@Yogesh Parajuli Hi Yogesh, I spent marvelous time in Pokhara. Quiet and friendly place. I hope you'll travel a lot ! If you come in Quebec, Canada, write me !
I completely understand the driver when he says "one rainy moring he couldn't face the underground" and he left that life. I did that 6 years ago. I left the sheer insanity that is the US and have never returned. The weight that has been lifted is indescribable. (written from a port on the Med Sea where I live now 🙂)
Such a beautiful video. --- I travelled to Kathmandu by road for the first time in 1979 and arrived there in December. I was in Asia for several years in total. --- I consider myself so blessed and lucky to have been able to experience and see all this.
Hlo mam i am from NEPAL and would be too glad to back in my childhood where i witnessed lot hippies tenting around my houses.Which which places had you travelled of NEPAL?
I did this route in ‘79. Couldn’t travel through Afghanistan because the Russians had invaded. Had to take a huge detour via Baluchistan, Quetta. What an incredible experience it was. Wherever we went, people were warm and friendly, welcoming. Even in Iran, which was “global public enemy No1” at the time, due to the Revolution.
Reminds me of he book "hippie" by paulo coelho,the route,magic bus,boys with long hair and girls with the tshirt flowerpower printed on it . 70's was golden era.Those were the time when people from all over the world came to Nepal for the enlightment and to sort out the unanswered questions of thier life. I sometimes regret being from 90's, and now fucking technology destroyed all of our hospitality,bonding and still the worst is yet to come.
Man, don't believe that nonsense. There isn't anything that you could do in the 70s that you can't do today. Young people are doing hard core travel in Africa and South America right this moment. It's a state of mind, not an era.
@@michaeldeman -- oh man, that made me laugh out loud. As if traveling were the path to nirvana. And why Nepal for the source of enlightenment when Columbus Ohio is equally likely? :-) Curious, did you ever make it up to Dharamsala, where the Dali Lama and his entourage ended up? They've set up a pretty impressive footprint there complete with "Buddha University" While open to anyone I'm pretty sure the thinking was why not make some money off these hapless western kids who have time and money and come here out of a desperate need for purpose in their lives. Everybody wins! There were quite a few of these westerners walking around all proud and full of themselves in their newly purchased brand new monk saffron robes. Their downward gaze said it all: they were superior chosen human beings here for a purpose as opposed to the rest of you aimless gawkers who are merely stumbling through life, Now that I think of it, I can see that working, that all they really needed was a valid reason to feel important. Who am I to judge? A rational thinker, that's who. Fuck them and their cartoon saffron robes. They were just immature and impatient. Nobody knows who they are at 20. But you get there soon enough.
had to smile when he said India was a crowded country, i traveled from London to Australia in 1977/78 and thought India crowded too. Just returned from a month in India ( January 2023) got a shock India is packed ! last visit was in 2000 , enjoyed Delhi and Calcutta but now it was just too much for me i fled to south India and spent my last ten days in peace. wonderful film conjured up many great memories , thanks.
1974, a small holdall, not much money, solo from Istanbul to Kathmandu by local buses, staying in local inns. from there to Bangkok by plane (no passage through Burma in those days). then trains and hitching, to Singapore. didn't want to go back, so carried on... rustbucket ship to Perth, W.A. I arrived a matter of days before they shut down the free entry for Brits option (something I wasn't aware of at the time). astounded I did it, astounded I survived. the best bit for me, was Afghanistan, but certainly wouldn't want to be there now. lived in Oz for 18 years. now in Japan for 30.
You don't need a time machine friend, you can do it right now. Sure, not the same trip, but how about Africa? Or South America? I will say that it's far more plausible the younger you are. This kind of adventure is a young person's game. While you could conceivably do it at any age, it will be hell on an older body who won't take much delight in the cheap accommodations and will likely just be a miserable old coot.
Well, first time I came to Nepal in 1979 and came back nine times again, having nepalese friends there who visited me here in Europe. Those were the days.
Serious Karaoke Well, I have stayed alltogether 5 years in Africa, the Americas and Sout East Asia. NEPAL was and is my favourite place and it is unique. Germany is my first home and place of birth and Nepal the second, Chile the third. Sumatra was amazing too but Bangladesh was horrible.
Let's do it now. I'm a neo hippie and ready to take the trail. If one of us gets killed, we'll use that as a message on how evil the local people are if we do. It's peace or death journey but worth it!
I did this trail back in ‘74... we stopped one night and camped in the desert in Afghanistan. We all took acid and one of our passengers wandered off in the middle of the night. We waited and looked for him but couldn’t find him. I always wondered what happened to him.
@@michaeldeman hello Sir, please could you tell me when would you release part 2, 3 & 4?? Can't wait to see your video about the last Destination Nepal 🇳🇵
Man, I wish I could travel back in time and visit all the beautiful places in Marocco, Afghanistan, India, Nepal when they were like they were back then...😌
yup, it is I, Mike Deman, and very much still alive! The driver and star of this movie ;) And I am still in contact with at least three of the passengers on that trip. Two of them are grannies and still with adventure in their hearts!
@@michaeldeman I can only imagine how pristine and amazing the whole trip would have been. I hope all the hardship of the travel was worth the hospitality and welcoming nature of my old City of Kathmandu. Do you still visit Nepal? If you do, I would be delighted to perhaps have opportunity to meet you in person and listen more of you travel stories. Love and light from The mouttains. :)
@@kichaachitrakar443 I have nothing but the very fondest memories of my times in Nepal. When I stopped overland driving, I managed the Everest View Hotel in Solu Khumbu for some time - and living up there among the world's most beautiful peaks was a truly spiritual experience. I keep meaning to go back for a visit, but simply have not yet found the time! I would love to meet you if one of these days I actually get to do it!
Thank you for the reply, I can only imagine how amazing experience it would have been. I shall send you a message so that perhaps we can stay in touch till you are here!@@michaeldeman
🙏 thank you so much for this wonderful video as well as all lovers of Nepal . It makes me feel so thrilled, it touches my heart and got on opportunity to watch the back Kathmandu. I’m out of country so missing a lot of things of hometown.
fantastic, loved it. COVID-19 had just forced me to return 6 months early from a 1-year overland trip from UK to Aus (well, Indonesia, as far as you can get by land/sea these days). Made it to southern Thailand via trans-Mongolian railway, China, Laos and Myanmar. Due to the virus, I'm now back home and spending all day watching retro travel stories such as yours to maintain my beleif that we shall all be able to travel again some day. Thanks for posting.
same here... just came back from laos because of this covid shit. Hoping to get back on the road soon. Hope to see on the crossroads some day... till then stay safe stay alive.
....except that travel in Asia is now 1000 times more lame and uptight than it used to be....I first went to India and Thailand (&Viet Nam, LAo, Burma ..) in '93 and have gone back over the years but it just became more and more tame and touristy....worst example: Thai islands - lawless and sweet in 93-94, now pale simulacras of what was...teeming with tryhards....cops, concrete,,.....
I would reply with great thanks to the very many Afghans who received all of us with such hospitality and generosity of spirit, back in those days when all seemed right with the world. I am now 70 years old, but I will never forget those wondrous days and nights, sipping chai and eating kebabs with flat bread, and having warm conversations with our hosts in the roadside chaikhanehs....
3 months in the back of that truck, that takes some perseverance. Must have been an amazing experience back then though. I have a 3 hour flight from where I’m living to Kathmandu and have popped over for a long weekend !
The preparations for this trip and the skills needed, imagine... The trip is an education surpassing what you are taught in schools. Amazing. Things were less complicated and more complicated in those days.
Amazing...so captivating, fascinating and mesmerizing documentary. Everything is so perfect, if only the print would hv been better, but I understand,it's from long back in the time. You took us through the time around half of the world. I could recognise places in Turkey and India. Kashmir has a long history of hospitality and tourism, I find the same even now. I'm proud that only Asia has such wide array of geographical, colorful, cultural, religious and demographic diversity to offer to the world. Thanks for uploading. If someone has more such treasure please upload or give link
Thank you so much to see my home land Pokhara,,it reminds me a lot ..at that time we had a king and good road from pokhara to Kathmandu,happy people and culture,,that we are going to losing soon,,,,
I made this trip 1979 - 1980, but not with these guys. That would have sucked for a couple reasons. First, that truck would totally suck to travel in for months and months. I traveled using local transportation, old beat up buses (at times riding on top where you could stretch out on the luggage) and third class train tickets. The ride itself probably wasn't any better but the view sure as hell had to be better than a canvas topped cargo truck, good lord. Second, traveling with the same people, all westerners, going to the same places and doing the same things as a group? For three solid months? That would be maddening within two weeks tops.. And cooking your own food? Wth? Eating the local food (usually street food) is a big part of the traveling experience. Where is the adventure? This is an insulated guided tour. To hell with that. The adventure is in not knowing what lies ahead and immersing yourself in whatever comes. Eyes wide open, everything is new and different. It was like being on another planet, several other planets. It's the details and little things that make it an adventure like dealing with bus schedules and train schedules and finding that certain hostel and that cool as shit local cafe and dealing with local bureaucracy in getting visas for the next country...all that administrative all that finding out stuff, that's the journey, that's what traveling is all about, well the destinations too, but still you aren't really traveling unless you have both. Here's why: you're not just getting a train ticket, you are interacting with people in their culture and in so doing you get to directly experience that culture in the only way one can directly experience it. (The video still merits a thumbs up because they at least had the foresight to video document their trip and there are damn few of those. I'm just now struck with the thought of how cool it would have been to have had an iPhone back then.) I traveled by myself, meaning I didn't start the trip with anyone else but I never ended up traveling alone. It was easy to meet fellow travelers since budget travelers all stay in the same cheap hovel hostels, eat in the same cheap places, drink beers in the same divey bars, and so forth. Mind you that doesn't; mean one hostel, it means dozens of hostels, and hundreds of cafes, and bars (in Europe that is). There were always a couple cool travelers heading the same way and you just sorta grouped up. After a couple weeks we'd split up to take off in some other direction with another traveler heading that way. There was a current of travelers going west to east and the other way, from Australia/New Zealand heading to Europe, and the information and tips was real time current. I traveled like that for a year starting in London and overland to Kathmandu. We zipped through Iran as quickly as we could since this was just after the Shah had been deposed and the Ayatollahs were running the show and it was not a good place for Americans to be. A few months later the U.S. Embassy Hostage Crisis ensued. We also bypassed Afghanistan since the Russian induced civil war had just begun and took the southern route to Pakistan instead and spent a couple months each in Pakistan, India, and Nepal. It would have been great to have been able to travel overland through Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam to get to Thailand, but all those countries were closed to travelers at the time. So I took a cheap plane ride to Thailand some months there and in Indonesia. It was safe, it was fun, it was mind expanding, it was maturing, it was enlightening, it was a helluva lot of partying, and it was DIRT CHEAP. A dollar a day in some places. But the best part of it all was no matter where you went there were cool people who were happy to have you and show and tell how important/ancient/interesting/ and wonderful their piece of the world was. It was an incredible experience that has never left me, indeed I carry it with me still for it profoundly changed my worldview. I've been an eager adventurer ever since. It's a big ass wonderful world out there just waiting on you to take the first step and leave your familiar little ol' piece of ground where nothing changes and nothing is interesting. "Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way." .
Hi Karaoke, thanks for the comment, and one can only commend you for your spirit of adventure. But you know we have an expression "horses for courses". We were operating as a commercial venture, and fortunately for us there were a lot of takers. Plenty of people may have an appetite for a venturesome experience, without doing what you did. I had an incredibly diverse set of passengers on these trips, and one in particular sticks in my mind: an ex-Indian Army colonel in his 70s with an artificial hip who not only travelled all the way from London in the back of our truck, but also trekked with me to Everest Base Camp - with a couple of additional sherpas to carry his vodka rations! I also recall on one occasion driving deep into the Great Sand Desert in Iran, coming across a couple of travellers who were cast more in your mould. Their beat-up psychedelic kombi van which they barely knew how to maintain, had given up the ghost a good 2 days drive in any direction from any form of sustenance mechanical or dietary. We happily loaded their belongings - including two hand gliders - onto the rood of the cab, and took them all the way to Kathmandu. Very good company they were too; and they paid for their passage by teaching us all how to hang glide once we got there. I think there is another point you are missing: probably the major point of our trips was to spend the maximum amount of time off-road, and to go to places where perhaps the individual traveller on his own resources would not be able to reach. Yes of course we went to Shit Street in Kabul where anyone can go to partake of hash brownies, and to the Bamiyan Buddhas, where travellers like yourself could also visit in the local buses. But were you able to cross the Dasht-i-Margo aka Desert of Death in a series of sandstorms? Visit the Minaret of Jam by the tumbling Hari Rud river in the middle of the Hindu Kush? The Old City deep in the desert south west of Kandahar? I can assure you that you cannot visit those places in a tuk-tuk! What I am trying to say is that there is no right way or wrong way to do this: and I think you might reconsider and rein in a little bit your veiled contempt for people who at the end of the day just might have been able to see things and go to places that you were unable (or maybe not interested) in seeing. I am certain that you had an amazing set of experiences that will stay with you for the rest of your life, and bravo for that. But I am also certain that the people that travelled with me have the same set of memories. I have remained in touch with a number of them, now in their sixties and seventies like myself, and they never stopped travelling whenever they could, and remain adventurous in their desire to see all the places on their bucket list. They are still at it. And bravo to them too! As I said....horses for courses. And I of course was the really lucky one - I actually got paid to drive 4-wheel drive trucks in deserts and mountains, and to get to see far more places over a number of years than I could ever have expected to see as an independent traveller!
@@michaeldeman -- And there you have it, reasonable discourse represented by differing points of view. In the end, I think you will agree that it's splitting hairs when considered in the greater context of having had the experience in the first place. To all you young people out there, it's not so much how you do it as it is that you do it. And I hope you do it.
did anyone take the "Magic Bus" from London to Kathmandu in the 1970s, I'm sure it was £25 for an open return ticket, I used to see the advert in NME for it and always wanted to take that trip, a few people who I knew who went there never recovered, or should I say readjusted to UK life, became full-on hippies or vanished, times were far simpler back then, buy an old bus, fix it up, advertise in the NME, when it was sold out set off, no special insurance, no nothing, just go and do it. . .what a great attitude these travellers had back then, little or no organisation and only a few reference books to read prior to going,
I was 13 at the time and travelled aged 20 around the Greek islands for 5 weeks on my own. I’m not sure anyone would allow their daughter to do that now. Travelling in those days was very scary and difficult. No internet, not even many credit cards. In the end you kinda changed
Thanks for the memorable documentary. I took the same land trip in 1972 by ship from Penang to Madras and further by land to Europe. Unfortunately I was travelling at a very low budget....USD2 per day. I could not afford a camera and therefore no pictures available....
Talib Hamid not having photographs is also a blessing in disguise. Now u can explain and elaborate ur trip based on your memory to ur children or friends. Remember Marco Polo too didn’t took photographs
This was the easy way…a group, a guide…a filmmaker. Thousands of young people had gone before, single, couples, friends for a decade. Those were the true adventures. But it’s very nice to see some film that suggests that time. In the 80’s during several trips I reached 44 countries. Afghanistan was closed, but China and Tibet were open. I was never robbed, and never heard a complaint about violence from other travelers. It was bad publicity to attack western kids in all the police states, I guess. The Dollar was crazy high. Now I’m old and must pee far too often 😢
I was there near that time. I think we left Istanbul in early September and arrived in Nepal about Dec of 78 and we were there in Nepal for 3 months and a week or so. We had to get our visa extended multiple times. At first in Kathmandu and then much longer in Pokhara where we had a house (more like a hut) near the lake.
😅i made the overland trip from Corfu to Kathmandu in 71 on Mercedes streetcar bus driven by a couple of Irishmen. I was 19 years old when i started the trip twenty when I arrived in Kathmandu. The 15 to 20 others on the bus were mostly young europeans
A truck? We used to dream of travelling in't truck. Went overland alone in 1976 by train, bus, hitching etc. I arrived in India the very week that Charles Sobragh was finally caught by the police in Agra. Whew!
"and every school boy knows a camel carries water in its humps" ..indeed! what a journey, I wouldn't have believed people would chooose to spend 3 months on a truck ...wow
man, makes me dream. when self-growth and discovery clearly fucking meant something. full on immersion in nature and culture so foreign that every day can change you, every new place and people leave a vivid impression and the potential to alter how you look at the world, must have been so inspiring. now we're just told to read sodding Twelve rules for life and suck it up. to hustle soullessly and endlessly in the face of capitalist excess, environmental disaster and social and economic decline. must have been glorious to feel so free from it all for a few months, thanks for this awesome documentary x
I just met a crew last week in Ladakh who drove a big old 80's bus (I think converted ambulance) through Iran and Pakistan. They only had good things to say about Iran, particularly the curiosity and hospitality of the people, so still possible :-)
@@benwalton1039 Heard about the travellers currently jailed in Iran? One of them, a french young guy taking pictures and being accused of being a spie! Has been jailed for quite a while now, and is not the only one. So, no thank you, I wouldn't take the risk or either want to travel to a country who can do that.
Great to get a reminder of my solo overland trip to the Himalayas and India in 1975. Don't want to nit-pick but I can't imagine doing the trip any way other than how i did it which was very arduous but character-building. Most did it this way, by hitching half the way and then catching local buses. You were free to stop off and spend time, or go wherever you wanted to. I can't imagine paying the money to this as a group, and with no freedom. ("Cooking duties", "shopping duties", and putting out and packing tents again?) Of course, it wasn't reasonably possible to make a documentary about what most people did, which was to do the trip solo! A lot of this "tour" seems to cover many things I never saw and seem vaguely interesting - but frankly after 15 minutes of any kind of "guided tour" I get very bored and need to go off alone again. In short, this is definitely not how most people did the overland route to India.
Bedford MK , what a classic . If the cab tipped like the Ford D series it would be perfect. Ive bounced around in the back of one them so massive respect to all those youngsters . Never fancied it myself but I was in the hospital for tropical diseases in st pancras after a tough time in india and almost every other bed was taken up by a similar expedition crossing Africa whod left behind all their soap and disinfectant one night and were all horribly ill.
I would love to see a video of the travellers in the film getting together and reminiscing about the journey and their thoughts on countries today like Afghanistan and Iran. Could anyone make this possible?
I am in touch with only two or three of the members of this trip, and sadly one passed away recently. I would love to have a reunion but doubt I can make it happen...,
@@michaeldeman That’s a shame. It would have made a great video. Thank you for this video though. It’s fabulous. The young lady at 11.40. Is she surprised at how cheap or expensive the fruit is? Also at the end of the trip did you drive the lorry back to England solo or sell it? Apologies if they come across as silly questions. I’m just fascinated about journeys like this.
Wonderful adventure. Thank you for posting. Maybe in the future don't use those weird "stabilizing" plug-ins when converting. It gave several scenes a bizarre look.
