Would our Land Rover Defender with her large mud-terrain tyres, skull adorned bullbar and self-built habitat be as out of place and inappropriate on the streets of Europe, as a rooftop tent is bolted onto the feminine slope of a Porshe 911? And would Europe be so expensive that we would have to flee for Africa and Asia, desperately? Would we find adventure and un-spoilt nature, would we be able to travel freely and live our outdoor lifestyle? This book is written to answer those questions, and the best way to do so is to continue the narrative of our continuous intercontinental overland journey as written in our previous books – We Will Be Free and Overlanding the Americas “La Lucha”, the story of our family of four giving everything we have to give to achieve our goal of living the explorers lifestyle.We seek nature, beauty, tranquillity and adventure. Many Europeans who read this book may ask themselves whether us outsiders might have found what they may have not, in their own backyard. I believe that we have
With a wish, a dream, and lady luck on her side, a naive 20-year old realized the world was hers to explore. Setting sail on the SS Australis in October 1974 — first as a passenger, then later joining the Chandris Crew family — Jenny shares her hilarious adventures and misadventures recovered from precious memories stored in letters she wrote home. Climb aboard for a trip of a lifetime! You don’t tell your mother everything, so it’s necessary to read between the lines.
Tales From The Big Yellow: Unreliable Memoirs of a Tour Guide
by Simon Tobin
It’s the late 1970s and Simon Tobin knows he wants a life of adventure after he finishes college in England. But when he answers an ad in the paper to become a Tour Guide, he’s not sure what he’s getting into.
“Get your shit together, have a shave and a haircut, buy some clothes that don’t make you look like a stupid hippy,” his boss tells him after the training trip around Europe. “You take the first three-weeker leaving on Monday. Good luck, you’ve got potential. Don’t fuck up.’
Travelling in a coach painted with a big yellow sun across Europe, through Russia and down to North Africa until the early 80s, ‘Tobes’ survives both an earthquake in Montenegro and the traffic in Paris. He runs an Austrian ski resort and converts a chateau in the Beaujolais. He smuggles jeans in Russia, lunches (and lunches, and lunches…) in Tuscany and drinks tea at sunrise in the Moroccan desert.
Through it all, he makes friends – food-and-drink loving Italians, Austrian skiers, and a vast network of young, down-to-earth Aussie and Kiwi travelers and tour guides all with outlandish nicknames. Tobes’ life of adventure turns out to be above all, a life of friendship and fun, giving him more than a few ‘Big Yellow’ tales to tell.
Our visit to Canada was great. My Wife and daughter met me in Montreal as they had been in UK. I flew to Vancouver then to Montreal and they met me the following day.
We spent a bit of time in Montreal and also did a trip to Quebec City and also another trip to Niagara Falls.
The Quebec City trip was great we had a good guide and she gave us an excellent walking tour of the old City plus we had a bit of time to explore some places ourselves before catching the bus back again.
The Niagara trip gave us plenty of time and we had lunch at a great place with a view of the falls. It also included a couple of stops, one at a wine tasting place and one in a small village. While there we did do a boat tour on the river below the falls, which was a bit wet but awesome, it gives a great perspective of how bit and how much water is coming over the top.
From Montreal we flew to Toronto and had a few days there. This is where our daughter stayed on for another few days to do a course while we flew next to Calgary.
We planned the Calgary stop wrong as it was bitterly cold and we had 5 nights there killing time until our planned Rocky Mountaineer train trip. We were picked up at our hotel by bus and driven to Banff, after a night there we boarded the Rocky Mountaineer and headed to Lake Louise. This part was supposed to include a Helicopter flight and also a Gondola ride. The Helicopter flight was cancelled due to fog and the Gondola was almost no view at the top also due to fog.
We got to Lake Louise and once again due to low fog no view up to the end of the lake. We were joined by passengers from the train in from Jasper and that extended the train a bit longer. We never thought of doing the Jasper part until then.
Next stop was Kamloops, and then next day into Vancouver. We were greeted by a huge line up of buses to take us to several different hotels around Vancouver. All in a nice line with everyone in uniform it looked really impressive indeed.
We had opted for the Gold Service with the double decker carriages with a great view, we also had meals on the train as well which were fantastic.
Another few days in Vancouver to look around and a lot of walking, a couple of bus tours, it is a place I would gladly go back to at another time.
Rimrock Hotel
Our view of the spectacular mountains at Lake Louise
In the late 1960s a young New Zealander, who had always known he would travel, first set out into the big wide wonderful world. His first journey was a voyage on the ‘banana’ boat which then regularly visited some of the smaller South Pacific Islands. It was the first step and the wider world beckoned. There was now no stopping him and the Asian Overland was the first magnet. At the time the route between Kathmandu and London was the ultimate adventure. Nepal was still a mysterious Himalayan kingdom at the end of the hippy trail, India and Pakistan were tolerating each other in an uneasy peace; Afghanistan was still a peaceful kingdom and Iran was under the tutelage of the Shah. It was a journey of discovery with a wealth of wonderful places to visit – great elaborate marble tombs, erotic temples, ancient ruins, underground cities, awe-inspiring cathedrals… Europe & particularly England was then the ideal venue for a working holiday, and for a kiwi who had never been near a farm, he soon had employment as a farm labourer! Other adventures followed – a visit to the Soviet Union, which, at the height of the Cold War, and mainly due to Western propaganda, was then thought to be a place to be avoided, after all you could disappear without trace into the maw of the KGB! There was grape-picking in France, and further travels in Spain, Morocco and throughout the United Kingdom before eventually the decision is made to return home, this time on another epic Overland journey – through Africa, travelling by truck to Nairobi then hitch-hiking south to Cape Town to catch a ship back to New Zealand. Again there were many the experiences. There was the vast fascinating expanses of the Sahara with wandering Tuaregs, the rainforests in the post-colonial Congo & the occasional glimpse of Pygmies, the game parks of Tanzania and the tranquil beaches of Portuguese Mozambique, then in the throes of a guerrilla war and of course much more.
This narrative has been compiled from diaries, personal articles, photographs and memories of the happy days of my first travels. This book is also serving as a background to another book which will recount my experiences as a tour leader on the Asian Overland routes to Europe and the later years as a special interest tour leader/guide in India, Turkey and the Middle East in the days before terrorism, international politics and vicious local wars have made many of these fascinating regions no-go areas to the average traveller. All the photographs in this edition were all taken at the time of the events narrated. The photos have helped me immensely in recalling many of the events that took place. This book is a cameo of the golden days of travel before international politics destroyed or restricted many of the places I feel fortunate to have visited in happier days. I know my sentiments are shared by many of my peers.
Around The World In A Double Decker Bus 1979 – 1983.
Chad went into the small travel agency in London to deliver a letter. To his surprise, he came out as the driver of a double-decker bus with 19 paying passengers on a 6 week trip around Europe. The problem was he didn’t have a licence. He didn’t speak their language. He had never driven a vehicle larger than a mini and had no idea where he was going. None of that mattered, he was broke and needed a job – any job! But first, he had just 24 hours to learn how to drive a vehicle that resembled a two-storey building on wheels, without any training or instructions. Then came the daunting task of driving it on the wrong side of the road through France surrounded by renowned crazy French drivers who hated the English.
For the next four years Chad solved crisis after crisis in some of the most challenging situations and countries imaginable in his bid to keep the wheels rolling and his punters happy. What makes this story even more enticing – it is set long before the advent of mobile phones, computers and travel guides. Once you left home you were on your own.
Could you talk your way out of jail by playing cards with your arresting office? Pose as a journalist to gain entry to Ashes Test Match at Lords. Attempt to sell thirteen cartons of illegal whiskey to the chief of police in Pakistan, a devout Muslim and anti-alcohol country? Fix a bus engine with a box of cornflakes? These are just a few of the adventures you will delight in when you read Deckers, Punters & Dead Ants.
Will Chad learn to drive in time? Can he find his way around Europe before his passengers pull the pin demanding their money back? Does he ever master their language? Will he spend time in a Pakistani jail? What has Dead Ants got to do with driving a bus?
Top Deck double deckers offered a revolutionary form of long-distance transport from the 70s to the 90s. The large British Lodekkas carried under-35s vast distances through SE Asia, the Middle East and Australia in a new innovative mode of no-frills adventure tourism.
Taken on by Top Deck as a double decker bus driver in early 1977, Trevor Carroll conducted European tours for a year before he was set loose on his first overland tour, London to Kathmandu and return. A three-week dash to Kathmandu had the tour stumbling into the start of the civil war in Afghanistan mixing with a government crackdown and soldiers and tanks on the roads. Trevor describes his exciting and sometimes harrowing experiences on six overland trips as both driver and courier.
Finally, he embarked on the massive 20-week Sydney to London tour in 1980 with its third and final leg aboard ‘Casper’ and its 20 occupants across India, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy. The tour passed through 21 countries and covered 34,000 kilometres, conquering places where the buses’ designers never meant it to go.
Trevor met his future wife Hilde on tour, and they have now been married for 34 years.
Skroo Turner the founder of Top Deck and today’s Flight Centre provides an introduction to these stories, his foresight has continued his travel revolution from those lumbering old buses to today’s conglomerate, The Flight Centre Group.
This is the first history of the Hippie Trail. It records the joys and pains of budget travel to Kathmandu, India, Afghanistan and other ‘points east’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Written in a clear, simple style, it provides detailed analysis of the motivations and the experiences of hundreds of thousands of hippies who travelled eastwards. The book is structured around four key debates: were the travellers simply motivated by a search for drugs? Did they encounter love or sexual freedom on the road? Were they basically just tourists? Did they resemble pilgrims? It also considers how the travellers have been represented in films, novels and autobiographical accounts, and will appeal to those interested in the Trail or the 1960s counterculture, as well as students taking courses relating to the 1960s.
Why not? After all, no-one had ever done it before. It would be one of the longest of all overland journeys-half-way round the world, from the English Channel to Singapore. They knew that several expeditions had already tried it. Some had got as far as the deserts of Persia; a few had even reached the plains of India. But no-one had managed to go on from there: over the jungle-clad mountains of Assam and across northern Burma to Thailand and Malaya. Over the last 3,000 miles it seemed there were “just too many rivers and too few roads”. But no-one really knew…In fact, their problems began much earlier than that. As mere undergraduates, they had no money, no cars, no nothing. But with a cool audacity, which was to become characteristic, they set to work-wheedling and cajoling. First, they coaxed the BBC to come up with some film for a possible TV series. Then they gently “persuaded” Rover to lend them two factory-fresh Land Rovers. A publisher was even sweet-talked into giving them an advance on a book. By the time they were ready to go, their sponsors (more than 80 of them) ranged from whiskey distillers to the makers of collapsible buckets. In late 1955, they set off.Seven months and 12,000 miles later, two very weary Land Rovers, escorted by police outriders, rolled into Singapore-to flash-bulbs and champagne. Now, fifty years on, their bestselling book, First Overland, is republished-with a foreword by Sir David Attenborough. After all, it was he who gave them that film.
Travel the Planet Overland was written to inspire others to explore this magnificent rock we all call home and the core message is simply that anyone sufficiently inspired can travel the planet overland. We take the readers hand and walk them through the long term world travelers reality, introducing the different types of overland travelers and the vehicles they prefer based on the fluidity of their cash flow. We then guide readers through the financial and emotional preparations for overland travel and provide the tools for overland travel success!
