After mentioning some of my hitchhiking experiences in earlier posts, I came across this article by Hilary Bradt in The Guardian. In it she talks about her own hitchhiking experiences. At the age of eighty two she has been hitchhiking every decade of her adult life.
While the mind can very easily go to possible dangers of standing beside the road waiting from a lift from a stranger, especially for a loan woman, or for that matter the dangers of picking up a complete stranger, I would argue that such incidents rarely happen.
I feel as though I am pretty tolerant of different toilet facilities that one might encounter in daily life. This is especially so for me while traveling. I’ve used some very basic, very impersonal, very smelly toilet facilities. I’m not saying that I enjoy them or go looking for them, but I find that I can let my guard down and tolerate more.
However none of this stops me from grading my experience and I think the toilet that I used on my flight from Maui to LA yesterday evening was the worst that I can remember. Where do I start…or maybe I shouldn’t?! Discoloured toilet seat, paper littering the floor and something of a questionable nature on some of that paper. Water everywhere. I tipped toed in and shakes off the paper as I walked out. Thankfully only one visit was necessary!
While going through my mixed up and messily catalogued, that is a very generous term, slides, I came across these two images of the Taj Mahal. I am pretty sure that I have some more, but the state of my slide storage means that I am unlikely to come across them in a hurry, chance discoveries aside. So I scanned in what I had found with my rudimentary equipment and am sharing them here.
This story started as an exploration of the speed of travel, but I decided that there was a story within that just about my traversing of the Khunjerab Pass. The Pass is closed for a part of the year simply because of snow, it sits at 4,693 meters (15,397 feet), and for the rest of the year is at the whim of politics. I made the journey in 1989, only a few months after the student protests in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent Chinese government crackdown.
I have long loved rail travel. Sitting in a carriage, watching life go by. Gratefully allowing others to take the strain of the transportation logistics. Perhaps striking up conversation with a fellow traveler, or more likely than not sitting quietly reading, writing, watching, sleeping.
When I got older and threw a backpack on my back railway stations took on another significance for me. That of unknown adventure. Yes, I might have had a ticket in my hand stating an intended destination, but as I looked out at the train tracks disappearing into the distance from the station platform I had a sense of unknown adventure ahead.
Two boys playing cricket just off the Karakoram Highway
While traveling the Karakoram Highway through Pakistan I stopped in Passu for three nights. My memory of Passu in July of 1989 was it just being made up of a small collection of houses. Nothing else. One of those was the guest house that I stayed in. This was run by a lovely man who use to be in the Pakistan army.
We visited the town of Odeceixe just over a week ago. I was tasked with finding the destination for the day, somewhere where we had not visited and not far or on the coast. So I picked Odeceixe at random.
At first glance there appeared nothing special or unique about the town. When we arrived it seemed very quiet. Situated about 3km from the coast there were few people around. We skirted the edge of town, and after two hours of driving I parked by what looked like some fields on one side which stretched to the coast, although out of view.
Close up of a beach.
This is a short story. As I go back through the slides of my travels, I am interested in what caught my eye. What I was seeing while I was on the road. One way I look at this is what my heart was drawn to, what interested me, what moved me.
This slide could be from anywhere, at least from any beach in the world.
I sit here in 2024 in a house in Portugal, and a piece of music transports me back to 1985, to a hiking hut somewhere in mountains of the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Almost forty years have passed, but the memory is vivid and the effect of that time on my life feels as real now as it did all the way back then.
Let me give you some context.
April Photoblogging Challenge, Day 20: Ice suggested by @the
This photograph shows the terminus of the Batura Glacier in the Karakorum mountains of Pakistan. It sits at around 4,000m (13,123ft), and at the time that I visited the glacier terminated 0.5km from the Karakoram Highway.
Benaulim Beach, Goa, India.
A month ago I explained how I was capturing the slides that I am using in the “Story behind the Photograph” series (all of which can be found here (RSS), or under the map emoji 🗺️ in the menu bar above). Well I have now found a gadget that I was given a number of years ago. Its purpose is to digitize slides and negatives. Due to the device’s age, the scans are probably not the best.
Waiting at the border crossing
I was going through some more slides of my travels last night and this one has stuck with me through the day. Taken in July 1989, I recognized most of the faces, as well as the nationalities of some of those standing there, but could not put names to them. I found myself wondering where they are now? What happened to them after we parted ways on our respective travels?
A lot happened during my short time in Bodhgaya, and so I am spreading this section of the travels over a couple of posts.
Arriving into Bodhgaya with the top of the Mahabodhi Temple peeking above trees
One of the first things that we (myself and Ray, an American who I had met on the road and was currently traveling with) noticed on arrival in Bodhgaya was the number of people who walking around with patches over one eye.
A slide being projected onto a wall in a darkened room.
When I set off on my travels in the mid 1980’s, I took a SLR camera with me. From my memory I had two lenses, a 35mm and a zoom lens the size of which I cannot remember. I believe that I also had a couple of filters with me. I did not know a lot about photography, though had been reading a little on the subject, and wanted to take the best photos that I could to remember and give me a flavour of my time away.
Road from Gaya to Bodhgaya from the roof of a bus
Following my time in Patna, I continued my journey onto Bodhgaya by catching a train to the city of Gaya. I travelled to Gaya by train along with an American, Ray, whom I had met in Patna. I had an omelette for breakfast in my hotel room, settled up with the hotel owner and then caught a rickshaw along with Ray to the railway station.
I’ve just left Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram situated just outside of the small town of Sevagram in almost the geographical center of India. I had spent a couple of night’s at the ashram as part of a pilgrimage around India that I had set out on, to visit places connected with the life of Gandhi. He has been a big influence on my life, and I have read a lot by and about him.
Photo of a slide projected onto a wall.
It was mid November, 1989. I was four months into my journey through Central Asia. With my visa expiring, my time in Nepal was drawing to a close. Not feeling ready to go home, indeed a deeper sense of purpose and exploration beginning to arise from the trip thus far, I decided to travel down to India. I had left home with a few vague goals of things that I wanted to see or do, otherwise I was following my nose and seeing where the adventures would take me.
The original of this image was a slide. I projected it onto a wall and took this photo.
I initially posted this photo on September 3, 2023, but offered no context for it. Following the reception to my story about a photograph that I took of Mt.Everest at sunset and encouragement of Miraz and Maique, I have decided to revisit other photos that I have posted of my travels, as well as ones yet posted, and share their story.
Yesterday I posted a photograph showing the last rays of sunlight catching the summit of Mt Everest at the end of a day. After putting it up online, I was reflecting on the story behind the image, and thought that I would share it.
The year was 1989, the month September. I found myself in Nepal at what turned out to be a little under halfway through a journey that would take me through Pakistan, China, Nepal and India.
The summit of Mt Everest, peeking out from behind surrounding mountains, coloured orange as it catches the last rays of sunlight at the end of the day. This image was captured during a month long trek to the Solo/Khumbu region of Nepal around September 1989. Photo of slide projected onto a wall.
There’s a quote from the book Danziger’s Travel that has sat with me since I returned from my travels in the early 1990s. Danziger’s words spoke to how I felt on returning to my home country, Britain. I was feeling lost and his words told me that I was not alone.
Nick Danziger had returned from an extraordinary journey, traveling through Afghanistan during the war with Russia, crossing the Kunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China before it was open to foreigners, making his way into Tibet when that country as well was closed to foreigners, and after finally arriving in Beijing he found a boat to take him back to the UK.
Yesterday a conversation on Micro.blog brought back memories of an episode early in my travels in 1987. In the Micro.blog conversation I wrote,
I remember hitchhiking out of Estes Park many moons ago when I was just starting my travels. From my memory the breaks weren’t working properly on the vehicle that picked me. The driver managed to slow down, but I had to run, throw my pack in and then jump in after it.
I am not sure where this was taken, except that the country is India. I believe that it’s either the Lilajan River in Gaya, or the River Ganges in Patna. Like other recent photos that I’ve posted, it was taken in 1989.
Another photograph from my travels through the Indian/Chinese subcontinent between 1989 and 1990. This was taken near to Bodhgaya, Bihar state, India, possibly on the road on the way to the town. From the height of the photograph I wonder if I am sitting on the roof of a bus?
Kathmandu from across, I think, the Bagmati river. Like other photographs that I have posted this week, this was taken in 1989 during my travels through the Indian/Chinese subcontinent. Photo capture of a slide projected onto a wall.
