Jim Durkee
Tales of Traveling to India has stories about two Vietnam War veterans who traveled through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to India where events disrupted their plans. Typical of the 1970s, they wanted to be "on the road" and did not care where they went. Flipping a coin, fate and talking to other travelers helped decide where to go and what to do. The stories include visiting an Indian village, testing an Indian customs agent to see if she was psychic and trying to sleep in a campground surrounded by Iranians circling and pointing at them like they were curiosities in a zoo. They were caught in a war between India and Pakistan and interrogated for supposedly spying on India for Pakistan. This book does not comment on how the world changed especially in Iran and Afghanistan. Instead, these stories are told the way we told them in the early 1970s. Readers can open the book to any story to be transported back to 1971.
