July 1982. Our plan was to hitch hike to Istanbul over the course of a month. We were fresh out of school and had just finished our A levels. Mark was going to try for a place at Brasenose College, Oxford in the seventh term exams and I was off to Warwick University that autumn. We were hungry for life and adventure.
Our rucksacks were new. Our shorts and T shirts were white, as was our skin. Very white. Persil white in fact. We had £100 each, a copy of Ken Welsh’s classic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Europe and 200 Camel cigarettes. What could go wrong?
Our girlfriends had said their goodbyes and we headed for the ferry terminal at Hull. It took us overnight to Rotterdam and we managed to hitch a ride into central Amsterdam. Tramping around with our rucksacks and our spindly legs poking out of our white shorts, we must have looked like prey. Walking around the Red Light District, street pimps touted for our business.
You like girls, boys?
The woman-madam walked beside us but backwards, looking into our faces with an amused look. “Nein, danke” we cried, dredging our German knowledge from World War II films and hoping that our evident German-ness would flummox the madam and throw her off the scent.
Ach, du bist Deutscher. Kein Problem. Noch besser. Wir haben alle Mädchen der Welt für alle Jungen der Welt. Komm und ficke.
Our goose was cooked. We had no more German to continue this charade. We fessed up to being Brits but said we were not interested – thank you (always important to remain polite, we reasoned). Actually, we were a bit overwhelmed. No, that’s not true. We were completely overwhelmed. We were way out of our depth. We had landed in the middle of RealWorld after decades of sheltered upbringing and we were unprepared for it. Not, admittedly, as unprepared as my nephew, who, on his first trip abroad alone, missed his pre-arranged ride and was effectively kidnapped by his airport taxi driver in Jakarta. He ended up in a brothel trying not to watch dwarf ladyboys wrestling in oil, valiantly trying to hold onto his suitcase as the prostitutes tried to prize it from his grasp.
No. We were not that unprepared, but we were overwhelmed and a little bit scared. Maybe it was the ganja floating in the air but paranoia descended and we turned on our heels and fled the street. We took refuge in a bar and had a beer. What to do? We figured that our backpacks made us look too conspicuous. Too touristy. They were performing the same function as a target painted on our backs saying “FUCK US OVER” would have done. Clearly, no one was out to get us. We were just in the streets. But we took it real personal.
The beer made us resolute. We decided to go to the rail station and dump our backpacks in a locker. That way, we reasoned, we would just blend in. Brilliant. On our way to the station we were handed a card with the legend FAT CITY on it. This establishment was only asking 50p a night for a bed. Bargain, we thought. And signed up. Once we’d dropped off our backpacks at the station, we relaxed a bit and had another beer overlooking the canal. We walked along and this time, in our beer buzz and relieved of the weight of the world on our backs , we could enjoy the summer vibe of an Amsterdam evening. Beer followed beer. We became braver. But we figured that, perhaps, we had slightly overextended ourselves and that Amsterdam was a bit “off the deep end”. Promising ourselves that we would only ever do this once, we resolved to get a train to the French border in the morning and then start afresh our hitch-hiking marathon to the Bosphorus. A plan. We wandered the whore strewn streets with renewed insouciance and, with a confidence befitting seasoned travellers we fended off the advances of the hawkers and pimps. We resisted the window girls – we were both in deep and committed relationships at the time, obviously. And we found our accommodation for the night: Fat City.
We showed the guy on the front desk the card we had been given and he directed us to the dormitory upstairs. No ting of the brass bell; no bell boy magically appeared as they seemed to when I travelled with my parents. Just the stairway up to a room that was dark and musty and where the window was draped with a blanket. There were two bunks unoccupied and we took those. Most of the other beds had blankets hanging over the side to give privacy. On the table in the middle of the room was a syringe and some stuff we presumed wasn’t a diabetes kit. For two boys whose idea of rebellion was sucking down a Marlboro red by holding the cigarette between your pinky and your ring finger, cupping your hands to pull the smoke through your enclosed hand at a hole in the gap between your thumbs, this was a mindfuck. The night couldn’t go fast enough and we headed out at first light the next day. This realworld shit was, well, real.
The first stop inside France was a little town called Aulnoye. We disembarked with our backpacks and stood wondering what to do next. Being good, middle class, law abiding young gentlemen, we decided we should probably inform the nearest constabulary of our arrival in France. Figuring that we had journeyed through Holland and Belgium on the train, we didn’t want to end up on Interpol’s Most Wanted List. We presented ourselves at the police station in our best O level French. It made no better impression than our German had the night before. Although we didn’t understand the nuances of the duty sergeant’s response to our “handing ourselves in ” and offering our passports for inspection, his hand gestures made it clear that he was eager for us to leave and not waste any more of his time.
The only shop we could find furnished us with a bottle of red wine, a baguette and some Camembert. A feast. We set up our tent in a field on the outskirts of Aulnoye and watched the sun go down over some French cows and grass and lit our seventy-first cigarette of the day. Life seemed better. Even though we had yet to actually hitchhike, this life on the road suited us, we felt. We were very Kerouac, very Bob Dylan. Calm but excited by the prospect of all those miles stretching forward along our pilgrimage to Constantinople, we talked into the night and bedded down in our pristine, never used sleeping bags and the borrowed tent that took us two hours to semi-erect.
Our dining companions in the field 
A simple supper 
Our tent – the ‘before’ shot in a Viagra ad
Camp was struck and we tramped down the lane to the main road. We decided to try our thumbs. Two guys isn’t every male French driver’s wet dream, it seems, but – eventually – a car pulled over a hundred metres ahead of us and we ran to the promise of our first ever lift. The man was going to Paris. Which was fine by us. Paris was en route to Istanbul, wasnt it? Progress at last. We jumped in. He rambled in French and got very little change for his efforts. By lunchtime we had been dropped off somewhere in Paris. Neither of us had ever visited Paris. It was a mystery other than from Alain Delon films that had peppered my sport-avoiding youth at York’s Odeon cinema and Mark’s intellectual affair with the likes of Sartre and Camus.
I cannot remember exactly the place we stayed at in Paris. But once bitten, twice shy – we were keen not to repeat our Amsterdam crack den experience at La Grosse Ville or end up in an opium den, so we threw money at the problem and went for a decent place to park. In fact, I cannot remember anything exactly about that first time in Paris. But I do remember how I felt. Paris was everything. It was an entirely sensuous experience. We gorged. We drank. We inhabited brasseries and cafes and walked the streets. We nearly died crossing the road to see the Arc de Triomphe and I do remember that as eight lanes of cars honked and hooted furiously at our dodging, staccato journey from the Champs-Élysées to the safety of the arch itself we realised half way across that there was a perfectly serviceable subway. But Paris swallowed us up and folded us into its way of life.
Three days in Paris and we were both broke.
The dream of Istanbul died in the boulangeries and patisseries of Paris. That gateway to the Orient remained 2,734 kilometres to the East. The Grand Bazaar would have to wait. The nearest we got to the exotic Near East of Asia Minor was a croissant, symbol of the Christian West’s halting at the gates of Vienna the Islamic hordes and the Turkish tobacco in our frequently smoked Camel cigarettes.
I had never tasted food like the food in Paris. Even pizza tasted better here. I willingly traded the miles for morsels of French cuisine. The trip sparked a life long love of French food and with France.
When the money ran out, Mark and I hightailed it back to England and hid out at our respective girlfriends’ places. I called my parents from pay phones and pretended each call that I was somewhere tremendously exotic along the route. I was Spartan with details. My parents never said anything but I am pretty sure they knew. We had lasted just six days on the road. After two more weeks pretending, we fessed up and returned home. It felt ignominious and the long, dull summer rammed home the lost opportunity we had squandered. I do regret that we never made it very far. But it is unsurprising, for with the characteristic lack of foresight so typical of teenage boys, we hadn’t made any plans or worked out a budget or a route or, in fact, anything at all. Which makes it all the more impressive that some people on the Hippy Trail, even at the tender age of 17, do manage to make it across the Continent to adventure. We were just too young. We weren’t ready for the world. The world did eventually come knocking, but that’s another story. But as Rick said in Casablanca: “we’ll always have Paris”.
