Atlantica - 01.06.2006, Page 58

AT L A N T I CA 57
ENCLAVE a
word of mouth. The route to self-knowledge wasn’t
revealed in the pages of the latest mainstream guide.
In 1970, a London “information charity” – sustained
by donations from Paul McCartney and The Who
– published an Asia Overland travel newsletter. Its
first edition, printed in a dingy room smelling of
meths and running to a dozen mimeographed pages,
sold out as soon as it hit the street. That same year,
on a park bench less than a mile away across town,
a young engineer named Tony Wheeler fell in love.
He and Maureen – his wife-to-be – decided to drive
across Asia, reaching Sydney penniless on Boxing
Day 1972. “I bet we could do a book,” Wheeler said,
and in a month he wrote Across Asia on the Cheap.
Lonely Planet was born, its first guide also selling out
in a week. A generation was learning how to move
through the world alone and with confidence.
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the
magic buses touched down in jumbled, medi-
eval Kathmandu. Drivers named Blossom and
Chattanooga Bob lit their pipes of Mustang at the
Eden Hash Centre. Cat Stevens wrote songs in a chai
shop in Asantol. Road-sore overlanders checked into
the Hotchpotch and the Matchbox, dirty warrens of
cell-like rooms with low, ornamental, head-cracking
doorways, and debated how best to heal both their
aching backs and the world. At the Bakery (with its
mosaics of the zodiac, I Ching hexagrams and the
best record player in Nepal) many newcomers sold
their jeans for strings of amber and red-felt boots
embroidered with flowers. Newari snake charmers
played their flutes outside the central post office.
Crows squabbled in the old palace trees, their black
wings sweeping over the terracotta rooftops.
Beneath them the Intrepids tripped out of smoky
rooms, popped into the mud-floored market to buy
bananas, then met friends at a curd shop to wonder
aloud if their final destination really was the king-
dom where the Himalayas meet the heavens. “But
where to now, man?” they asked with unexpected
surprise. “Where to now?”
Nepal wasn’t the end of the road. Today the
majority of us travel for a change of scene. Few of us
want to be reshaped by the journey. We renew our
For many travelers Kathmandu was the end of
the road, the ultimate destination where the
Himalayas meet the heavens. Bobby Hughes
was an Intertrek driver. He called those days
“an exceptional time spent in exceptional
places. The job was the best one I ever had in
my life. We never could get bored: stroppy bor-
der guards, even stroppier Bedford trucks, and
female passengers who let drivers get away
with things only rock singers could!”
PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS WEEKS 1974
Eric Bengston from Nebraska in Goa, India. Eric left the day Nixon resigned and
returned to the US when Reagan was shot, travelling for eight years, working on and
off as a construction worker in Germany, teaching scuba diving in Israel and selling
vitamins in Papua New Guinea. He was one of the few travellers who went both ways
on the overland trail, and got caught in a riot in Tehran in 1979. The Iranians pushed
him into a phone booth to protect him from the mob.
On his return to the US, Erik worked at the American Youth Hostels - Los Angeles
Council, and ran the old San Pedro hostel for many years. He vanished in the 1990s.
PHOTOGRAPHER: CURT GIBBS 1978
Maureen – soon to be wife of Tony – Wheeler
emerging from the Central Hashish Store,
Kathmandu. In the Sixties and early Seventies
hashish was legal in Kathmandu and the various
hash shops had lurid calendars, business cards
and slogans like “your oldest and favourite joint”.
Maureen claims she was emerging from changing
some money in the Central Hashish Shop, since
sometimes they were a front for moneychangers,
which was illegal.
At the end of this trip Tony Wheeler founded
Lonely Planet travel guides.
PHOTOGRAPHER: TONY WHEELER 1972
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