June 8, 1963

This was mother’s birthday.  We gave her the gifts we had chosen in Lahore, a facsimile of a seal from Harappa, a napkin ring and a Pakistani spoon for her collection.  We got up early, got breakfast over and repacked the car and got away quite early.  As we got into the car we rushed back for a picture.  The place looks like Kashmir with tall cypress trees and lovely cool gardens.

The scenery as we came down out of the Sulaiman mountains was tame compared with our climb up the night before through those mountain gorges and plunging valleys.  We wound through rolling hills for quite a while.  At one place the road crew signaled to us to stop and asked for sugar for their tea.  We should have been generous and given them some but were afraid about getting more for ourselves.

We stopped for a tea break at a lovely little stream which crossed the road, with pink oleanders lining its banks.  We got out and bathed our feet.  Patty put her cup of tea down in the stream where it crossed the road and when a truck came it ran right over the top of the cup but did not touch it.  We drank our tea, fed the huge minnows and felt refreshed.

We got down out of the mountains at last and drove up a long valley, flanked by higher mountains on both sides.  It looked almost like desert, rocky and dry with no trees and only very dry grass and bushes.  We saw some signs of villages and passed a few Muslim graveyards.  Each grave was marked head and foot with stones.  From time to time we passed local travellers and gave a couple of them rides.  One man, dressed in a voluminous white shirt, beautifully tucked and stitched, rode with us quite a long way. 

We tried for a long time to find a shady place to stop for lunch, and finally came to a high domed rock on the right of the road and a little spring on the left, bubbling up out of the ground and winding away in small stream.  There were houses and a few trees there.  We ate and drank water from the spring.  We had our watermelon and were ashamed when the watching children grabbed up the rinds and ate the white right down to the skin.  We gave them sweets.

There were fruit orchards once in a while.  We stopped at Loralai to buy tea to fill the Thermoses and got some apricots.  We stopped for tea by a swift canal under trees and ate apricots while we cooled our feet.  Daddy had bought some Pathani chappals (tribal sandals with airplane tire soles) at Loralai.

As it got toward evening we began to climb the ridge of mountains between us and Quetta.  We had hoped to reach Quetta by night but were still a long way off and saw we would have to camp for the night.  It had been terribly hot all day and we were all wilted.

Again the cool air felt wonderful.  There were evergreen trees and lovely woods and we kept going higher and higher looking for a flat place to camp.  We wanted a stream too.  We finally found a big flat place.  It was getting late and would soon be dark.  A man came up who must have lived nearby and promised to bring us some water from a spring.  He brought a little but it was muddy.  Patty had spilt the first bucket or something.  Anyway.  It was enough.

This was the first time we pitched the tent and the bistar (canvas bedding roll) slipped out of Johnny’s hands while he was unpacking and it tore the tent.  [Anyway we did not use that tent very many times after that.]  We got into bed fairly quickly.  It was getting cold.  Johnny slept up on the top of the Microbus and got the coldest but we all froze that night.  It turned out we were at an altitude of about 10,000 feet.  We started off in the morning we began to go downhill right away.  We had spent the night in a pass!  We came down to Ziarrat, the “hill station” for Quetta and stopped there for a picture.

Overland India to England 1963

We were a family of four children and my parents worked for the church in India.  In 1963 my parents were due for a furlough, a time back in the U.S. for continuing education and a break from the work in India.  My dad convinced the church board that it would be less costly for them to give us the money for the equivalent of six of the cheapest steam ship tickets and let him purchase a car which we would drive from India to the U.K.  than to pay for us to all travel on the ship itself.   Whatever his argument they were convinced and he proceeded with the plan.  He contacted Volkswagen in Germany, by letter, as there were no telephones or any more modern means of communication in 1963 in central India, and ordered a red Microbus.

The Microbus was delivered to Karachi and my dad traveled by train to go from India to Karachi (requiring a visa in his U.S. passport to enter Pakistan) and take delivery of the car from the ship.  He then drove from Karachi north to Lahore where my mother had taken the four of us children, ages 16, 13, 10 and 4.  It was a 675 mile drive from Karachi to Lahore and the temperature was hovering around 110 the whole way. 

My dad had promised me, the very teenaged 16-year-old, that we would not have many days of hot weather.  Having grown up in the Himalayas I was quite unaccustomed to hot weather and was very fussy when I was too hot.  We had special storage cupboards built in India and a tent sewn of heavy canvas which was packed into a large tin trunk.  We had two Jerry cans of gasoline to carry with us as there would not be many places to purchase fuel on the Pakistan/Iran/Turkey portion of the trip.  Ultimately, the heavy load, the high temperatures and the relatively small, air-cooled engine of the Microbus meant we had numerous breakdowns as values burned out, one after another.  But that is a story for another time. 

Here is the diary of what I wrote about the first day of the trip:

Our trip has begun at last.  Daddy got us all up at 3:00 a.m. and we sleepily wandered around putting the last things into the car.  It was lovely and cool because of a dust storm the night before.  The Bells (our hosts) got up and gave us some cocoa and coffee to keep us awake and last us until we could eat breakfast.  They had been wonderful hosts, taking us to the swimming pool, keeping us very comfortable in their lovely home and smoothing our way with travel advice.  At last we were off at 4 a.m.  [We left the first thing behind – John’s good shoes.  We did not miss them till several countries later.]  The weather the last few days had been 105 or higher so the cool morning air felt wonderful.  We drove out of Lahore by the pearly light of a full moon sinking slowly westward.

At about 7:30 a.m. we stopped and bought some tea for our Thermoses at the bus station.  There were crowds of people around and when we asked we found the bus drivers were on strike.  We drove away from the staring crowds and flies and found a quiet spot in the country on the bank of a canal to eat our breakfast.  The current was strong in the canal and the water looked muddy and sinister.  The water was high in the canal and the grass all around was very green.  We got a glimpse of a cute little marmalade colored kitten while daddy bought us a watermelon to eat later on.

We started off again and as we went the day got hotter.  We found some nice big, red plums to buy along the way and ate them thirstily.  Bobby ate too many and soon he was sick, vomiting all over himself and the car.  We found a tap and gave him and his clothes a bath then and there.

There was plenty to see, different looking than India already;  sand dunes like in a Foreign Legion movie, palm trees and camels, strange looking people in long shirts and baggy pants.  The road was very good and we clipped along at a good rate.  Things were new and different so we kept awake and watched.

When we got to Muzzafagarh we drove around till we found the bazaar and bought some curry and tandoori rooti.  We found the Guest House compound and stopped there to eat.  It was 118° Fahrenheit and we were all feeling the heat and glare.  We found a tap and washed arms, legs and heads in an attempt to cool off.  Daddy lay down and tried to sleep a bit.  The food we had bought tasted good and we ate like we’d never seen food before.  After all we had already been on the road for eight hours.

 To keep cool through the afternoon we wet towels and draped them over our heads.  It did keep us from passing out with the heat but we all caught colds from it.  The towels would be dry again very quickly so we kept wetting them.  We wished we had gotten curtains over the windows.

We had to drive north almost 50 miles to cross the Indus Barrage opposite from Taunsa.  There were real sand dunes, very poor, marginal looking fields.  The dam was a huge thing and when we stopped in the middle you could hardly see to the sides.  There were no banks to be seen straight ahead, just miles of boiling brown water.  It was lovely and cool in the spray.  Patty said the water looked happy to be let out of the dam as it roared under us.  We walked down a little staircase and here just about on top of it.  Exciting!

We reached Dera Ghasi Khan for tea.  We got out stiffly and had a cup, got two packages of cookies and some gas.  At the gas station the wind began to blow and we dove for the car and got going again.  It was a terrible dust storm.  It blew for about an hour and was very hard to drive through.  We had the windows shut tight and rolled along in our little portable oven.  It was surprising how little sand came in the windows.  We needed the headlights to inch along, the wind howled and dust shifted across the road like snow drifting in a blizzard.  We finally drove out of it and saw lovely, high mountains up ahead – the Sulaiman Range.  We hopped out of the Microbus to stretch and a picture, so glad to be through the dust and the hot day’s dash across Pakistan.

It was a magnificent climb into the mountains.  Just up and up though beautiful steep mountains.  We drove about 30 miles twisting higher and higher on breath-taking hairpin turns, hardly able to imagine where the road would find a way to go on up.  The strata of the rocks was gorgeous, it looked like the Grand Canyon only we imagined this was much bigger and far more beautiful.  The colors in the sunset were beautiful.  At 7:30 p.m. or so we got to the rest house at Ft. Munro.  This is where all the local tribal chiefs have their summer houses and come up out of the heat to politic with each other and rearrange their feuds. 

We were all exhausted after our 600 plus mile drive and stumbled around gratefully getting our things into the guest house and getting ready for supper and bed.  It got dark and we had difficulty with the lights.  The rest house had dhurries on the floor, lovely beds, curtains, all kinds of furniture.  We fell into bed as soon as we had eaten and cleaned up – grateful for the coolness of that high place.