From ‘Hitchhiking to India in 1962. India, The Balkans and Greece in 2015’ by John Waller based on the diaries of Andrew Macalpine

The Yugoslavs are the most wonderful people we’ve seen. Very poor, but cheerful.

Yugoslavia is remarkable in its variance from the flat plains of Croatia to the patchwork quilt of Serbia and finally to the barren harsh beauty of the mountains of Macedonia. The Slovenes in the north and the Macedonians in the south are cheerful and friendly but otherwise our feelings have been blurred by the poverty. The communist system is a failure and one can only wait for the change.

Tragically, few countries in Europe lost a higher proportion of their Jewish population in Hitler’s Final Solution than Greece. ….The personal costs of the war in Greece were immense: the elimination of the Jews; the 250,000 people that died directly or indirectly as a result of the famine between 1941 and 1943; and the anti-guerrilla campaigns of 1943-44 when villages were wiped out as acts of revenge….It was also the economic cost to the Greeks that turned the Greeks against the Germans. ….After the war and the Axis defeat, the Communists fought on against the elected government leading to the Civil War which ended in 1949. In the Greek mountains from Western Thrace in the east, through Macedonia, where the guerrillas were strongest, to the Pindos in the west, Greeks killed Greeks. Over the 5 years of civil war at least 60,000 Greeks were killed. On top of this, more than 50,000 Greek speakers were refugees, mainly to Communist Yugoslavia….The exodus from Greece continued in the 1960s; there was no work and little food in Greece.

1453 is a year etched on the heart of every Greek – the year Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. On Tuesday 29^th May, the final vestige of the over one-thousand-year-old Christian Eastern Roman Empire was ended. Tuesday is still an unlucky day for the Greeks…The Ottomans were respectful of the other ‘Peoples of the Book’, welcoming for example, the huge Sephardic Jewish population after their expulsion from the Iberian peninsular in 1492…..At the peace conference in Lausanne in 1923, it was agreed that 1.3 million Christians, both ethnic Greeks and Turks, were to be expelled from the new Turkey in exchange for 480,000 Turkish-speaking Muslims stayed in Western Thrace and slightly more Greeks remained in Constantinople, though perhaps only 2,500 still live there today. ….The only good thing that came out of this tragedy was that Greece, as a country, became the most homogenous in the Balkans.

…at the Turkish-Iranian border……the truck drivers waiting to clear customs….were from Pakistan …..With great charm and perhaps some concern, they agreed to take us to Tehran…..a theory I was formulating: the further east one travelled, the more friendly and hospitable were the locals.

Almost as soon as we were in Iran an impressive and dramatic change occurred in the landscape. From moderately cultivated land even in the remotest parts, we came across enormous expanses of semi-desert. The only thing relieving the monotony of the brown was the arid green scrub. We saw our first camels……this country is very dusty….Iran is a great plateau of desert and barren mountains.

…an Iranian proverb, which says, ‘Isfahan is half the world.’

…..Iran…..the further east we go the less we see of the peasant woman, who remains in her home all day and only goes out for shopping. When she does, she is so heavily veiled that one can only see the eyes peeping out from two slits in the great loose gown she wears. This seems to be the source of the Latin conception of women for especially in poorer Italy and Spain they are very much the housewives and child-bearers.

Persia is by far the dirtiest country we have visited so far….Although the food in Turkey was very greasy it did at least have variety. Kebab was only one of the many dishes. In Persia, kebab is the only dish. It is eaten with a pancake-like bread, which is always tough unless absolutely fresh…..In Turkey, there were salads. In Iran there were none. The food is quite expensive.

In Turkey, the Moslem religion didn’t seem to have any hold on the people. Whereas in Persia it seems very strong.

….old Persian proverb: Oh God, having made Multan, Sibi and Dadar, what need was there to make hell.

Another Persian proverb: People found shivering in hell were from Multan.

…Multan…The people are very primitive. No cultural tradition at all which there was in Persia.

The Pakistan people have a code of hospitality, which must be seen to be believed. This is the most wonderful country I have ever been in.

Indian music has much that is rhythmically similar to West Indian music……Aurangabad …..Two Moslem friends had known each other for 8 years yet had never met each other’s wives

…convoy of Sikhs….all three lorries stopped ….they were set to do their weekly wash in the nearby mountain stream ….Modesty…prevents them undressing further and they always retained the towel-like cloth around their loins. It always strikes me as paradoxical that men who exhibit as few inhibitions amongst themselves as the Indians – they seem unable to forbear to handle each other when talking and to see two men walking down the street in Bombay holding hands is as common occurrence as it is in Iran – that men who show so little restraint in their day-to-day physical relations should fall short of an act that even the most conventional of Europeans would consider normal – namely exhibiting one’s naked body before friends.