INTRODUCTION.
Too many years ago to comfortably recall, well 54 to be exact, as a 19 year old, I was given the opportunity to drive a Land Rover to Australia. Obviously not all the way, because since the continents shifted, a couple of sea crossings have become necessary, but basically most of the journey can be made by road. It’s a long way and the distance depends on the number of countries visited.
In 1963 there were a few places that were closed to land travellers, Burma and parts of the USSR were among them, but today almost the whole of the Middle East must be considered impassable, and I would guess that poor old Burma remains closed. The result of 54 years of progress being that we are a lot less free than we were in the zany 1960s.
The journey that my friends and I made was no more dangerous than anything involving 6 young people with an average age of 22, and a couple of Land Rovers, and we had our share of mishaps. Neither was the journey particularly ground breaking, lots of people of all ages were travelling around the world in a variety of ways, some hitch hiked, some walked and a distant cousin of mine rode his bike to India, so what follows is simply an adventure shared by Ian, Warwick, Helga and myself, plus our two hitch hikers.
The concept of trying to write the story was suggested by my son, Ben, who discovered a box of fading colour slides in the loft. He knew very well that I would never actually do anything about it unless there was some sort of deadline involved, so unbeknown to me he contacted a magazine, and interested them in the story. The first I knew of the project was when I was contacted by Classic Land Rover with a request for 5000 words and some photos, within 6 weeks please.
I cannot pretend to be a writer, and can only apologise for what follows. Additionally I haven’t tried to produce a daily log of where we went, nor how much petrol the Land Rovers used. What I hope has come out of this exercise is a light hearted account of three months travelling undertaken by 6 young people.
The city names are those current at the time of the journey, and although I have used the internet to check my facts and spellings, have taken no more than that from my searches, but what has been a truly surprising result of those has been the growth of some of the tiny places we visited, one example being Penang Island in Malaysia. We spent Christmas 1963 on Batu Ferringhi and what we found was a magical strip of tropical sandy beach with a couple of rustic huts and a beach bar called The Golden Sands, but try putting ‘Batu Ferringhi’ into Google, I won’t attempt to describe all of what is there now, but the area has become ‘The Golden Sands Resort’ and is a multi million dollar holiday complex, the children of the owners of the beach bar must be very happy. I suppose it would be selfish to hope that it had never changed, now thousands of holidaymakers can enjoy the place, and lots of jobs have been created as a result, but all the same……………………….
This part of the journey finishes in Singapore, with the Land Rovers travelling on to Australia by ship, the adventure continued there, Ian travelled thousands of kilometres in the North West before finally settling in Melbourne. Warwick started a new life in Sydney and is still living in Australia now. I travelled in the north and east and will continue this story with a report of driving the Birdsville Track in 1964, and the return journey through Egypt and North Africa in 1965.