1967 Catchup - Tehran to Afghanistan with a sidetrip to WWIII

What with vacation in New Mexico, followed by vacation in Seattle I am very much behind. Here is the start of catching up:

One final Tehran memory: A hamburger at the US Consulate dining room. Back in those days there were really no security worries at the Consulates and Embassies so we could wander around and pretty much help ourselves to anything we wanted.

Left Tehran May 9th
Left Mashad May 10th
Left Heart May 15th
Left Kandahar May 17th
Arrived Kabul May 17th

We traveled over a terrible road from Tehran to Mashad where we, natch, stayed in a terrible hotel for the night. Whilst taking a short stroll around Mashad we were stoned by children as Mashad is a holy city and we were infidels. Peter, a German buddy I met in Tehran, and I learned that the bus to the Afghan border was full. We hitched rides to Torbit-e-Jam where we found a meal and then walked 4 k out of town and sat in the too hot sun and through a cold night hoping for a lift to the border (4 p.m. to 11 a.m.). Two Germans picked us up and took us to the border where they were turned away as they had no Visa. An oil tanker took us into Heart for $1.30

May 12th Heart

Heart was a nice place with a beautifully tiled Mosque (mostly in Ruins) and friendly people. It was so cheap there that I traded my Gaz butane stove for a fist-sized chunk of very potent Hashish. This was my first ever purchase of an illegal drug.

May 16th -Kandahar

Flush toilets full of human waste, seemingly because no one told the Afghans how to pull-the-lever. A Heroin addict at the hotel caressing her syringe as I would our housecat. Flies all over the place thick bunches of them on anything edible and landing / crawling on us in profusion. We left as soon as possible.

Kabul May 17th to June 5th

Four of us in a cheap hotel room smoking Hashish, having our meals sent up from the dining room. We'd occasionally eat at one of the nicer restaurants (The Khyber) in town for a twenty-five cent steak dinner.

I had cereal in the lunchroom at the US Embassy too. We could wander about the embassy without supervision. In the lunchroom I picked my cereal and opened the fridge to select my milk. A wonderful moment of normalcy on the road.

I found the street of moneychangers and acquired some Indian rupees at an exceptional rate. It is illegal, of course, to take rupees into India but everyone seems to do it.

If we are in the hotel dining room we had an amazing sight each day. An older man would walk in with an enormous sack on his back. Inside the back was the hotel's water!

Not too many memories for such a long stay ? Good Hashish perhaps?

At this point my intestinal problems began to regularly appear. When I returned to the States it was diagnosed as Giardia, an intestinal parasite. I've always suspected that the Marzipan in Istanbul was the culprit.

June 5th - Kabul to Lahore

We caught a bus through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan where it seemed as if WWIII was near. The Arab-Israeli war had broken out and anti-American demonstrations were everywhere. We could see that this best course of action would be to get out of Pakistan and into India as soon as possible. We caught a train from Peshawar to Lahore. Onboard the train a student asked me where I was from and I said "America". He promptly replied 'I hate you". Those words, the tone and threat in them are something you never forget.

Tehran to Herat - 617 miles
Herat to Kabul - 397 miles
Kabul to Lahore 362 miles

Next installment: Onward to Jullundur India
Lahore to Jullundur - 78 miles