TRAVEL WORDS

What can I say about Amsterdam? It was very different to home. Drugs for a start. Lots of drugs. The red light district. Hippies. The emperor of Japan – I kid you not – loud demonstrations, museums, canals, so many bikes. We spent three hours in the Ryksmuseum, it was fascinating.

The Student Bar was a popular hang out and as we were kicked out of the hostel at 9:30am we spent another day wandering around the capital city. There were no shortage of young men vying for our attention with suggestions of accompaning them to Switzerland, Morocco, Afghanistan. All of which we turned down, of course. Finally we needed to move, the youth hostel was full and so we had to leave, we went to the nearest town of Harlem where we spent a couple of rainy days before setting off for the coast.

We reached Oostende at 12:30pm this time successfully avoiding Antwerp. It did take a while though with many short lifts, one amusingly crammed into a two-seater Triumph Spitfire. Still raining we found the youth hostel for one last night. It was very clean and also expensive, but dry. We had an enjoyable evening chatting to a couple of Americans and some Canadians who were heading for India.

The following day we walked around the city, telephoned home and used up the last of the camera film as the ferry wasn’t until 7pm. On board we got talking to Kim who was from Watford and a folk singer! He apparently had written a poem which had been used by The Incredible String Band on one of their early albums and whether that was true or not he did entertain us with his hilarious tales of travelling in France. He even offered us a lift but his car was full of gear – guitars, amps etc. Plus we were so tired when we reached Dover – the sea was so rough that it took several attempts to dock and by then it was 1:30am. We stayed in the waiting room until daylight before setting off for London.

Not the best of days. It was raining, there weren’t many lorries about and lifts were scarce. It took us all day to get through to the north of London. Calamity stuck when the lift we were in broke down and we were stuck at the side of the motorway waiting for a breakdown truck. Obviously we weren’t in a good location to hitchhike. At Leicester Forest East we finally got a lift by a lorry driver going all the way to Leeds. The relief! By now we were soaked though, cold and miserable. Our time on the Greek islands seemed like a dream.

Total time away: 10 weeks.

Within weeks I was desperate to travel abroad again, but Cathy had met a boy and reluctant to leave him and without any savings this meant finding work. So it was that on 1^st January 1972 I was flying for the first time, to Switzerland, to begin my job as an au pair in Geneva.

And so my life as a rolling stone began.

After the peace and quiet of Ios Athens was almost unbearable. Noisy, polluted, busy. We badly wanted to turn round and go back to the islands, but of course we couldn’t. Being rather dishevelled and dusty – hot showers weren’t in abundance on the island – we decided to head to the Youth Hostel No 1. It took us a while to get there and when we did, at 7:30am we found that we needed to leave at 9am. So no chance of sleeping, but at least we could get a shower and change our clothes.

We headed back into the city and decided to visit the Acropolis again and the museum. It was another hot day and we were struggling by the afternoon when we decided to head back to the hostel and have a nap. It was also my 18^th birthday so we celebrated that night with our favourite Gyros meal.

Early Monday morning we had another shower and got our gear together ready to set off home. We had very little money by then so went via the hospital to donate blood for which we got paid a few quid, enough to get us home. It was a lovely sunny day and by 11am we were on the road hoping for our first lift. We soon got one as far as Larissa where we were stuck. We went to the loos at a rather nice looking petrol station and somehow got talking to a Greek-American older man who said he was driving all the way to Bremerhaven in north Germany and was happy to take us with him. We were dubious about that, but decided we would chance it. By the end of the day we were back in Skopje. It was a huge American car with so much space and we became navigators and conversationalists in return for the lift and food, just like it was with Harry!

Instead of the coastal route this time we went through the centre of Yugoslavia which was a complete contrast. It was dull, the weather was dreary and everything looked so grey. We even saw fields still being ploughed by oxen. The towns we stopped in appeared quite poor. It all looked very bleak. We passed Beograd, Zagreb and Ljubljana and eventually stopped to spend the night in Austria. The driver (whose name I unfortunately did not record) went to stay in a motel, but Cathy and I decided to sleep in the car, the seats were wide enough for us to stretch out. I say sleep, but it was so cold we really only dozed. A loo break at dawn and then we continued until 8:30am when we stopped at yet another pretty Austrian inn where we had a substantial continental breakfast.

At this point we decided that if we did get to Bremerhaven we could possibly have a few days in Amsterdam on our way home. So we continued through Munich through Nuremberg and Kassel, where we decided to hop out and find the youth hostel as we were desperately tired. It was too cold to camp now and we really needed a proper night’s sleep and a decent meal. It was a lovely clean welcoming hostel.

The following day we hitched towards Hannover. It was a slow day of travel, frequent, but short hops and spending more time waiting than actually travelling, but we had no choice, we had to keep some money back for the ferry over the channel. We eventually reached Hannover and then headed towards Osnabruck using a mix of autobahn and other main roads. As the sun was setting we had reached Melle and it was becoming very cold – we weren’t dressed for the cold having left in the summer and spending the last couple of months in the south – luckily there was a youth hostel nearby, a rather beautiful timber framed building and we had the whole female dormitory to ourselves. Another piece of luck was that a group from West Berlin were playing at the hostel that night “Ton Steine Scherber” a political German language rock band who were very much into the works of Marx and Lenin. The songs were mostly protest songs and actually rather good though our linguistic skills were definitely not up to the after show discusions so we opted for our beds.

The morning after another good shower and breakfast we were back on the road to Osnabruck and the Dutch border where we got a lift by a lovely Dutch airman to Utrecht and from there  a couple of lifts to Amsterdam where once again we headed to a very popular youth hostel. The journey north had been a lot easier than our southern route, but maybe that was because it was now autumn and there weren’t so many people hitchhiking.

And no need for the mallet.