‘The Travellers’ Tales’: A novel born from 50 years of travelling the world
Travelling has certainly changed a lot in the last 50 years, though Haddenham-based author Alastair Cairns Hull, who has written a novel based on his extensive travels, still enjoys it as much as he ever has.
Published on 28 May by Troubador Publishing, The Travellers’ Tales describes travel in the early 1970s, when there was a dramatic change in the way people were travelling and the places they were travelling to.
The novel also shows how these trips to far-flung locations were influenced by the popular culture of the time, as during the late 1960s/early 1970s, there was something of a revolution in music, clothing and social attitudes.
There were villages, towns and cities ripe for exploring, in an era when the trail promised wonder, adventure and excitement.
“I’ve been travelling mainly in Central Asia for about 50 years – I’m addicted to travel,” explains Alastair, who used to run a shop in Mill Road called Alternatives, a Cambridge market stall and a business called Nomad Traders, which eventually evolved into the Nomads shop on King’s Parade.
“And when you have an addiction like that, there’s probably about three things you can do…
“One is become an airline pilot, the other is to become a tour leader, and the other is to do what I do, which is go to unusual, remote places, buy beautiful, colourful things, and bring them back to sell to friends and the public.”
The year 1971, which is when the book is set, was a time of significant change.
Drugs and looser sexual morals were becoming more widely accepted, while the war in Vietnam raged on, resulting in mass demonstrations and draft-dodgers.
In many parts of the world, border crossings were opening up and there was a freedom and desire to travel through undiscovered countries.
The overland route to India and the Far East was open and followed by many inquisitive people from Europe and North America – and Alastair was one of them, although he actually started his travelling odyssey shortly before that, in 1969.
“My book is based upon 1971,” he notes, “which is fiction, I have to add, but it’s based upon all my experiences of travelling and meeting people and things like that.”
What first attracted Alastair to Central and Southeast Asia – he lists his favourite three countries as Nepal, Afghanistan and Indonesia – and what is it that has led him to return again and again?
“I qualified as an architect and was working in a small office in Cambridge,” he recalls, “and one, horrible, January, rainy, freezing-cold morning, probably with a hangover, I went into the office and just said to my secretary, who was a bit of a girlfriend, ‘Why don’t you come to the Seychelles with me?’
“And she said yes straight away. So 10 days later, we left to go to Kenya, with our joint money of £90.
“We flew to Kenya, one way, went to Mombasa, booked on a ferry to the Seychelles, which then were virtually unheard of…
“The only way to get there was by ferry once every three months, from Mombasa. We travelled around a bit and got stuck in the very north of Kenya, with a cholera epidemic, so we missed our ferry.
“We couldn’t possibly afford to wait three months for the next one, so we took the next ferry, which went to Bombay, and travelled around India for quite a while, ended up in Nepal, fell in love with Nepal instantly, and in those days the only way you could stay more than two weeks was to get a job...
“So Hazel, my girlfriend, now my wife of 50 years, got a job with the United Nations as a Nepalese typist/bookkeeper, and I got a job – amazingly – with my own project as an architect for the Women’s Institute of Nepal, and we stayed there for over a year.
“When we decided to leave and come back to England, we travelled overland, from Nepal to India, to Pakistan, to Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey etc.
“We fell in love with Afghanistan, and that’s where it all started.”
Alastair continues: “In the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, an awful lot of young people just set off and travelled to learn about the world.
“It was a much easier place, there weren’t difficult border crossings; you could travel from Europe all the way through to Thailand and beyond without much problem.
“Life was very different then, it was much freer.”
Although many people say that these days travel is just too much of a hassle, what with lengthy airport checks, the sheer number of people travelling, and complicated border crossings and the like, it hasn’t stopped Alastair from continuing to feed his travel addiction, albeit at a more relaxed pace.
“About seven years ago, both Hazel and I decided that our carbon footprint was so enormous from travelling for 50 years around the world, that we should try and just go by boat and train and car,” he says, “so we haven’t flown now for seven or eight years, which is quite difficult.
“One of our daughters lives in Barcelona, she’s lived there for over 15 years, we go by train to Barcelona, which is very nice and comfortable – you can watch the French countryside whizzing by.
“And our other daughter lives just outside Amsterdam, so we go by ferry and train to visit them – and next week we’re going to Wales on holiday; we’ve got our beautiful, antique Airstream caravan.”
Alastair reveals that the book took him “a long time” to write.
“I got the idea probably about 10 years ago, when I was travelling in North Ethiopia,” he says, “in the back of a very rough old 4x4, totally covered in dust and bouncing over rocky roads.
“For some reason, I just suddenly thought, ‘Why don’t I write a book about all this?’ And I wrote it over the next two days in the back of this 4x4 truck, as filmmaker’s slide-shots.
“So I designed each chapter in my head as pictures, as film shots. It took me five, six years later before I actually put anything down onto paper.”
The Travellers’ Tales, priced £10.99, is available now from troubador.co.uk/bookshop/ contemporary/the-travellers-tales.
