Dust on My Feet: A Panegyric to an Overland Journey from KATHMANDU to LONDON 1979

On my first assignment as an Overland tour leader for Sundowners in July 1979, I was literally thrown in at the deep end. I was sent, along with a Kiwi driver, Merv, in a Capricorn Overland Seddon coach, to Istanbul to meet a group of mainly New Zealanders and Australians who were flying in from Kabul. The group had left Kathmandu several weeks earlier in a Sundowner's coach with another driver and courier, as tour leaders then tended to be called, and after travelling across India and Pakistan had driven up the Khyber Pass to Kabul in Afghanistan. Politically there was much unrest in Afghanistan with Soviet Russia asserting its influence, positioning itself for the invasion of Christmas Eve the same year. Iran was also in turmoil, the Shah had fled in February, anti-American political rhetoric was at its height and it was unknown how the ‘Revolutionary Guard’ would react to Western tourists. Sundowners felt it would be far safer to fly the group to Istanbul where they would be met by Merv and myself. I had been in Istanbul twice before, the first being in 1970 on my first Overland as a passenger, the second just a couple of months earlier on the Sundowners training trip. I had also been to Ankara and Cappadocia in central Turkey in 1970, but that was it, the rest of the journey through Syria, Jordan, Jerusalem, Iraq and back around coastal Turkey to Greece was new territory, as was the side trip to Egypt. The trip was successful and memorable and at the end of the tour I wrote a somewhat verbose panegyric of the Overland which, on looking back across the years, does really epitomise these fantastic journeys. I have quoted it here in full:

Capricorn Overland coach at the Ziggurat at Ur, Iraq

And now as Albion’s fair shores draw nearer, we come to the end of our journey, a journey that began in the snowy peaks of Nepal and ended ninety days later in the cool mellow lands of Old England. We have rubbed shoulders with the Sherpas of the Himalayas, the Pathans of the Khyber Pass, the Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates swamps and the proud Bedouin of the sandy wastes of the Middle East. We have travelled the roads of conquerors; Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the Persians Darius and Xerxes, Rameses II of ancient Egypt, Assurbhanipal the Assyrian, Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame and their Mongols; all passed this way. We have explored the crumbling remnants of once glorious civilisations – Nineveh and Babylon of the Assyrians, Memphis and Thebes of the ancient Egyptians, Aphrodisias and Side of the Greeks, Jerash and Pergamum of the Romans, Hatra of the Parthians and Petra of the Nabateans. We have visited some of the world’s greatest buildings – the incomparable white marble Taj Mahal, eternal testament of Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan’s love for his dead wife Mumtaz; the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, shimmering in the Pool of Immortality at Amritsar; the great Byzantine cathedral of Haghia Sofia in the centre of Istanbul whose great dome is a thousand years older than St Peter’s in Rome; the mighty Pyramids of Giza, still as solid as the day they were completed four and a half thousand years ago, and the now pathetic remains of the once magnificent Temple of Artemis near Ephesus, once a wonder of the Ancient World.

Overland group cooling in the waters of the Euphrates, Birecik, Turkey

We have stood upon the great Ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees, city of Abraham; explored the rock churches and dwellings of Cappadocia and scrambled through the narrow passages of the amazing underground city of Kaymakli. We have slept in the tomb-caves of Petra, the ‘rose-red city half as old as time’ and camped beneath the crazily perched monasteries of Thessalian Meteora. We passed by now silent battlefields where heroes once fought and died: Troy where once Achilles and Hector clashed in mortal combat; Thermopylae where Leonidas and the 300 Spartans died defending Athens from the invading Persians; Aleppo and Kerak, around whose walls Saracens and Crusaders battled furiously for control of the Holy Land; Gallipoli where Anzacs ‘from the uttermost ends of the earth’ stormed ashore on a fateful April morning in 1915; and Dunkirk with its lingering memories of the little ships rescuing a beleaguered British army from its beaches in 1940. We have walked the path Christ took as he bore his heavy cross to Golgotha, visited the spot in Bethlehem where the three wise men found the infant Jesus, and have swum in the Sea of Galilee upon whose waters Christ once walked. Along the river Meander, in Anatolia, we passed the spot where the talkative nymph Echo pined away through the love of the beautiful youth Narcissus; crossed the Hellespont into which the unfortunate maiden Helle fell from the back of the ram with the golden fleece as it flew through the air to Colchis where it was sought in later years by Jason and his Argonauts. We camped in the shadow of Mount Olympus from which lightning bolt-wielding Zeus sallied forth on his amorous escapades into the neighbouring valleys, and crossed the Tempe River where the unfortunate Daphne was changed into a laurel tree to escape the unwelcome advances of the god Apollo. We have stood in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi where once the ancient Pythia uttered ambiguous predictions that directed the destinies of the ancient Greeks. We have sat in the precincts of magnificent Karnak where the Egyptians of old cowered in the presence of the great god Amun-Re. In museums we have seen the solid gold coffin of the boy-king Tutankamun and gazed into the desiccated mummified face of the great Pharoah Rameses II. We marvelled at the bejewelled Topkapi dagger and the radiant Spoonmaker diamond in Istanbul, the bronze charioteer of Delphi, the Gandaran Fasting Buddha in Lahore, the lifelike rock crystal, onyx and malachite eyes of the Egyptian funerary statues in Cairo, and the little fertility god, Priapus, with his giant phallus at Ephesus. We have haggled with street vendors in many-templed Kathmandu and at the cremations ghats by the Ganges in Varanasi. After the teeming bazaars of Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul the clean sterile streets of northern Europe came as a relief to the flies and dirt of the Orient, and as the White Cliffs of Dover come into view from the misty waters of the English Channel we know that the journey is now at an end and we are left with amazing memories of this great Overland journey across the heart of Asia.