First moves

We hitchhiked from Scotland to Hull and took the ferry to Ostend, where we stayed in The Red Dragon, a pub with a squat above it, run by Welsh hippies. My first trip abroad. We ended up hitching to Amsterdam.

The following year I went to university and travelled no more until I’d graduated, when I took the Magic Bus from London to Athens in spring 1978 – sadly I didn’t own a camera. The trip from London was over four days – overnight to France, breakfast in Paris; by late afternoon we were driving through the Mont Blanc tunnel, and had breakfast on the second day in Milan.

At Trieste we crossed into still-Communist Yugoslavia – the bus operators were smugglers, and had exactly 200 Marlborough cigarettes, 1 litre of Metaxa brandy and 1 Bible for every passenger, those being the personal allowances that the Yugoslav border guards could not object to. Once over the border, the contraband was reclaimed from us and delivered that night in Belgrade. 

On the final leg, one driver abandoned us at the start of his shift in Thessaloniki (his home), meaning the swing-shift driver had to do a second 12-hour stint, kept awake by us passengers crowded around him singing and playing guitar. By the time we limped into Athens it was 3 a.m., and we had to wait till 7 o’clock to get into our hotel, having been up all night.

After only one full night in Athens, we realised we could not afford to stay in the city, and set off for Naxos, where we spent the rest of the vacation camped for free on the beach.