True Tales of a Traveller 8: Overlanding (Part One)

Overlanding is the 8th story in the True Tales of a Traveller series. This is a series of short stories and novellas consisting of several dozen real-life travellers' tales covering three and a half decades. Although presented in a short story format for reading convenience, these stories are not fiction. Apart from some of the characters’ names, which have been changed to protect their identities, everything in these stories is true. At over 46,000 words, Overlanding (Part One) is the longest story of the series so far, for one of the shortest periods of actual travel. Of all my travels in the 1980s, in terms of time spent, undoubtedly no journey made such a deep and lasting impression on me as this overland trip from Karachi to Rotterdam. Not only did it unceremoniously blow away many of my own preconceived notions of life in Pakistan and Iran, it was also a harsh lesson for me as a traveller in the virtues of being prepared for any journey into terra incognita. Additionally, the first part of the journey, from Karachi to the Turkish border with Iran, was relatively dangerous, not due to involving difficult terrain, but rather to man-made hazards. But overall, the journey turned out to be something I originally had never suspected for a moment it would be: an intensive course in the follies of racial prejudice and ethnic chauvinism.