Eastern Horizons
Levison Wood is an award-winning author, explorer and photographer who specialises in documenting people and cultures in remote regions and post-conflict zones. His work has taken him around the world leading expeditions on five continents and he is an elected fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club.
Levison's second book, Walking the Himalayas, was voted Adventure Travel Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards and his other books, Walking the Nile and Walking the Americas, were both Sunday Times bestsellers. He has presented several critically acclaimed documentaries including From Russia to Iran: Crossing the Wild Frontier where he re-traced part of his Silk Road adventures in a four-part series for Channel 4.
Also by Levison Wood
Walking the Nile
Walking the Himalayas
Walking the Americas
Eastern Horizons
Hitchhiking the Silk Road
Levison Wood
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Levison Wood 2017
The right of Levison Wood to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 473 67628 2
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
50 Victoria Embankment
London
EC2Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
For my parents, who had no idea where I was most of the time
In memory of Arthur Conolly
Contents
Author’s note
Preface
Part 1
1 A Letter
2 Tramps Abroad
Part 2
3 Back on the Road
4 Venice of the North
5 Urban Wanderings
6 Enemy at the Gates
7 The Long Road South
8 Land of the Golden Fleece
9 Cross Roads
10 Musaafir
11 Axis of Evil
12 A Pilgrimage
Part 3
13 Caravanserai
14 Bad Habits
15 Crossing the Khyber
16 Land of the Five Rivers
17 The Golden Temple
18 Himalaya
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Picture Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Section
Author’s note
This is an account of a journey taken at the age of twenty-two, fresh out of university with the dregs of a student loan. I set off on a trek that, unbeknown at the time, was to become a defining point of reference for perhaps all my subsequent expeditions.
The year 2004 was a seminal one in my own life, and one of great social upheaval and change on the fringes of Europe, in Russia, and along the countries of the old Silk Road. However, this book does not purport to present a geo-political narrative, or indeed a comprehensive history of the ancient overland routes to the Indian subcontinent. Nor does it seek to analyse the complexities of Western foreign policy in the region, or the inter-tribal conflicts that have marred the paths of high Asia for centuries. There are other books that already do that very well. This is simply an account of my own youthful wanderings in a general easterly direction - albeit with a sprinkling of the kind of anecdotal history that interested me at the time.
The book was written over a two-year period after I left the army in 2010, some six years after the events had occurred. It was my first attempt at writing. It relies for the most part on my journals and notes kept at the time. The manuscript lay dormant for a subsequent six years until I was fortunate enough to retrace a part of my earlier adventures for a television documentary and it seemed an appropriate time to dust off the diaries.
The text itself is largely unchanged, therefore I should probably apologise for the perambulating style and literary immaturity of the narrative. But, rather than change it, I have chosen to keep it as it is and retain the essence of the memory. Because for me, that is what travel is all about: good memories – whichever direction they take you.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move . . . to come down off this featherbed of civilisation and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints . . . [It] is no great industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1878
Preface
Taybad/Dogharoun, November 2004
The border post appeared as a mirage on the horizon, disfigured by the heat of the desert, rising like a phantom flame from the road. There was little but sand in all directions and the only reminder at all that life existed here was the group of speckled figures in the distance. Rifles were slung over their shoulders and dark beards concealed their faces. But even these shadowy apparitions did not seem real, and the entrance to Afghanistan appeared like a figment of my imagination. Wild, dangerous and romantic.
A rusty barbed-wire fence disappeared into the scrubby desert to the north and south, separating Iran from Afghanistan; by several centuries, it appeared. Bearded and turban-clad tribesmen squatted on their haunches like a scene from the Arabian nights. A shepherd eyed his flock of skinny goats, and the soldiers, dressed in a ragtag array of grey caps, woollen jumpers and old Russian greatcoats, sat in the shade of the immigration office – a crumbling shed with a painting of the Afghan flag on one whitewashed wall. It would have seemed quaint had it not been pockmarked with bullet holes.
As it was, I felt a combination of fear and excitement at the prospect of entering a country notorious for bloodshed and a predilection for disposing of foreigners by the most grisly of means. War was never far away; this was 2004 and as allied soldiers were pouring in from the West, so too were Islamic jihadists from the East. The stage was set for a resurgence of violence, and another ten years of bloody fighting. I had not planned on going to Afghanistan, but there I was: young, alone and penniless in the Khorasan desert, sixty miles away from Herat – the nearest thing to civilisation, and you could hardly call it that.
This sunbaked no-man’s-land was the place where Zoroastrianism and Buddhism prevailed in the centuries before Islam; where Alexander conquered the Persians and Babur began his epic journey across the Hindu Kush. It is the geographical transition between the Middle East and Central Asia – the heart of the Silk Road – and a place of mystery and wilderness since recorded travel began. For me, too, this was more than just another border crossing: it was the last great frontier before the Indian subcontinent, and one step closer to my dream.
Part 1
1
A Letter
. . . and above all, travel.
Those words, written in a letter, had resounded in my imagination ever since I first read them. Second Lieutenant James Whitehurst of the Royal Artillery has a lot to answer for.
It’s funny how small things can change your li
fe in such big ways. Little was I to know when I lost my wallet at the age of sixteen, that it would have such a great influence on the rest of my life.
It was a pretty normal Saturday afternoon for a teenage boy from Staffordshire. We’d planned it for a while; the attractions of Alton Towers were too strong to resist and one day a few of us from school cycled the fourteen miles through the Moorlands to try and sneak into the theme park. We set off, past the chip shop on the high street and the pub where gruff men smoked and drank pints of cheap lager. It only took an hour along the twisting country lanes, over the rolling hills before the looming gates emerged at the side of the road. We went straight past, another half a mile or so to where a little trail led off into the woods. We knew it like the back of our hands, given the fact we’d all worked there over the summer, selling hot dogs and pressing the go button for the monorail. We hid our bikes in the bushes and covered our tracks. There was a little hole in the fence where we could climb in; and from there it was a simple case of avoiding the security guards with their big dogs and emerging out of the rhododendron bushes without any of the staff noticing. Not that they’d care though. We all made it, and found ourselves dusting off twigs inside the castle grounds before lunch. Mission accomplished. Now we were at liberty to go on the rides and have a fun afternoon in the park without spending all of our pocket money on the entry ticket. Karma got me back though when, an hour later, having enjoyed being hurled around on the corkscrew rollercoaster, I wobbled off, only to discover, much to my horror, that my wallet was gone. Had it fallen out? Perhaps it had been stolen. Either way, it was extremely annoying at the time and a severe blow to my finances, especially since my bus pass was in there and it would mean paying the full fare on the number seven to Cheadle.
Luckily for me, though, the wallet turned up in the post a week after I lost it. Surprisingly, it was complete with all of its contents, including the bus pass, and with it came a short letter from the man who’d found it. I was impressed by its style and politeness, and the way Second Lieutenant James Whitehurst of the Royal Artillery addressed me as an adult. It was on smart paper complete with an embossed watermark. He threw in, dryly, that he’d written it in the early hours of the morning, apologising if the writing was untidy – he was up at that time because, as an officer in the army, he had very important duties to attend to. I pictured a dashing young soldier dug in a shell scrape on manoeuvres in some secret location, preparing his men for war.
Eager to find out more about my new hero, I wrote back immediately, thanking him for his integrity and having taken the time to write at all, when even the most honest of folk these days would have simply handed the wallet in to the local police station and let them deal with it. I’d been interested in a career in the army ever since I was a kid, but nobody I knew had joined, especially as an officer, and I hadn’t the first clue how to go about applying, so, seeing the opportunity I asked if he wouldn’t mind offering me some tips.
The reply came by return of post in the form of six full pages of sound and practical advice: Learn to read a map and a compass, get fit, run a mile and a half in nine minutes, join the TA, read the news, know your military history . . . take a gap year, and above all, travel.
There it was in black and white – a plan for the future, who’d have thought it? Determined on my new path, I set about following this advice to the letter for the next two years. Whilst finishing off my A Levels at school by day, at night I studied contours and ridgelines; went running and started doing press ups, I read the broadsheets and tried my best to keep up to date with political scandal. I got stuck into history and read anything I could get my hands on. It wasn’t hard; I’d always loved history, especially tales of adventure from foreign climes. I devoured the diaries of explorers and ancient navigators who had journeyed to the east.
And, above all, I travelled. I remember showing my parents the letter when I turned eighteen.
‘Look, Dad, it says what I have to do right here, travel.’
‘And what about university?’ They didn’t seem too impressed and stared at me disapprovingly.
‘I’ll go next year. I promise.’
My father looked unconvinced and my mother distraught.
‘A gap year. Whatever is one of those anyway? Your mother and I never had gap years in our day.’
‘Yes, you did. You had the hippy trail.’
‘Well, we weren’t bloody hippies.’
‘Neither am I. I just want to see a bit of the world.’
They studied me in silence, shaking their heads in resignation. Finally, my father broke the tension.
‘Well, you can bloody pay for it. And you can start paying rent while you’re at it.’
I was ecstatic. I got a job. In fact, I got a lot of jobs. I became a labourer, warehouse assistant, rail-track layer, burger-flipper, supermarket shelf-stacker, and van driver; I even went back to work at Alton Towers for a while, where I repaid my debt of sneaking in through long hours dressed in an orange uniform selling keyrings and stuffed toys to Chinese tourists.
With a few quid in my pocket and a brand-new rucksack, I set off alone. I was under no illusion that six months in Africa, Australia and South-East Asia was considered trail-blazing. I didn’t explore any uncharted peaks or walk across any deserts or paddle to the source of any rivers. I did, however, learn the basics of independent travel and the benefits of trying to understand other cultures, rather than staying put in isolated ghettos with other tourists. I found that one of the best ways to meet people was to hitchhike. It was generally unpredictable, often lonely, sometimes fun and frequently downright dangerous. But it was always interesting. Travel is by its very nature fascinating; an education. And I was eager to learn.
Much to my parents’ relief, on my return from my gap year, I enrolled at the University of Nottingham to continue my passion and study history. But all the way through university, I carried on travelling; each time, in an insatiable search of adventure, I would spend a month or two roaming the wilds, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a like-minded student. I trekked through the highlands of Scotland and the plains of Eastern Europe. Once, in a fit of juvenile irresponsibility, I even hitchhiked home from Cairo, by way of Jerusalem and Baghdad, in the middle of the Second Gulf War. That was my real education. Looking back, I was driven not only by a real desire to learn about the world, but also a fear of missing out. I didn’t want to get old without seeing the world.
Mark Twain puts it nicely:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did . . . So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
The only times that my trade winds were disrupted were during the first two weeks of each summer holiday, when I would be obliged to complete a fortnight’s summer camp with the Officer Training Corps. I had enrolled in my first year of studies, following the advice of the letter I’d received three years before, and it was here that I met Winfield.
Jon Winfield hailed from the craggy moors of the Peak District. Although we became friends in the vaguely military environment of the deceptively serious-sounding ‘East Midlands Universities Officer Training Corps’, Jon had no designs on joining the army, unlike me. In fact, among military circles he was identified for his very unmilitary behaviour. EMUOTC was technically a unit in the Territorial Army and therefore to the uninitiated, quite stern stuff, but in reality, it was a drinking club for students who were contemplating joining the real army – and of course people like Jon, who merely fancied the social scene. He would often turn up to training unshaven, with his hair way beyond regulation length. I don’t recall him ever ironing his uniform and on exercise in Wales, his water canteen would regularly be replaced with a good bottle of port. Jon was a natural rebel; I knew he would make an excellent travelling companion.
Knee deep in mud in the Lake District, we would talk about travelling
together. Backpacking through Thailand, bartending in Greece, volunteering in Kenya . . . cliché after cliché. Until one particularly wet soldierly day on the immense green slopes of Helvellyn, my thoughts turned to a book I’d stumbled across in the university library called The Great Game. Quite why I was reading that when the module I was supposed to be writing about was Frankish knights I don’t recall, but the distraction proved fortuitous. It told stories of bold young Englishmen sneaking over high mountain passes to defend the Empire, with India as its centrepiece, against brutish Russian marauders.
One person in particular stood out. I think I must have been impressed with the beard. Contemporary portraits show a barrel-chested man with immense facial fuzz and a turban that would have put the Ayatollah to shame. It belonged to Arthur Conolly, a dashing young officer in the British East India Company, who was the first person to coin the term ‘the Great Game’. I wondered if he and his mates had made their travel plans whilst training in the green fields of Blighty? Conolly undertook several forays into the far south of Russia, as well as the khanates of the Muslim Central Asian states – often in disguise, rarely with official permission, and always at great personal risk. One day, in the summer of 1839, he set off on an overland trip from England to India, to see if it was possible to travel along the Silk Road in the age of Empire.
I suddenly had the urge to do the same. I shouted through the mist to Jon, ‘India?’
‘Hmmm,’ he mused. ‘I do enjoy a good curry, but I was thinking I’d like to tick Russia off first. It’d give me an excuse to read War and Peace.’ It wasn’t quite the answer I’d hoped for, but I could see I’d tickled his fancy.