hit this fox, this interlude caused much merriment on the bus. Not long after, two Afghan men sitting in the seat in front of my Irish mate and me turned around and started trying to talk with us. With my limited Dari, some Urdu, and some Hindi, we carried on a lively though rudimentary conversation. Mostly this consisted of these men’s pointing to some part of our clothes or kit and asking chan, “how much?” These two took particular interest in my friends watch. Both these men were dressed in traditional Afghan turbans, vests, and pajamas and both were armed with rifles and bandeliers. An Afghan sitting on the other side of the aisle had a little English and he tried to act as translator. Through this man we came to understand that the two men in front of us wanted us to visit them for a couple of days. This seemed like a very exciting prospect, and the Irish guy and I talked it over.

Not long after, the bus stopped in a draw where there were several of the black felt tents the nomads lived in. The two men in front of us made to get off and urged with their gestures for us to follow them. However, at the last moment, we decided to stay on the bus. When the bus started back up again, some of the other men sitting around us started talking excitedly to the man who had acted as our translator. After much shaking of heads and clucking of tongues, the translator made us understand that we were lucky that we had not gotten off to stay with the other two men. They were well known bandits and the other men on the bus felt certain we would have been robbed and killed if we had entered these men’s tents.

In Maimeneh we had to change from the bus we had been riding on to an open air jeep. The land up in this corner of Afghanistan was flat and arid. We were only 50 or so miles from the Russian border. There was a rich merchant in our jeep, a poor teenage boy, and one or two other men, including a long-bearded mullah. These men were very interested in us and we spent a fair amount of time trying to communicate between each other. The merchant had some English, and it was through him that the mullah asked what we were doing in Afghanistan. The Irish guy simply said he was traveling for the fun of it. I, on the other hand, tried to explain that I was a Buddhist on pilgrimage. Afghanistan had once been a Buddhist stronghold, so Afghans know what Buddhism is. When I pantomined the Buddha sitting in meditation, the mullah finally understood what I was trying to say. He then looked very contemptuously at me and began chanting a verse from the Quran or some other Muslim scripture, I’m sure extolling the virtues of Islam.

At another point in this jaunt, the merchant was telling us how good President Kennedy had been. Actually, this mostly consisted of saying Kennedy and then holding his hands over his heart with a beatific look on his face. I had several Kennedy half dollars on me to use as baksheesh when the occasion arose. This seemed to be one of those occasions. I gave the merchant one of these half dollars which he accepted very enthusiastically. I kept these half dollars in my Tibetan shepherd’s bag which was the sole bag I had with me. When we got to Balkh, we went into a teahouse. The teenaged boy stayed in the jeep, and we assumed he was staying in order to watch over everyone’s belongings since the other men left all their bags in the jeep as well. When we came out of the teahouse, the boy was gone and some were all my other half dollars.

We finally arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif in the late afternoon. We found a guest house in which to lodge and had a dinner of mutton, Afghan rice pilaf, and nan. The next day I visited the Blue Mosque which is the tomb of Hazrat Ali. Otherwise, Mazar-i-Sharif was a dusty, uninteresting little city in the middle of the desert. Therefore, we didn’t stay long but caught a bus for Kabul via Kholm. In Kabul I went to the main post office and checked poste restante for any letters from Jim, but there were none awaiting me. The last time I had been in Afghanistan, I had learned about the Buddhist statues and grottoes at Bamiyan. Bamiyan is small valley in the central mountains which had once been an important Buddhist center. Hundreds of monks had carved meditation cells in the sandstone cliff which lined one side of the valley. There were also some monumental standing and seated Buddhas. Although the Muslims had early on cut off the faces and heads of all these statues, they were still extremely beautiful. Therefore, I decided to go to Bamiyan. My Irish friend was not interested in either religion or art, so this was where we parted company.

I bought a plane ticket for Bamiyan and went to the airport on the outskirts of Kabul. The plane was an old three engine German Foker. The passengers got in and the pilot revved up the motors. However, something was wrong with the motor right outside my window. The pilot shut down all the engines and we were told there would be a slight delay for a small repair. A mechanic dressed in Afghan pajamas and skull-cap came out to the plane and climbed up on a ladder to work on the engine. Watching this man tighten this or that part and take off and reattach this or that piece of equipment was not very reassuring. He didn’t seem to look very confident in what he was doing, nor did he seem very careful. However, eventually he was satisfied at what he had done, the pilot revved the engines back up, and we took off over the mountains and valleys on our way to Bamiyan.

Bamiyan was a jewel of a valley. Living now as I do in Colorado, it reminds me today of the Four Corners area. Bamiyan is situated 138 miles northwest of Kabul at an elevation of 7,500 feet above sea level. The sandstone was a rich orange color, the vegetation at the bottom of the narrow valley was intensely green, and the sky was intensely blue. One side of the entire valley for more than a mile was honeycombed with caves and festooned with statues of the Buddha. There was a single hotel where rich and poor alike stayed. After checking in here, I took myself to the cliff which had been a thriving monastic community for several hundred years before the Muslims had put every soul to the sword and every sutra to the flame. I first went to marvel at the two largest statues. One was 150 feet tall and the other was 115 feet tall. Then I climbed up into some of the monks’ cells and attempted to meditate. After some time, a caretaker came and motioned for me to come down, pointing at a sign in several languages that climbing in the caves was strictly forbidden. Reluctantly I climbed down and spent the rest of the day walking the length of the valley and sitting in one of the teahouses looking up at this most impressive archeological site. It is hard to believe that 30 years later, Muslim fanatic finished the work started by their ancestors by completely dynamiting all the statues out of existence.

After a couple of days hanging around Bamiyan, I caught a bus back to Kabul. I checked into the same hippie hotel I had stayed at on my trip west several months before. I had given Jim the name and address of this hotel, but the owner said that no one named Jim Valby was registered. Once again I went to the post office to see if there was any message from Jim. This time there was but it was postmarked from Tehran. I sat down outside the post office to read what Jim had to say. He explained that, after I had left Tehran, he had gone to a hospital and been treated. As soon as he had been discharged from the hospital, he bought a plane ticket back to the U.S. Jim said he was sorry to disappoint me by not accompanying me on this trip and he wished me good luck. Similar to how I had felt when Jim had left our camp in British Columbia, I was devastated. Although I was by now used to hooking up with this traveling partner or that, Jim’s return to the U.S. left me feeling extremely alone. Perhaps it was because the other hippies I met traveling to and from India where not looking for anything in particular except cheap dope, cheap living, and the novelty and romance of the East. Jim understood my quest. He understood what was driving me to and fro, this way and that across continents and oceans. Now I was alone again with my daemon. With a heavy heart I returned to my hotel. Tomorrow I would set off to Jalalabad and thence Pakistan and India, “dirty, fucking India.”