The trip home - Afganistan

This is a comment I posted on the blog of a friend, David Searles, who was our country director during part of our PCV stay in the Philippines.

My husband David and I COS’ed (Close of Service) from the Philippines in January of 1974. We did the “long trip home” for most of the year in 1974. We picked up an English tour bus in Kathmandu called “Swagman Overland Tours”. Needless to say, it was full of Ausies taking their “Walk-abouts”! It was definitely a “budget tourist” way to go. We camped most places, sometimes with the tents that were carried on top of the bus, but often just on our ground pads and sleeping bags out in the open. We went overland from there through India, into Pakistan and into Afganistan. We must have gotten our Afghan visas in India or Pakistan because we didn’t have any problems at the border. Our small problem was at the gate to the pass. We arrived too late in the day to cross all the way to Kabul before dark so were turned back to start again the next day. The border guards said that they couldn’t “protect your women”! We found a hi-way construction camp on the road back to Rawilpindi and the workers allowed us to camp there. We drove through the pass the next day, stopping at a town in the middle for tea. We could have bought all sorts of smuggled goods there from “pen” guns (holding one bullet in a fountain pen) to coke (and not cola). We arrived safely in Kabul in the late afternoon and stayed in a budget hotel there. We celebrated the 4th of July in Bandiamir, camped near the beautiful lake there.