Transit to India

Neville Tate OBE R.

Description

Changing times bring changing outlooks but even back in 1984, well before the plethora of today's health and safety laws and risk-averse attitudes, an overland school trip to far-off India was considered somewhat extreme. And doubly so, given that travel through Iran was unavoidable despite Iran at the time suffering the upheavals of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution and engagement in a bloody war with neighbouring country Iraq.The idea behind this 10000-mile, eight-week journey was to present a 'retired' old school Ford Transit minibus to the charity 'Lepra' to aid its life-saving work among India's rural poor. Ten pupils aged 12 to 16, accompanied by two teachers, made up the delivery crew, in so doing possibly making the longest school minibus trip ever undertaken. One of the boys travelling (aged 15 at the time) said recently: "Surviving all the adventures and hairy incidents, all I can say is that I set off as a boy and returned as a man."

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528984713
• Langue: English

Extrait

T ransit to I ndia
R. Neville Tate OBE
Austin Macauley Publishers
2022-11-30
Transit to India About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Postscript
About the Author
Son of a Yorkshire farmer, R. Neville Tate OBE’s first employment was as a graduate apprentice in aeronautical engineering. However, an urge to travel led to a career change, taking up a post as a science teacher in Buenos Aires where he spent 13 years. Using the long school holidays Neville crisscrossed South America, at first by motorcycle, but later leading numerous schoolboy adventure expeditions to many of the wildest parts of that continent. Canoeing, or cycling, or horse-riding long distances demanding circumstances was often part of the package.
Returning to the UK in the mid-seventies, Neville was soon immersed in a new adventure of quite a different sort, becoming the founding headmaster of Yarm School, one of the very few “Public Schools” to be started from scratch since World War II.
Current hobbies and interests include light aircraft flying, gardening and model railways, and of course, adventure travel. Neville, as a constituency delegate addressed the 1976 Conservative Party Annual Conference and served for five years as a non-executive director of the North Tees Hospital Trust.
Dedication
To all those brave parents who allowed (and even encouraged) their precious offspring to join my adventure expeditions, to their ultimate benefit.
“I went a boy and returned a man” was the summary of David Hall, one of the participants.
Copyright Information ©
R. Neville Tate OBE 2022
The right of R. Neville Tate OBE to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of 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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528984683 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528984690 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528984713 (ePub e-book)
ISBN 9781398418332 (Audiobook)
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First Published 2022
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Chapter 1
The central bazaar in Zahedan in eastern Iran, though by no means in the same league as Istanbul’s Kapali Carsi or Cairo’s Khan Al Khalili, was in all essentials much like its far, far bigger and more famed sisters. Yet on one particular August day in 1984, an element in Zahedan’s pattern of trade made the place distinctly unique and, in its way, remarkable. For there, in cheeky openness, was a stall being run by English schoolboys. They were selling, believe it or not, tins of baked beans, of Ambrosia rice pudding and other popular standbys of the British home. These same lads were also providing cooking tips and offering free samples prepared on a tiny primus stove. Bemused locals crowded round, drawn by the novelty of the scene and brisk sales resulted.
The date held some significance. For a start August is Iran’s hottest month and 1984, the Orwellian year, a sad time of war and revolution in the ancient land of Persia. An intolerant fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had returned from exile in 1979 to overthrow the authoritarian pro-Western rule of the Shah and in its place had established a revolutionary Islamic state, a regime particularly hostile to Britain and the United States. By 1984 Iran was also in the thick of a vicious war with neighbouring Iraq, then ruled by another troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein. This titanic conflict between Shia Iran and Sunni-dominated Iraq was to claim over a million lives.
But what in the first place were these ten English schoolboys and their two teachers doing in the dusty and remote Iranian city of Zahedan in the middle of such a war?
To answer this question, I will have to take you back a few months to the small market town of Yarm in the north-east of England, where at Yarm School disappointment was being felt over the worth of an old Ford Transit minibus which the school had hoped to trade-in for a newer version of the same vehicle. But so little was the school being offered for its old faithful that I felt the deal hardly worth the bother and that we might just as well scrap it or give it buckshee to some charity. In fact, there was next to nothing wrong with it except for some ugly rusting around the wheel arches, yet such is the tyranny of modern-day attitudes that the school had little choice but to replace it for the sake of its all-important image. Today’s parents set great store by the fripperies of equipment and facilities.
It was while mulling over these irritating issues that I remembered ‘Lepra’, a charity the school was regularly supporting. Leprosy is curable these days but myths and deeply rooted prejudices about the disease were still preventing many fully cured victims claiming their rightful place in society and their share of economic opportunity. This was particularly true of certain remote rural communities in India and I was aware of the vital work this charity was engaged in work as much about education as medicine. Suitable vehicles to enable Lepra’s specialist personnel reach these backward communities were urgently needed yet the purchase of even one would absorb thousands of pounds from a budget where spending just a few pounds secures all the drugs necessary to save a sad victim from leprosy’s cruel ruin. In short, it seemed to me ridiculous that, thanks to the crazy dictates of Western economics, we were proposing to throw away as trash exactly the sort of vehicle heroic medics in India desperately needed for their work.
Among its various clubs, societies and extra-curricular bodies, the same school ran an ‘Expedition Club’ which organised overseas travel and exploration for groups of pupils over the summer holidays. Most of these expeditions were built around travel in a school minibus to destinations off the beaten track and rather more exciting than those commonly accessible via the mainstream travel agencies of the time – the 1970s and 80s. Further, not only was such travel physically tough, thanks to the rather basic nature of the vehicles then available, but food and accommodation were equally of an improvised nature with primus stove cooking and camping the norm and a meal in restaurant or a night in a hotel very much the exception. I had been running such trips for a good many years and because only the basic outlines – ferry bookings and suchlike – were pre-planned, a frequent catalogue of untoward and unexpected incidents was more or less inevitable and led to an atmosphere of adventure that most boys found heady and exciting.
I don’t recall the point at which a link actually formed in my mind between the minibus we had for disposal and an Indian leprosy charity’s urgent need for vehicles but clearly the real eureka moment was when I realised that I could make a splendid Expedition Club adventure by physically delivering our old bus to the charity in India.
For, by filling it up with volunteer pupils and then driving all the way to India through Europe and the lands of the Middle East, I would of course be opening up for them the opportunity of once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
I will delay until later details of the bureaucratic adventures I also had to endure to obtain visas to allow us to pass through war-torn revolutionary Iran and to import into India, without customs duty, our old minibus and a small trailer. Let us for the moment just picture an elderly commonplace minibus crammed full of sweating teenagers grinding along the desert highway linking the two sweltering and dusty Iranian cities of Kerman and Zahedan. The distance between them is 317 miles (510km) and we are hoping to do it in something like nine or ten hours. The terrain is an intimidating blend of sand and bare rock as the road crosses the southern end of the formidable Dasht-e Lut desert. There are no roadside towns or settlements to divert attention or mark progress. It is a continuum of heat and glare. According to NASA’s satellite research, this area holds the record for the hottest land temperatures on the planet and on occasion the ambient temperature has exceeded 70°c. At first the road was quite good but the further east we travelled the rougher it became. There was virtually no other traffic but about every half hour or so a vague form would emerge from the shimmering haze ahead and gradually assume the outline of a large truck. As it neared it would turn on its headlights and often also blast its raucous horn, these acts a precaution in case the other vehicle had a sleeping driver. We, too, for like reason adopted the custom and those pupils in the back not yet comatose would wave and cheer lustily as the vehicles passed, giving I suppose the poor devils something to do.
Twelve people on a seven-week journey require a lot of luggage and to provide as much interior space as possible for long teenage legs, most of it was either on the roof or in the trailer. Additionally, the challenging nature of the journey obliged us to carry two spare wheels for the bus as well as extra petrol, all of which is heavy stuff.
Another concomitant of self-sufficiency in desert travel is the need for a fair amount of on-board water, yet another weighty commodity. Finally, there is the question of food and the heavy g