“The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than ever.” -Ken Kesey.
The Overland trek was not for the faint hearted. After 3,000 years of human infection, smallpox was finally declared eradicated in 1979. Until then, it was the world’s most feared disease. In the 20th century alone, it’s estimated to have claimed 300 million lives. The thirty percent fatality rate was part of the story. The other involved the potential loss of eyesight and the painful development of pus-filled lesions followed by pitted scars.
In 1975, the prevailing recommendation for international traveler’s departing Australia was to be vaccinated against smallpox, cholera, and typhoid. That was a painful but necessary experience.
Obtaining visas for the various countries we were traveling through was always a hassle. It wasn’t about showing up at the border of most countries and gaining entry and e-Visas were decades away. Lining up as many visas ahead of time took months of planning, especially for extended periods of travel.
Visas were gold, your permission to enter the country that could take weeks to obtain.
We’d have to take our passports to an embassy, consulate, or diplomatic mission, or sometimes even mail them in and wait for them to be returned. We also had to be sure they would not expire by the time we reached the country’s border. Problem was in trying to estimate our arrival dates. Our passport pages filled quickly with visa entries and exit stamps. Extension pages had to be added to our passports to accommodate all our visa stamps. The stamps were important but also created problems because where we’d been sometimes conflicted politically with where we were headed.
A visa or stamp of a previously visited country occasionally raised flags for border officials. We had heard stories and were warned by travelers who had been refused entry to certain countries based on the stamps in their passport. We learned to request not to have our passport pages stamped with the entry visa for Israel. A separate single page was issued, stamped, and slipped into our passports. An Israeli arrival stamp would pose a serious problem if we wanted to travel to any Arab country after visiting Israel. We were hoping to get to Jordan and maybe Egypt after Israel, but after hearing stories of backpackers being refused entry into those countries because immigration officials suspected they had visited Israel and were immediately refused entry and made to leave. Jordan and Egypt would have to wait.
Social media didn’t exist! And that was a blessing. We were never haunted by the need to constantly be plugged in to friends and the home we’d intentionally left behind. There were no ‘Instagram images beckoning us to follow the hordes to sites of mass tourism, or a digital universe to stifle our capacity for independent discovery. Destinations weren’t shared with influencers or ordinary travelers who packed the latest fashionable wardrobe for capturing self-promoting photographs beside iconic landmarks. Selfie sticks didn’t exist, so we didn’t have to witness people taking unnecessary risks for extreme selfies or ‘the perfect shot’ to garner as many likes as possible. Overland travel wasn’t regarded as a competition or a checklist in the ’70s, social media wasn’t a platform that existed to promote it. And hunting down Wi-Fi to access it was another hassle several decades into the future.
I’m pleased our generation didn’t have to think about the unchecked power of social media, and whether or not we had to succumb to the pressure of using it to influence or profile our travels. All we have besides the memories are a few fading photo prints. And that’s enough.
We also escaped one of the greatest cons of the century, and as a result, didn’t have to encounter an endless supply of discarded plastic water bottles along the way. If we found bottled water, which was rare, we saved and reused the bottle over and over. Mostly we quenched our thirst by drinking lots of coke and beer. When necessary we dropped a few iodine pills into our saved water bottle or canteen to purify the funky local water, but the taste was so horrid we reverted to beer or Coca-Cola. Ice was also forbidden. There were times when we were assured the water was safe to drink only to suffer terribly for it. Dysentery and vomiting was not fun and the combo together was pure hell. You just learned to live with a constant queazy stomach. Tetracycline was the cure-all and taken for all sorts of infections picked up on the road.
All the magic and adventure of the Overland Trail changed by 1979, when both Iran and Afghanistan became off-limits, the former due to domestic revolution and the latter to the Russian invasion. The ouster of Iran’s shah was marked with the burning of American flags, Levi’s and Rock&Roll were replaced with the traditional Chador and speeches by Ayatollah Khomeini. Westerners, particularly Americans, were no longer welcome. Meanwhile Afghanistan had come under siege from the Soviet Union. This magnificent country became a vicious battleground, and the paltry American hash and hostel revenue was replaced by significant U.S. military aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. The world was changing everywhere.
Today, the iconic markers along the Overland Hippy Trail have mostly vanished. The backpacker-friendly hostels of Kabul, Tehran and Kathmandu are no more. Cheap bus line travel had dried up with the closing of borders and political unrest. The Pudding Shop is still open in Istanbul but a far cry from its glory days of the 70’s. A few faded photos on the walls are the only memories left of that time. Afghanistan’s Chicken Street and Sigi’s, major stopping points for us backpacking travelers were both destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The haunts and dives of old “Freak Street” in Kathmandu were ruined by the 2015 earthquake. The continuing troubles in Myanmar and the Middle East make them seem like nothing more than faded memories of a past life.
In 100 years like in 2124 we will all be buried, or our ashes will be scattered like our relatives and friends. So much of what we spent our adult life buying, collecting and saving will be scrap. Our homes, cars and memories gone.
After we die, we will hopefully be remembered for a few more years, then we are just a photo saved, and a few years later our history, photos and stories will disappear into oblivion. We won’t even be memories. If we just pause to analyze this notion, maybe we would see how wasteful the dream to acquire it all was. I’d like to think our approach to living, our ideas of life would be different, and we would be different people.
Always having more, no time for what’s really valuable in this life. I’d change all this to live and enjoy the walks I’ve never taken, the places I didn’t visit, the people I never got to meet, the smiles and hugs I didn’t give, kisses for our children and our loved ones, the stupid jokes we didn’t have time for. Those would surely be the most beautiful moments we’d remember. Yet so many of us waste our days with greed, selfishness, jealousy and intolerance. Thinking that was the answer.
Waiting, freezing before the Turkish Iranian border.
Pagan, Burma. Land of a thousand temples.
Hashish anyone?
Young Afghan friends.
