Found: Old Travel Documents

You needed all kinds of documents to drive successfully from Europe to India, starting with a passport, of course, and visas for many of the countries you’d be passing through. Some of the visas you could get at the border, some you had to get in advance— and I remember being turned down for one entirely. I was in Belgrade in what was then Yugoslavia and trying to drive to Albania. The person at the embassy wouldn’t even let me into the building. He just opened a peep hole, asked me what I wanted, said no and unceremoniously closed the peephole. Decades later I spent the better part of a month driving around Albania with Roland. It was easy then; they wanted tourists. And the paranoid dictator was long dead.

But that drive I took from London to the Indian subcontinent starting in 1969-- no cell phones, no computers, no credit cards-- that was a tricky thing to navigate. Some documents I could get when I was still at home. Others I just picked up willy-nilly on the way, travelers in the other direction telling me what I needed and giving me an idea of how to get it.

But back in the ‘60s, it was tough. Eventually I put it all together as best I could. The most difficult score was a carnet de passage en douane, which I needed in order to get my van into India. India was starting auto manufacturing and they didn’t want tourists bringing cars from Europe and selling them to Indians. So you had to put up a bond, a cash guarantee for the full worth of the vehicle that would be refunded when you left the country with the vehicle. The carnet was kind of a temporary import license and not easy to get unless you had a lot of money. I had about $200 in travelers checks when I got to India. I needed $3,000 in lieu of a carnet and back then only rich people with established credit histories had credit cards and the issuers had strict eligibility criteria that made it as impossible for someone like me as getting an Albanian visa was. Besides, American credit cards weren’t accepted in most foreign countries. I never knew anyone who had one until the late ‘70s when I got back to America.

So that carnet was a big problem that had to be solved. I didn’t have the cash and I didn’t have a banker’s letter of indemnity. Today you need a carnet to bring a car into Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India but I drove into all those countries and it was only India that insisted.

I learned that the folks posted to out of the way embassies like in Iran and Afghanistan were always eager to have American tourists come by since there were so few back then and I guessed they missed people who spoke English as a native language. Some of these embassies had a weekly movie screening with free refreshments. And “free” was a magic word for me back then. The idea of free food and a movie was a big deal. I never missed a movie night in Tehran or Kabul. And all it took was cleaning up a little to make the embassy staff feel relaxed around me. Funny, none of my traveling companions were ever interested beyond asking me to bring them back a doggie bag.

In Tehran I met a young guy not much older than me. At the time I didn’t understand that he was putting a move on me but I was in a celibate state, totally asexual. That didn’t stop him from being very friendly in a kind of uptight professional way. He was the one who told me I needed a carnet and he was the one who helped me get it with a letter that mad the embassy the guarantor. Hard to imagine, I know— and I didn’t even have to put out; I didn’t even realize ’til years later I was supposed to have. Anyway, I got my carnet for India. I was looking for it today. I found my international driving permit, issued in 1970, an international student ID issued in 1969, a Nepali trekking permit I needed for my trip to the basecamp of Mt. Everest issued in 1970, another international student ID card in Dutch in 1972 and an India liquor permit issued in 1969. It reads “This permit authorizes the holder to buy, possess, transport, use and consume bottled liquor while touring any part of India where Prohibition is in force, provided his/her continued stay in any single state is not more than thirty days at a time.” It also included a long list of restrictions that I ignored. It was a gold mine. Let me explain.

I don’t think alcohol. I tried it once, hated it and aside for a couple of times that I had some wine, I never used any alcohol. Never even tasted a beer. But… Madras (now Chennai) is in Tamil Nadu which was a dry state— no booze in the whole state gigantic state with that has 72 million people now. Chennai is over 12 million. And I knew some of those folks would want alcohol. Actually someone must have told me. So when I was in Delhi I picked up that liquor permit and months later when I was in Madras I would drive 3 and half hours down the East Coast Road to Pondicherry (now Puducherry), an old French colony on the Bay of Bengal. Having recently (1962) acceded to India from France, that was not a dry State.

I could buy all the alcohol I needed, drive back to Madras and sell it, semi-legally (or almost legally), on the front steps of the YMCA for a reasonable profit. I financed a couple of months that way including my eventual first trip to Calcutta.