Magic Bus (4 page)

I look out on the summit of Istanbul's First Hill and its monuments of past empires. I wonder how many Turks share my genial hosts' anger? How many Muslims have been alienated by the latest Western incursions in the Middle East and Central Asia?

The broad dome of Haghia Sophia, once the greatest church in Christendom, then Islam's largest mosque and now a museum, rises beyond a Softie ice-cream machine. In cellars beneath the Four Seasons Hotel, lions were kept to fight Roman gladiators. Next door stands the Spiral Column from the Delphic Temple of Apollo – in front of which limps the luminous stranger.

‘Synchronicity spoken here!' wrote Tom Wolfe in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, a resonant literary link between Beat epoch and pop culture. I'm not going to miss my chance again.

I thank the Çolpans for their time, pass on their offer of a plate of macaroni and snap shut my laptop. By the time I'm on my feet, the woman is already halfway down the hill, striking her walking stick on the cobbles with every step. I chase after her toward the park.

‘Hey, Jack,' she says as I fall in beside her.

‘I saw you from the Pudding Shop.'

‘They painted out the peace symbol,' she says, swinging her head, failing to prevent strands of hair escaping their purple-feather clip.

‘What peace symbol?'

‘The one that used to be on their back wall. They've covered it with a dollar-bill clock. I sure am glad Jill didn't see that.'

‘Jill?' The name doesn't mean a thing to me.

‘Last month she called and asked if I wanted to come back here with her on a crusties' tour. Like, can you imagine me on a
tour?
'

‘Not easily.'

‘I'd rather sniff around and find my own funky spots. But her call got me thinking. With all the bad shit that's gone down this year, I decided to chase my own ghosts; starting here.'

Memories tend to age with people, yet the stranger's dated patter suggests strong feelings root her to the sixties. I look at her as she fixes her open, putty face on a line of dilapidated buildings. One particular dirty blue ruin – its windows barred, its metal shutters warped by vandals – holds her attention.

‘That's the Gülhane,' she tells me, waving a beaded wrist.

I stare in wonder at the lost Atlantis of the hippie trail. ‘I thought it was knocked down years ago,' I gasp.

The Gülhane was the Intrepids' favoured hostel for almost two decades. Here, roof space could be had for fifty cents a night and a first bout of dysentery endured. Here, also, lived junkies and prostitutes.

‘In the sixties, on my first morning in town, a hand reached out of that open door and gave me a huge J. One toke and I was blasted for three hours. Magical things happened here if you went with the flow.'

‘Assuming you weren't busted first.'

‘Istanbul seemed so fantastic back then,' she goes on. ‘Boys singing in the souks, cripples chipping away at lumps of crystalized sugar, travellers tie-dyed to the hilt. I'd walk into Sitki's, order a waterpipe, just like the Turks did, and he'd ask “With or without?” Meaning with or without
hashash
, as they called it. All night we'd argue about Vietnam. Man,' she says, ‘this town had good vibes.'

The woman lowers her big mauve spectacles and turns her wide feline eyes on me. I notice that her long fingernails are painted purple.

‘There's a karmic connection between us,' she whispers, her husky voice sincere and emotional. ‘I don't know what it is but, for sure, by meeting twice we're in this together.'

I remember her tears on the Imperial Terrace. I sense a darkness inside her. I hope her reminiscences aren't about to bring on an acid flashback. But her undiluted audacity makes me laugh out loud. I tell her my name.

‘Call me Penny,' she says.

Penny's soft hands are always moving, spinning her ebony stick, lighting cigarettes, twisting her purple beads and eight rings: god's-eyes, moonstones and an
I Ching
signet. Her hourglass figure has timed out into a skittle shape. Yet her slim body, though unbalanced by a replacement hip, retains a startling beauty which no puffing of flesh, no number of age lines, can erase.

‘Let's check out the park,' she says, reining back her feelings.

Beyond the dirty shell of the hostel, Gülhane Park spreads cool and green down to the Bosphorus. The high embankment walls of the palace, through which Penny once stole to copulate, have been rebuilt. Local couples still meet at the foot of them, under the broad-leaved plane trees, though they tend to sit a hand's width apart. Young mothers push Mamas and Papas prams along the cobbled pathways where Penny sang ‘Dream a Little Dream'.

As we pass through the arched gateway next to the Sublime Porte, I ask her what ‘bad shit' has gone down this year. Instead of answering me, she says, ‘Jill – the friend who tried to rope me into a tour – and I used to be terrific pals. She had a shop in San Francisco full of amazing things like strobe lamps and rose-tinted glasses made with prisms.'

A lopsided smile rises on her face like a sickle moon.

‘I remember one morning tripping together down Haight Street. You know, at the bottom where it curves round…'

‘I know it,' I say, warming to her story, picturing Haight-Ashbury
circa
1964: staggers of open bay windows, civil rights banners, customized Harley choppers and bell-bottomed bohos carrying guitars and zonked to the eyeballs.

‘We'd taken a smidgen of LSD, just a tiny little bit under our
tongues, homeopathically you might say, like the tip of the little finger. At the bottom of the hill there was a flower shop and a little lady with a mauve rinse selling daisies: thirty cents a bunch. They were beginning to wilt and I told her she should be giving them away, but she shook her mauve head and insisted on the full price. So we paid and, you know, it felt so good, two young chicks on a sunny Californian morning, that we started giving the flowers away. We gave one to a policeman, who put it in his cap. Jill handed a bunch to some mailmen. I gave one to a guy who was a journalist. “Hey, what are you?” he asked us. “Flower girls or something?”'

I stare at Penny, an original flower child.

‘It was no big deal,' she says without hesitation. ‘Lots of people were doing it. Jill and I handed out flowers again the next day. Ours was a small community and the idea spread quickly. Wasn't much later that everyone started calling it Flower Power.'

A uniformed park warden shoos a clutch of children off the grass. Turkish families picnic beside spitting charcoal grills, reading newspaper reports about the ‘war on terror' and US troops on their border.

Penny thrusts out her cane and lowers herself on to a bench. She puts up her good leg, showing off venerable leather boots – hand-tooled in Mexico – which hurt her hip like hell when she pulls them on, but she's never giving them up. She fixes me in her gaze and asks me to tell her about myself. I've hardly begun when she interrupts.

‘You're heading further east?'

‘All the way to Kathmandu,' I reply.

‘Are you stopping in Cappadocia?'

‘Didn't everyone?' I say. ‘It's in all the guidebooks.'

Five hundred miles east of Istanbul, the strange Anatolian valley was the second essential stop along the route.

‘You know, when I was young, there was no
Lonely Planet
. We travelled without guides.'

‘Apart from the odd guru,' I remind her.

‘Look at yourself, Jack,' she sniggers, glowing now. ‘You're a
good-looking boy. You've got clear eyes, supple limbs, a grace of movement and manner…'

‘Sounds like
Siddhartha
.'

‘You
have
done your reading,' she laughs. On the trail, most Intrepids read Hesse's story of the wandering ascetic's search for meaning in life. ‘Like Siddhartha, you have to learn to follow your own road.'

‘You realize the personal quest isn't any longer a prerequisite for this journey?' I tell her. But when I see her regret, I soften my tone. ‘I'm writing a book. I don't have time to sit under a banyan tree reaching for enlightenment.'

Without warning, Penny stretches out to touch the back of my hand. The stranger's spontaneity shakes me. ‘You asked me about the shit,' she says, a needy tremble again in her voice. ‘There have been… changes at home.'

‘Changes?' I ask. She holds my gaze and a shiver runs up my spine. I imagine a flash of fireworks once more. Suddenly I want to know more about her.

‘I'll tell you on the bus.'

‘What bus?'

‘I'll also tell you about Kesey.'

‘Ken Kesey?' I say, my voice rising an octave. Kesey was one of the dominant personalities of the hippie era. In 1964, he travelled across America in a converted school bus, staging the Acid Test dances, blowing his and the nation's minds. His journey was another of the cultural precedents for the Asian trail. ‘You knew Kesey?'

‘I crossed the States on his magic bus.'

With Neal Cassady at the wheel, on whom Kerouac – bebop Whitman, lonesome traveller – based the central character in
On the Road
.

‘Jack,' says Penny, ‘I fancy your company.'

I know that the best way to discover a city is to walk it, to stop for a moment, to gaze and to listen. But I did unexpected Istanbul at a run, immersing myself in Friday prayers with Adem Çolpan
and the Intrepid's favourite
hamam
, taking in both the sacred tomb of Mohammed's standard-bearer and the venue of Petula Clark's 1966 concert, discussing political disaffection in Kalkan's garden and wrapping up the capital of three empires in four days. While I worked, Penny hung out at our hotel, making me humus and chive sandwiches, reading her tarot cards. She also repacked our bags.

‘They're overweight with expectation,' she told me, ‘that is, illusion.'

Not long after dawn on our last morning, we walked through Beyo
ğ
lu's leafy courtyards, smelling washed cobblestones and apple tea, sharing the city with market cats and street-sweepers. Outside the Institut Français, policemen dozed in their patrol car, glasses of
çay
cooling on the roof. A spent clubber slept beneath an exhausted cash machine. Dirt-poor peasant traders from central Anatolia unpacked their meagre sacks of garden vegetables on the pavement of Taksim Square. We checked in at the Metro Express city terminal. Our bus left on time.

On a sunny Thursday morning a few months after our departure, a white van hurried by the Grand Hôtel de Londres, where we had stayed, and crashed through the wrought-iron gates of the nearby British Consulate. The explosion killed twenty-seven, including the consul general and the suicide bomber. Fatih, our deferential hotel manager, ran on to the street screaming as a cloud of yellow smoke blocked out the sun.

Spirals of dust trailed away from Istanbul, kicked up not by nomadic traders' caravans but by Hog Farm commune coaches. Ancient Austins and retired Royal Mail vans staggered on to the Silk Road. Born-again hearses were spurred east by seekers in sandals. Mountain freaks leapt towards Himalaya in rainbow-coloured Jeeps. Banners fluttered from rear windows. Pop music tumbled out of open doors. Overlanders called Blossom and Wombat piloted three-ton Bedford lorries through one-mule hamlets. Aboard clapped-out Turkish coaches and converted Top Deck Routemasters, the Intrepids lit sticks of incense and settled back on Habitat cushions, riding in the weirdest procession of unroadworthy vehicles ever to rattle and rock across the face of the earth.

‘Whooee, here we go.'

Penny, one of the hundreds of thousands who made the singular journey, is leaning across me, staring out of our bus's tinted windows, down over the side of the new Bosphorus Bridge at the sparkling water. Behind us is Europe. Ahead a road sign reads, ‘Welcome to Asia.'

‘First time our ferry hit the shore, I yelled, “Outasight. We're going to Kathmandu!”'

The morning sun, already hot, casts sharp shadows across Istanbul's dense eastern suburbs. A clutch of worshippers mills outside a concrete mosque, husks of sunflower seeds around their feet. Two middle-aged men, a hand on each other's shoulder, stroll along the central reservation. Beside a crash barrier, hawkers flog pirate CDs and leeches, curling in their jars, sold by the dozen for home-bleeding. When Penny first made this journey, only villages and kitchen gardens dotted the long, bare hills.

‘I remember crazy colours, wild smells, camels at the side of
the road,' she thrills. ‘It was like nothing,
nothing
, I'd ever seen in my life.'

In the sixties, young people grew up with the world. They came of age during a period of political and social revolution, in parallel with the space race, in step with the banishing of borders by Boeing and the fear of pregnancy with the Pill. The concurrence of historical events and individual lives convinced them that by changing themselves they could change the planet. It instilled in them a sense of shared destiny. It inspired them to break free of the shackles of bad tradition. Penny's story encapsulates the heady spirit of those times.

Her mother was a fandango-dancing refugee from Guernica. Her father was a West Country structural engineer. She was born into a comfortable north London suburb on the day civil war ended in Spain. The juxtaposition of opposing stars – dizzy leaps, solid foundations and dreamy ideals – stretched her life between the century's extremes.

‘My father wanted me to be a bluestocking, God bless him. To raise his grandchildren in Welwyn Garden City,' Penny tells me. ‘Like, get real. Why go to Girton when the whole world was mine?'

She was an independent girl at the grand opening of the teenage epic. Aged seventeen, she wore tight skirts, seamed nylons and jived in the aisles of the Odeon to ‘Rock Around the Clock'. At eighteenth she read Kerouac and embraced his hedonistic search for fulfilment.