View allAll Photos Tagged Overlander
Turkey: October 1971
The Safaris Overland bus I was driving from India to London, seen here parked in the town of Agri, in north-eastern Turkey. The snow on the bus had come over a thousand miles from north-eastern Iran, not far from the Afghan frontier – however, it was to start melting the next day, once we'd got over the Tahir Pass.
Beyond doubt the star of the show at this Sarasota classic car event. In 1914, Overland was second only to Ford in overall US sales, pitching to a more upscale clientele. Acquired by Willys in 1908, the Overland name was phased out as a separate marque in 1926.
Afghanistan: October 1971
The 37-seater AEC Reliance bus I was driving from Delhi back to London. In Afghanistan, I'd turned off the road from Kabul to Kandahar, to stop in a small town; I cannot remember the name of the place. The bus is shown parked outside a chaikhana (tea house) in the main street.
To fund the journey back to England I had needed to find as many passengers as possible to provide 'running money' for the bus; I was also behind schedule – and the next eastbound trip was scheduled to leave London for India on Sunday, 14 November 1971 – that was cutting it a bit fine. Finding passengers for the return journey to London was made easier by the daily deteriorating political situation between India and Pakistan; a state of war was expected to be declared at any moment, so there was no shortage of foreigners looking for a cheap means of transport to avoid being trapped in India. Some bought tickets only as far as Kabul but many paid to go as far as Europe. We put up notices in the New Delhi YMCA on Jai Singh Road, Connaught Place; and in a couple of other cheap hotels used by overland travellers, advertising the bus departure date and fares: Delhi to London was US$100 or £40 – payable in cash only – travellers cheques or any other currencies were not accepted. The fare to other destinations on that route was proportionately less. Every seat was filled – we could have filled the bus twice over.
On the Grand Trunk Road the main border crossing point into Pakistan had already been closed when we got there; however, an Indian Army officer told me that if I could drive down to Ferozepore that night, then that border would be open, only for a couple of hours, early the following morning, to allow foreign nationals to leave India. That turned out to be the quickest crossing between India and Pakistan.
Some people had got off in Kabul, but several more westbound passengers were booked at the Mustapha Hotel in Kabul – this was a popular and inexpensive establishment, not only to stay in, but to meet other travellers. Another attraction of the hotel was that the manager kept a discrete stock of bottled beer that had been brewed in Pakistan and smuggled into Afghanistan.
The weather was still comfortably warm in the part of Afghanistan where the photo was taken, but within a week I was driving through snow on dirt roads across northern Iran – I didn't know it then but this was a taste of what was to come on the following eastbound journey – the most extreme winter I've ever known.
The first clear sunset we saw,was by this lake in Tanzania,on the way to the Serengeti. Please see my set Africa Overland for more information.
40 km from the Chinese border, Nepal: October 1975
One evening in Kathmandu, we were in the bar of one of the hotels when a local man asked if we'd be interested in taking some tourists, in one of the buses, for an early-morning trip to see a Himalayan sunrise. It turned out that there was a group of Europeans staying in Kathmandu that night only and he'd promised some of them a 'trip to remember', on the following day. Apparently, these people were on a Round-the-World-in-Seven-Days package deal – and, obviously the local man was a travel guide working on commission, and had done this before with tourists. Anyway, a time and price was agreed, on condition they paid, in cash, before we left at five o'clock the next morning. We were going to drive along the old road from Kathmandu up to the Chinese (Tibetan) border, there were several places on that road to witness the sunrise over the Himalayas.
At five o'clock sharp the next morning, the new passengers were waiting outside their hotel – all fifteen of them. A few seemed to be not fully awake yet, but they were there in body. The first few miles up the old dirt road was easy but gradually it deteriorated to not much more than a mountain track – it soon became clear why the large bus wouldn't have got far. We were climbing all the time, the road often running alongside the rapidly flowing Bhote Koshi River, which eventually joins the Ganges. This was the time of year following the monsoon season so there had been numerous landslide and rockfalls onto the road, sometimes we were able to get round them but there were occasions when we had to wait for an ancient bulldozer to clear a path through all the mud and rocks. When we got to the place our guide recommended for a sunrise viewpoint the cloud had come down and we didn't see the sun until a few hours later.
We continued up the road as far as we could go – that was the Friendship Bridge at Kodari. The bridge was the border crossing point from Nepal to Tibet, and it had been closed for many years, ever since the Chinese had invaded Tibet. We were forbidden from using cameras by Nepalese soldiers so I was unable to photograph the bridge – or all the Chinese soldiers on the other side of the Bhote Koshi River. I had originally co-driven this bus from Ostend to Istanbul, where the owner asked me to take over the larger, 45-seater bus for the remainder of the trip to India, and then Nepal.
Coopers of Kilamarsh Bought this lovely little thing to Alton Towers . R201WYD a Volvo B9M / Vanhool Alizee C38FT. Photo taken 14/07/23
NR118 is seen at the Adelaide Parklands Terminal just before coupling to the Overland Service of 6AM8 for the 828 Kilometre journey from Adelaide to Melbourne.
Back from a two week trip to Colorado and New Mexico and starting to go through over 25GB of images. My hard drive on my old computer can't handle all the images, so I have to go through my old files and delete the obsolete and redundant in order to accommodate the new. It will be an ongoing process so I've decided to select and upload the pictures in roughly chronological order.
Special note to Simon K: this is the picture I was making when you and Jenny rolled up at the motel, :-).
Loco AN3 in red Ghan livery powers the Melbourne-bound Overland through Belair in the Adelaide Hills on the morning of 24 December 2005.
The use of an AN-class locomotive on this train was highly unusual, and was due to a major delay to the incoming train from Melbourne that day, causing a desperate rush at Keswick Terminal to assemble suitable rolling stock and motive power for the return Christmas Eve service.
AN3 operated only as far as Tailem Bend, where a more conventional NR-class loco was substituted.
The daily overnight Melbourne to Adelaide 'Overland' service (broad-gauge) - which I travelled on that night - awaits departure from Melbourne's Spencer Street station during August 1993. The service still continues today (on standard gauge), but is now a daylight run and only operates on two days per week.
Some of the passengers on the Safaris Overland trip to India, that left London in July 1971. In the front of the tonga are Hillary and Sylvia; in the rear are Marie and Alan — this was on a tour of Lahore, Pakistan.
900 on the Inner Circle line exiting the Avenue of Honour.
Diamond Valley Railway - Sunday January 22nd 2023.
Persepolis, Iran: 25 December 1971
The almost 600 mile journey from Tehran down to Persepolis took two days; the first day we got to Isfahan in the early afternoon and spent the night there. An early start on Christmas Day enabled us to have a few hours looking round the spectacular ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. Rather surprisingly, the place was deserted, not a soul to be seen – we had the whole site to ourselves. That night we stayed in Shiraz before heading back north towards Tehran, with another night in Isfahan on the way.
Considering that the giant stone blocks in the main terrace had laid there over two-and-a-half thousand years they were in remarkable condition. The joints between each block were so well made that you couldn't have slid a piece of paper into the gaps. Sometime in the first part of the fourth century AD the city had been sacked by the invading armies of Alexander the Great. Today can be seen evidence of the destruction and damage, but even so there is still a lot left to see.
The enormous bazaar at Isfahan had been very quiet; it was quite different to the one at Istanbul where you can be endlessly pestered to buy this and that. In Isfahan there was also snow on the ground; I hadn't expected to see it this far south in Iran, but the city is on a plain at over 5,000 feet elevation.
Turkey: December 1971
This is the AEC Reliance bus I was driving from London to India; it is photographed here parked by a deserted Turkish beach towards the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Before we lost sight of the sea a handful of the passengers had a last swim before we turned inland. The weather was turning colder, but not enough to deter the swimmers; three days later I had to buy a set of snow chains for the rear wheels as the weather had deteriorated drastically. I'd planned to drive through Syria and Iraq to get into Iran, but at the Turkish–Syrian border we were denied entry as the Syrian–Iraq border was closed by the worsening political situation between those two neighbouring countries. This left no other option than head north-east and enter Iran at the Bazargan border crossing – and unfortunately, this meant we couldn't avoid the severe weather of the eastern-Turkish winter. We ended up stuck in Erzerum for nearly a week until the infamous 8,000-odd foot Tahir Pass re-opened after the massive snowfall in that region; in a way the delay wasn't too bad after all as one of the passengers, a girl from New Zealand, had to be driven to the Erzurum Hospital with a suspected collapsed lung. I remember that of the three doctors who examined her, two were smoking cigarettes as they did so. The temperature dropped to around -40 C; the bus engine had to kept running continuously for six days and nights to prevent it freezing solid. On a slightly increased tick-over speed the engine consumed four or five gallons of diesel a night. One night in Erzurum we heard gunfire in the small hours, and in the morning, not far from the hotel, we saw a pile of dead wolves in the road – they had been shot in the night by soldiers when they came into the town looking for food. The 1971-72 winter in that region had been the coldest for over two hundred years.
Saw this outside the Boyertown Museum and couldn't find the owner to get more info. But they have a lot of work ahead of them.
The City of Overland Park is located in Johnson County, Kansas. In 2010 the city had a population of 173,372 making it the 2nd largest city in Kansas and the largest suburb of Kansas City.
Turkey: October 1971
This notorious stretch of road from Horosan to Agri in eastern Turkey has now been abandoned as a new route was opened up later in the 1970s that bypassed the old Tahir Pass. Being a dirt, or gravel road it was never a good surface to drive on — in summer it was hard to see where you were going because of the dust; in the rain it became a river of mud, and in the winter it was under snow for months on end. This road was part of the so-called Eurasian (or Euro-Asian) Highway, yet a lot of it was little more than a farm track. There were more heavy trucks using this road than cars or buses as it was the main trunk route from Europe, eastwards to Iran, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent.
Later in 1971, when I was driving the same bus from London back out to Kabul on this road, it was essential to use snow chains on the rear wheels, from Erzurum to Agri. The landscape is hostile and barren; the climate can be extreme – during that 1971/72 winter the temperature fell to around -40° C. This caused problems with diesel fuel 'icing up' so it was common practice to add a small amount of petrol or paraffin (kerosene) to the diesel tank – not something to be recommended, but sometimes you had no other option. A common sight in the winter was to see a truck stopped, and the driver had lit a small fire under the fuel tank to thaw the diesel.