Lamyi obliged by meeting us the next morning with his brother, two camels, three dogs, and a basketful of props and costumes to shoot photos for our sponsors. He arranged the scene, checked the sun’s angle, adjusted clothing, posed himself for each picture, and, drawing on his extensive film career, instructed Willy and me how to take the photos. He was producer, director, press agent, and star all in one.
And he was magnificent. He gleefully smeared himself with Sea & Ski suntan oil, exchanged his turban for a Dobbs straw cowboy hat, modeled an Arrow shirt, poured a quart of sponsor’s oil into our Toyota, and poured into himself a cup of the Bourbon Institute’s best, which, he assured me, with a wink, doubtless had medicinal value and hence didn’t conflict with his Islamic beliefs. He modeled a pair of Thom McAn desert boots, sprayed Canada Dry with OFF! insect repellent, lit a cigarette with our parabolic sunray lighter, posed on the threshold of our Thermos Poptent, and smilingly chomped his way through half a box of Manischewitz matzos.
In the desert beside the great pyramids in Giza, Egypt, I fulfilled two sponsor assignments by sharing a box of Manischewitz matzos and a bottle of bourbon with three Arab camel drivers, including Lamyi Ibrahim Ghoneim (right). Willy Mettler
After the photo session—which Lamyi said was “such a dandy delight” he wouldn’t accept our payment—he brought us to his home for tea and cake. The walls were covered with photos of famous people atop Canada Dry and travel posters on which Lamyi’s smiling face gleamed against the backdrop of the pyramids. He proudly showed us letters from his clients (while we used the opportunity to discreetly slip his fee behind the cushions on his couch) and read favorite passages from them, discussed his life and the future of his disabled son, expressed his heartfelt hope for peace on earth among men of good will, and beseeched us to write him.
Tears filled his eyes, and ours, when we parted. We’ll always remember you, Lamyi Ibrahim Ghoneim. I hope your son thrived, your tribe increased, your days were long and happy, you ascended serenely to Paradise, and may Allah forever hold you gently in the hollow of his hand.
* * *
It was time to get back on the road. The vehicles had been serviced, the letters answered, the sponsor pix shot and shipped, the supplies laid in, the crew rested and healed. Ahead lay the Middle Eastern deserts, now blistering in the heat of summer. It was good-bye to Lamyi and to the glorious women of Cairo, good-bye to the sparkling Mediterranean and the colorful con men of Alex, good-bye to spaghetti at Rex, to the cool hotel rooms, to innocent Iftitani, good-bye to North Africa.
We headed eastward from Cairo, planning to skirt the Arabian Desert on the north, bridge the Suez Canal, and then cut across the Sinai Peninsula to Jordan. Despite being warned that our route was forbidden and fortified, we were going to give it a go.
Less than halfway to the Canal, the narrow road was blocked by Egyptian tanks and soldiers. No amount of protests about freedom of travel did us any good. We could not cross the Suez and we could not cross the Sinai. Those doors to the Middle East were firmly shut. We were forced to retrace our route and return to Cairo, where we again petitioned the authorities for permission to drive to Jordan, and where our request was again rejected. “Next year,” the guard had said, “next year, when there is no more Israel.”
They told us that the only way to continue our journey was to take a ship across the Mediterranean to Beirut, Lebanon.
And where could we find such a ship?
Why, in Alex, of course!
CHAPTER 5
Into the Teeth of the Tiger
Five months later, after hard, hot crossings of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, I was hauling the camper down through the Khyber Pass into the Indian subcontinent. About 30 miles before Peshawar, the monsoon rains, of which we’d had a hint the night before, struck with all their fury. The afternoon turned dark as night. Lightning tore through the heavens. Down and down the rain drummed relentlessly. In 30 minutes the road was awash; in an hour the water was so high it threatened to flood the engine.
Even without the rain, the road was deadly. It was typical of the roads throughout Pakistan and India, a narrow asphalt one laner with a four-inch drop onto the mud or rock shoulders on either side. They were poorly maintained remnants of the British Raj, built in the days before heavy auto traffic, so narrow that two cars could not pass abreast, forcing one of them to put a wheel onto the dangerous shoulder. We’d been warned that the local truckers willfully smashed into oncoming cars rather than slow down or move to the side, but we didn’t believe it. Believe it! Western courtesy plays no role when a punctured tire or a broken spring can mean economic disaster for a trucker’s family. It had become a law of survival for the trucker to hold the road, using every manner of highway bullying, from honking horns to blinking lights, to make the oncoming driver turn chicken and take to the ditch.
We had just cleared the Pass, and were a few miles beyond Jamrud Fort, which guards its eastern approach, when the spindle that held the camper’s right wheel sheared off. We skidded 30 yards before I could get the bucking camper under control and stop. We were in a bind, on the narrow approach to a bridge over a river. We couldn’t move with a wheel missing, yet we couldn’t rightly block the bridge. We had to manually drag the camper off the road onto the shoulder, though that was only three feet wide with a 30-foot drop-off. The rear of the camper was dug into the mud shoulder; the front end jutted out over space. We used everything we could—jacks, rocks, boulders, tent poles, gas cans—to prop it up and prevent it from sliding down the steep embankment.
For most of the afternoon we labored underneath the precariously situated camper to unbolt and remove the axle, a delicate operation where any mistake could crush us or send the camper hurtling into the river. When we finally had the axle off, we loaded it into the Land Cruiser and I headed for Peshawar to find a welding shop, leaving the others to guard the crippled camper. It was evening by the time the spindle was welded into place in Peshawar, and the monsoons intensified as I headed back.
I’d gone only halfway when I was halted at a roadblock manned by four Pakistani soldiers who told me the rivers had jumped their banks and were flooding the road ahead. No cars were being allowed through. After I explained that I had to get back to the camper before it was washed away, the guards reluctantly agreed to let me pass. By the time I was a mile beyond the roadblock, it was completely dark and impossible to see in the driving rain. The road was covered with two feet of rushing, muddy water. I feared I might drive off the road and go completely under, so I enlisted help from a soggy local hitchhiker, who agreed to walk in front and scout a path. I gave him a flashlight and attached a lifeline from his waist to the car bumper. In this way, with the scout half walking and half swimming, I made it to the camper, which was close to toppling down the embankment.
We installed new supports, but these were undermined as fast as we could get them into place. It was nearly midnight when the downpour abated and we could brace the camper with jacks and gas cans. But it was too dark, and much too dangerous, to crawl under the camper to bolt the repaired axle into place, so we pitched the Poptents below to wait until morning.
Several hours later I was awakened by muffled noises above and stuck my head out of the tent. Two trucks were parked on the road. They must be curious passersby, I thought, and was about to go back to sleep, when I heard someone knocking a gas can from under the trailer. I grabbed the flashlight and zipped open the tent. My light caught three men pulling the jacks from under the trailer. We grabbed entrenching tools and started up the rocky embankment, but it was hard going barefoot. By the time we reached the road the bandits were in their trucks and driving off—with all our gas cans, both jacks, and some tools. And the camper was slowly sliding down toward the now-flooded river bed.
What kind of people would so violate the customary rules of survival as to pillage a disabled vehicle and steal the equipment we needed to repair it? The lawless tribesmen who inhabit the rugged border
region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, that’s who. Those independent, rifle-toting toughs who recognize no nation, no law, and no loyalty but to their clan. The same tribe of insolent hombres who, decades later, gave shelter and assistance to Osama Bin Laden.
* * *
After crossing Pakistan and India and visiting Nepal (where we sold Steve’s old Jeep), we were so far behind schedule that East Pakistan was submerged by the monsoon, which sunk our plan to tow the camper across it. Manu, Willy, and Woodrow took a ship with the camper from Calcutta to Bangkok, where we agreed to rendezvous, while Steve and I headed the Cruiser toward the border between India and East Pakistan, hoping to get through before the threatened war began.
We were taken under Indian military escort to a bridge over a tributary of the Ganges that separated India from East Pakistan. Two Indian customs officers carefully checked our papers, reluctantly stamped our passports, and watched us suspiciously as we crossed the long, untrafficked bridge between the two countries.
In the car I mused that “If the Indians think we’re Pakistani spies…”
Steve finished my thought: “… the Pakis are going to think we’re Indian spies.”
And that was exactly what they did think: We were greeted with the command to take every item out of the car for inspection.
We foresaw difficulty: Our pistol was in Steve’s overnight bag, and the irascible officers were looking for some way to bust our chops. It was showtime.
“Every bag?” I asked the officer, holding one up. “This one, too?”
“Every one!”
I put the bag I was holding down and grabbed two more. “How about these?”
“Yes, those, too.”
The officers stepped up and began searching through the bags as I pulled them out of the car. As they did, I’d open up others and helpfully dump clothing and supplies all over the bags they had started to search. In a few minutes I’d addled them. As the officers took a bag out of one door I’d surreptitiously slide it back in the other. I picked up an aerosol can of foaming mosquito repellent and insisted the officers let me squirt some on their arms for protection. Then I went for the backrest massage machine. I plugged it into the cigarette-lighter socket and invited the officer in charge to sit inside the Cruiser and try it. He was reluctant but, after much prodding, agreed, and I turned the vibrator on. In seconds the officer was purring contentedly, his eyes half-closed, like a housecat having his belly rubbed. Then the junior officer wanted to have his turn. Then the sergeant. When they resumed checking the bags they had no idea which they had searched and which they had not. In the end, they overlooked the gun bag and returned our passports. We breathed a tremulous sigh and drove on.
The country northeast of Calcutta and well into East Pakistan is a vast alluvial plain where, during the monsoon, jute grows in endless waves in the flooded fields. Every now and then a wide-rooted tree or thick cluster of bamboo broke the flat contour of the land. Along the elevated roads, built atop high embankments of hardened mud, slow-moving oxcarts hauled freshly cut bamboo and dried jute. The villages looked as they had throughout India: mud houses with pounded earth out front, where withered women stuffed twigs and leaves beneath blackened pots on mud hearths to heat their tea water.
Ferry boats and river steamers were the main means of transportation during the monsoon season. To reach Dacca, the capital, we had to take four of them. We drove into Dacca a little past noon on the second day. It was not an attractive or impressive city, with little to see and less to do. The U.S. State Department Personnel Office classified it as a hardship post.
We located the Government Tourist Bureau, from which we hoped to get a letter of introduction to facilitate our trip across the country. The deputy director was cordial and listened with keen interest about our travels, but when we explained our plan to drive to Chittagong in the southeast part of his country and from there on to Burma, he declared: “Gentlemen, I doubt if you can do it.”
“We realize it’s difficult,” Steve admitted. “We know Burma has been closed to foreigners for years. All we want to do is give it a try.”
The director paused before speaking: “I don’t believe you understand. Haven’t you heard the latest news? The hostility from India has caused a crisis. The Indians have bombed Lahore. There is no telling what will happen next. You had better register immediately with the police.”
We promptly drove to police headquarters. In the Foreigner’s Registration Office we found half a dozen officers huddled around an old radio. They interrupted their excited conversation only long enough to ink our names in the registration book, the only entries, I noticed, in many days. The officer adjusting the radio dials anxiously glanced at a clock on the opposite wall. The president of Pakistan, Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, was to address the nation in five minutes. All heads leaned toward the radio as the slow but truculent voice of their president announced that Pakistan was at war with the treacherous Moslem-hating Indians who’d been armed by a devious America.
We left the office to find crowds gathering in the street. Newsboys screamed the headlines: “LAHORE BOMBED. EMERGENCY DECLARED.” A squadron of Pakistani jets roared overhead. We drove to a gas station to fill our tank and spare cans. Fifty cars and trucks were ahead of us, hoping to buy gas before it was rationed. As we waited in line the station manager came over to complain about the military aid America had given India.
“We helped arm India so she could defend herself against China,” Steve explained.
“India used you. We warned it was a trick so India could get your guns to use against us.”
“But look at your own army,” I replied. “Every gun, tank, and plane you have is from the U.S. while India has British planes and German rifles and only a few American weapons. Every one of your pilots and officers has been trained by America.”
He could not see our point. We had betrayed Pakistan, and that settled it.
A trucker rushed up to us, waving a fist, yelling, “Americans help India. You are no longer our friends. Yet even though the Indians have your guns, we will crush them anyway.”
“But you’re outnumbered four to one by five hundred million Indians whose soldiers may well be crossing your borders now,” I said.
“We are not worried. Indians are moral cowards. We are Moslems. We have moral courage. This is key. We will win. We will crush them.”
We gassed up and headed for the first of the three ferries we’d have to take to reach Chittagong to exit the war zone. At the ferry landing ten miles east of Dacca we handed our papers to the guard who, without looking at them, handed them back, shaking his head. “No ferry,” he said.
“But we must take the ferry.”
“There are no ferries,” he repeated. “The government has taken them all into service. You might try the steamer in Narayanganj.”
We rushed to Narayanganj and through its narrow streets to the waterfront, where we saw a steamer loading cargo. We ran to the top of the gangplank, where the mate said that if we wanted to book passage we’d have to go to the shipping office. We copied down the address and, after a half hour’s search, found it.
“Sorry,” a clerk said, “but the Harappa is not leaving Narayanganj.”
“But she’s loading now. We saw it.”
“Maybe so, but we have just received orders from the commanding general of the port that no ships are to leave until orders come from the high command in Dacca. You should return to Dacca and find yourself a hotel and wait. Even if you did get authorization to board, and even if we did get authorization to sail, you couldn’t pass beyond Chandipur. The military has the road blocked.”
We took his advice and drove to the American Consulate in Dacca to register. After checking our passports a guard led us to an agitated foreign service officer who was on the telephone: “All Americans are to report to the Consulate … No, we’ll try to keep you posted … No, we have no official word … No, all communications have been cut.”
When the officer hung up we introduced ourselves and explained that we’d just driven into the country. He was startled. He asked us to wait, rose quickly, and ducked into an office. In a moment he was back. “Mr. Bowling, the consul general, would like to see you,” he said.
Bowling sat behind an impressive but cluttered desk flanked by the flags of the U.S. and the State Department. Three foreign service officers were poring over the newspapers on the coffee table as a secretary took notes. They were dressed in sports clothes, and I remembered it was Labor Day back home.
“You’ve picked a highly unlikely time to be driving through East Pakistan,” the consul began. “And my assistant tells me you’re journalists. I don’t think the Paks will be too pleased when they find out—you’d be the only foreign reporters here.”
“But we didn’t come here to write about the war.”
“Tell that to them! I advise you to keep out of sight and out of trouble until this whole thing has ended. I wish you luck.” We were dismissed.
Next morning, under the headline: CHITTAGONG BOMBED, I read: “Indian Air Force planes launched unprovoked, cowardly attacks on civilian targets in Karachi, Chittagong…”
I scanned the next column, headlined RESPONSE FROM EAST PAKISTAN: “President Ayub’s call to his countrymen to crush the Indian aggression on our sacred territory met with an immediate, spontaneous response from East Pakistan. The 60,000,000 people of the province now stand as one man behind Ayub to protect the sovereignty and sanctity of every inch of our soil.…”
The government’s propaganda machine was trying to stir up the East Pakistanis, and for good reason: All the face-to-face fighting was in the other half of Pakistan, near Kashmir, 1,500 miles away and separated by Indian territory. Ayub’s regime needed the support of East Pakistan to furnish soldiers and equipment and to put pressure on India’s back, so he was involving them through the press and radio. But the aroused people of East Pakistan saw no invading troops, no one to release their wrath upon—except those who aroused suspicion. And who better than foreigners?
Around the World in 50 Years Page 7
