G'day Ron,
I've only just seen your post, the website I found most useful was FriendReUnited.com, but luckily I'd kept in touch with an Australian passenger by letter for many years and with the arrival of e-mail she put me in touch with other passengers that she knew. Another thing I did was to simply put a name into Google - that worked for me twice. As a driver I always kept passenger lists and I've still got some of them.

That old Maudsley, JXM 563, in the first picture was eventually sold in Afghanistan, where it could be seen running around the Kabul district, still with the Ramsgate sign on the front.

Did you travel with Swagman? Do you have any photos of your trip?

Last edited by Dave (29-Dec-2006 16:23:52)

This website has got me digging out more old stuff, photographs, paperwork, passenger lists, newpapers, etc - I'm glad I kept it all. Here is a picture of YRC 45, the AEC; I'd pulled up at a chaikhana somewhere between Kabul and Kandahar - this was westbound in September 1971. The bus had been washed in Delhi and looked very smart, but this was not to last for long for we had a lot of snow in the mountains of north Iran a week later, with worse to come in eastern Turkey.



The picture of Dorothy driving OTT 81 on the Iranian mud lake reminds me of another lady of that age who had been a passenger on one of our trips some years before. The passenger list for the Safari's bus above, going eastbound in July 1971, included two ladies travelling together, who were somewhat older than the rest. They had splendid names; Cts. Dorothea Gravina (Dot) and Mrs. Delicia Gastrell - known as Dish, and their birth years were 1905 and 1895 respectively. I wonder if the Swagman Dorothy and the Safaris Dot were the same person. Both of these (Safaris) ladies had led very colourful lives and spent many years in Asia - they could give descriptions of places that we were in, many years before.

They both went as far as Delhi and then I took some of the passengers down to Agra as an extra trip at their cost and when we got back to New Delhi the two ladies made their own way to Katmandu, where Dot was going to spend some time climbing - apparently she was a very capable mountaineer. Dish went on to Australia to her daughter at Wahroonga, NSW. Later in 1971 she passed away there and her daughter had saved the numerous postcards that her mother had sent during the overland trip. She then sent all these to the Sunday Observer newspaper who published them as a travel article on Sunday 2 January 1972; pages 27-28. I've still got the faded copy of the paper - I will try and and scan it if it's not too far gone. It's well worth reading, it's called "The Last Bus".

Hi Dave,

I'm Kate, daughter of John Fenwick of Overland Safaris. Just shown these to Dad (picture of him in your photo 2007-02-17) and he would love to get in contact - hopefully you could mail me?

These are the first pictures I've seen of the overland trips as all the photos and film were lost in a move so great to see them

Don't know if you'd remember but he married Gill (my mum) who he met on the bus in 1967 they moved to the westcountry mid seventies and now live on a smallholding.  They are still in contact with a few people from Oz / New Zealand.

Would be great to get in touch hope to hear from you soon

best wishes,
Kate

In July 1971 the departure point for the Safari's eastbound trip was the car park of the Windmill Pub on Clapham Common in South London, a couple of weeks later the bus acquired the front bullbar (or roo-bar) in the workshops of the trusted mechanic Aydin in Istanbul, that can be seen in previous pictures of this bus.

Minutes before we were about to pull away from the pub some clever clown of a bystander found the emergency cut-out switch and activated it - so we went nowhere until the diesel injection system had been reset.

In later years I tended to leave from the carpark of Totteridge Tube Station in North London, by then I was doing overland driving jobs for other companies.


In Novenber '71 I set off again from London and this picture is of the same bus along the south coast of Turkey, some passengers had asked to stop so they could go into the sea - this was now December and we hadn't a clue how the weather was to change. Less than a week later I had to buy a set of snowchains to cope with the trek up to Erzerum. We'd intended to go into Syria, then Iraq to Iran, to avoid the snow in eastern Turkey - I'd had enough of that coming back to England back in October, but this grand plan was thwarted by Syria and Iraq having a dispute that meant that we couldn't have got out of the country.


Just before we left the Mediterranean coast we came across a wrecked and abandoned Turkish bus miles from anywhere, so I stopped next to it to enable our crowd to swarm over it...

Hi K.D.

If it was 1971 then I may have been able to help you, are you sure it's in the latter part of 1972 that your father travelled? I've still some passenger lists and have posted the remains of the one for the westbound trip from NewDelhi to London 7 October 1971, I did have two Indian persons aboard but they appeared to have travelled on Indian passports. I will ask the few other people I'm in contact with if they know of the driver.

On the Crew List of this website is a Swagman driver named Dave Watt, he can be contacted through the site.

This is what's left of the draft list, before we had it typed up in Delhi. Taking a bus through a border without such documentation to present to the authorities was asking for trouble - they could make things very slow and difficult: Sometimes times they did anyway...

I did now and again, assist someone through the borders if there was a genuine problem, more the once I've approached a senior border official and quietly asked if a Special Permit was available for the person in question. It's about settling a price, usually US dollars or a bottle of Johhnie Walker would resolve a sensitive situation. Of course all this was long ago, I'm sure no-one's going to tell me it still goes on... 

Hi Kalpesh,

At the bottom of the Swagman Home Page is a button for Tour Operators, there are listed most of the companies you're looking for. I'd try Googling for Passengers or Re-unions connected with those company names.

Perhaps the story of your Dad's trip could eventually be posted on this Overland Forum...

On an Indian Travel website I found these two pictures of overland buses in 1975, they were posted by separate ex-passengers, in a forum thread called Kolkata-London Bus service? on www.indiamike.com

These buses are parked alongside the wall of the grounds of the Ayasofya Mosque in Istanbul, behind the camera is the Otel Büyük Aya Sofya. The first bus was apparently run as a one-man band operation, until I saw this photograph I'd never heard of Intercontinental Transits; by the mid-1970's there were quite a few people trying their hand at the overland trip business.

The two buses parked behind it were operated by Budget Bus of North London.


They slept out by this Budget Bus in Iran.



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From Google Earth a 21st. Century view of places travelled can be seen.

This is an aerial view of the Attock Bridge over the Indus River in Pakistan; a single track railway ran on the upper deck and a single track roadway on the lower deck. Long delays could be experienced here - sometimes eastbound traffic had the right of way for an hour or so and visa-versa. To get a large vehicle onto the bridge meant a really tight turn from the road through the bridge piers.

The lower level roadway is now for pedestrian use only, two new bridges were built to the north to accommodate road traffic.


This pair is of Srinagar and the Dal Lake in Kashmir; there is enough topological data in the software to show the mountains when the image is tilted and rotated, but not enough to depict the houseboats and buildings as three dimensional objects. Click the images to enlarge them.
     

Well, the old place still stands there: the Amir Kabir Hotel in Tehran.



This is the evidence from Google Earth, whether it's still an hotel or not, I don't know - there is what appears to be an empty carpark behind it. The central, island part of this establishment was like a ship in a dry dock, the balconies connected by bridges to the surrounding 'U' shaped structure.

The city has obviously moved on, there are lots of upgraded roads: elevated expressways, super-highways, fly-overs and all the rest of it. And even an underground rail system - that would have made it easier for us to get up to the 'White Cap' bar up the top of Ferdowsi - on the big square.       

I first stayed in the AK in late September or early October 1968 when I was co-driving a 'Safaris Overland' bus to India. Six or eight of us were in the big centre room at the front of the top balcony, and on the floor below was a lounge where I used to have chai, boiled egg and bread in the morning. Between then and 1977 I stayed there, except once in 1971, when I was driving overland buses, sometimes you could pick up extra passengers there.

Here is an extract from someone else's comments about the place:

"I'm not certain, but I think the owner(s) were Indian or Pakistani-not Iranian. Also, they used to collect the passports so 'guests' didn't simply jump down from the balcony onto the piles of tires stacked below and not pay their bill, etc."

To see what others also say about the Amir Kabir, click H E R E to link to the travel forum.

An enormous number of travellers stayed there over the years - like they do in many other hotels, but the Amir Kabir in Tehran was one of the key Overland landmarks - other examples are the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul which survived (http://www.mustafahotel.com), but the colourful and busy Thai Song Greet hotel in Bangkok is long gone.

The Mustafa room prices were very reasonable, below are the rates in 1971, and underneath that is the exchange rate guide from the Safaris brochure of the same year - the Mustafa was good value for your money, some people almost lived in the place. John and Harvey (Safaris drivers) and a few others spent a couple of months in there, when they were stuck in Kabul one winter in the early 1970's.

Recently I found four more photographs that I'd taken in 1968, whilst on my first Overland trip with Safaris. In those days I used a Kodak Brownie camera, which shot black and white, later on I got a Pentax Spotmatic SLR, this was tremendous improvement.

That first journey was not just to India, but via Australia and America, in fact a round-the-world trip. Just before I left Sydney in late '69 I took advantage of a tax avoidance opportunity: if you could prove you were about to leave the country within a stipulated period, then the purchase tax on certain goods would be waived, as long as you took the item(s) with you. So armed with my Chandris Lines boat ticket (Sydney to Los Angeles) I bought the new Pentax (50/1.4 lens), 135 mm telephoto, 2x converter lens and twenty rolls of 36-shot film, in a camera store on George Street. 

But back to the 1968 pictures, the first one is of three girls on the bus, and I've no idea whereabouts we were. The only one whose name I can remember is Penny (right) - some years later I arranged to meet her underneath the main clock at London's Victoria Station...

The second one is easier - we and the bus were on a Bosphorus ferry and were approaching the Asian side ferry terminal. This was a key step in the trip - leaving Europe behind. It's not the same feeling nowadays; hurtling over the Bosphorus Bridge on a motorway.

While we were in Istanbul for several days JF and myself took the bus to an establishment that called itself a Lubritorium, here the bus was to experience a so-called Greasage. This place was just off the coastal perimeter road of south-eastern Istanbul, and therefore not far from the Bosphorus. While the bus was being pampered with a grease gun, JF and I swam in the Bosphorus - briefly. The water wasn't very clean, but after I dived and resurfaced to touch the floating carcass of a dead dog, that was enough. 

The third and fourth is one of those occasions when the passengers yell Stop, this time it was the first camel sighting, so the price of rides had to be negotiated with the owner of the animal. In the last picture Arthur wasn't too sure about what he'd let himself in for. Where were we? I don't know, but it probably was either eastern Turkey or west Iran. We made a similar stop between Agri and the border crossing (Turk-Iran) at Bazargan when one of the passengers who was actually awake, spotted a bloke working the land by trudging behind an oxen with a primitive plough. Of course, there's usually somebody who wants to have a go - so this individual stepped forward to demonstrate how easy it was; and made a complete fool of himself, and slunk back onto the bus and buried his head in a book. I did wonder what he was reading, it was must have been a good read.
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Click images to enlarge them


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One more photograph from 1968 - taken by John Fenwick (Kate's father - JF) of me on the top floor balcony of the hotel used by Overlanders in Tehran; above the Amir Kabir Avenue, in late September 1968. I was wearing a suit and tie (with sandals) and clutching a single barrel 12-bore Mauser shotgun. The suit is easily explained: to successfully work as a design draftsman in Australia I'd imagined that a suit would be required, as I saw myself working in drawing offices when I arrived. In Sydney this turned out to be more or less the case, this was almost forty years ago and things were somewhat different to today. In my first Australian job, six months in the Engineering Department of a copper mine at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, wearing Levis and a shirt was acceptable. But I'd been working in design offices around North London before the first trip and it was unheard of to go to work without a tie, in those places.

As for the shotgun - well, I wouldn't like to be standing there holding it today.



That picture illustrates how it could be so cold in the Amir Kabir rooms in winter: when you opened the door of the room, you found yourself effectively outdoors. This is why over the Christmas period of 1971, most of us moved to the nearby Hotel Armstrong. I was feeling the cold that winter, and I was only 28 at the time; it's a lot worse now.

While we were in Tehran, it was a good chance to tip out the rucksack and get some washing done, sort out all your stuff, obtain any visas needed for further on, visit the Post Office to collect any Poste Restante mail, write letters, and so on. Out the bottom of my rucksack fell the suit, it survived very well, I'd wondered how to pack it before I left London and in the end I tightly rolled it up in a bag. And naturally, the old Maudslay bus wasn't left out - it went off to the Tehran Leyland dealer's workshop for a check-over and a good old lube-up. - it had a Leyland engine.

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Now, rapid forward to 1971, and of the first of my two jaunts that year, I've still got some pictures of passengers. This is the trip that included Harvey and John (JCH) and the passengers were a really good crowd, a bit different to the assorted crowd that John and I rounded up in New Delhi to fund the return journey to Europe, in October that year.

Click the images to enlarge them.
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These three dedicated historians, Denis, Al and Alan, are totally absorbed in exploring the ruins, but it looks as though Alan has spotted a bar in the distance.
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From Athens I drove most of the passengers across to Delphi for the day; here they are seen waiting for the usual stragglers, before we returned to Athens. That evening we went to an outdoor Wine Festival - so I'm told.
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Here's Hilary (top) and Sylvia, location forgotten. Sylvia had recently joined Safaris to work as a secretary in the London office. She came on this round trip to gain Work Experience, as they say today.
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Again, I forget where this was, but as one of our girls stepped down from the bus even the old men left the chai-houses to gape at this foreign goddess. It's an interesting study in male facial expressions, which I just captured from the driver's seat.
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Once again, we're held up by latecomers. This time it's leaving Faletti's Hotel in Lahore. To only a handful of passengers this was an unpopular place to stay. It wasn't cheap but it was a refresher in several ways, because the next night was usually sleeping on outdoor charpoys or indoors in fleapits.

The line up from left to right is: ?, Maria, Sylvia, Hilary, Al, Denis and Dish - Delicia, at 76 was the elder of our two senior citizens on the passenger list. Denis and Maria met on the bus and when they both arrived at his home in Queensland, they married - I visited them there in 1973, she was Canadian.
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Close-up of Denis.
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This scene does not contain any passengers, I took it from a Bosphorus boat trip (Istanbul) and it shows some Turks swimming - and one high diver.
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Wherever this was it looks as though they're waiting for a bus: Alan, Denis, Al, ?, Al and Dave. This last one went on to Australia and joined a TV company in Melbourne as a film editor. As far as I know, he's still there - in the same job,  he's another one I met in 1973 when I was out there. The chap whose name escapes me was of dual nationality (British-French) and I remember when he was strapped for cash and sold one of his passports in Kabul.
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A tranquil setting on the Dal Lake in Kashmir for Doug, Sylvia, Maria, Al and Hilary. Like a lot of these places we went to, I dread to think what they're like now - with all the air travel of today, let alone the political problems...
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Last edited by Dave (18-Nov-2007 00:17:01)

Here's some more of Isabel's photographs, taken on the Safaris trip that left London on 14 November 1971. We were running about 10 or 11 days late due to border closures and extreme weather - all this I've mentioned before.

The first one was taken on Christmas Day morning at Isfahan - we were having soup for breakfast, before driving south to Persepolis and spending Christmas Night in Shiraz. It looks like I was worrying about something, I don't know what, for the worst weather was behind us now.


This second and third ones were taken in the restaurant of the Armstrong Hotel in Tehran on the evening of 28 December that year; the occasion being my goodbye drink with the passengers. A telegram (they should be mentioned in the Remember This thread) had come from London informing me of my father's death, so I had to return home. Arrangements had been made through the Safaris London office for Harvey to travel from Kabul to Tehran and take over the AEC bus which had been now transferred to John's passport.

John (JCH) is on the left then ?, Zena, American Dave, a guy we nicknamed 'Chelsea', and others. 


The last one is me (just about) standing amongst some of the passengers - they were a terrific group of people, a couple of times I wouldn't have been surprised if they all wanted to call it a day and abandon that trip. The temperatures were so low and the amount of snow so colossal, that I could not have blamed them - but they wanted to go on.

Last edited by Dave (03-Nov-2007 00:42:04)

Click these pictures to see these YouTube samples of road travel on the Sub-Continent and in the Himalayas...

The second one reminds me of driving a left hand drive bus from New Delhi to Kathmandu, on my own - many times I could've done with somebody as a righthand eye. The last video is a real reminder of driving through Indian towns - it appears to work because they all think the same...if you tried to drive as if you were at home, then you'd be out of sync - and in trouble.
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Can anyone here remember those companies that used Bedford trucks for the (India) Overland - or even better, does anyone remember being at that scene? Looking through the Tour Operators part of this site, it shows that Exodus, Hughes Overland, Encounter Overland and Intertrek used them on their trips; I'm interested in finding out which company's (eastbound) truck pulled the Safaris AEC bus back onto the road in October 1971.

Driving back from India, I slid off the road between the Tahir Pass and Horosan, in Eastern Turkey; the driver of the white Bedford towed me out. John is sure that somebody on the Bedford recorded the event with a cine-camera - naturally we'd be interested in seeing the film, but can't recall the name of the driver or his employer, even though later on I left a bottle of whisky in their London office for the driver - when he got back. Any film or photos showing what it was like travelling in the back of those Bedfords would be good to see.
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Kevin - do you ever read this stuff?  If so, does this picture ring a bell?

Waiting for me to collect it at the Amir Kabir Hotel in Tehran, was a letter from my parents. You and Harvey had gone through a week or so earlier than me - and you must've seen the letter in the mail rack and scribbled this on the back of the envelope - thirty-six years ago today. Your bus was doing a fast trip, whereas I had attempted to do a southern route trip - a Winter Tour; but that was aborted due to political events, which resulted in us getting stuck in snow in Eastern Turkey; we ended up ten days behind - and eventually back on the straight through route. 

We had gone down to Isfahan and Shiraz for Christmas, spending a few hours at Persepolis on Christmas afternoon - the place was deserted, we hardly saw any other people there at all.
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Some more photos - July 1971, we had stopped in Yugoslavia to see what was going on at this colourful scene. I don't think these have been posted before, it was near Niš, it looked like a gypsy meeting, there was no noise to speak of. Some of our lot mingled with them but not being able to speak the language, didn't find out what it was all about.


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