CHRISTCHURCH WOMAN HAS LONG DRIVE HOME

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28802, 24 January 1959, Page 2

CHRISTCHURCH WOMAN HAS LONG DRIVE HOME

The motoring trip of 13,000 miles from England to New Zealand just completed by Mr B. Smart and Mrs Smart, of Christchurch, took plenty of planning so that four persons, their food, clothing, and bedding could be accommodated in a small car. Mrs Smart, formerly Miss Janice Abbett, who was the only woman in the party, said that the chief clothing promlem for her was to pack clothes for roasting hot and freezing cold temperatures in the small weekend case allowed her. Her wardrobe for the journey consisted of denim slacks, a cotton frock, a skirt and blouse, a winter dress, a bathing suit, a pair of shorts, two pairs of shoes, a fur-lined wind-jacket, a plastic raincoat, ski socks and underclothing. -The shorts yvere not worn and the swim suit had to wait until Ceylon before it was used. It was not advisable for a woman to appear in slacks in the countries of the Middle East. Tins of meat and dehydrated vegetables which “didn’t taste like vegetables at all but were at least food” were bought before leaving Britain, and these were conserved until the party reached countries where suitable food was unprocurable or inedible, Mrs Smart said. It was also an economy measure to take food from England. Their meat ration was one heaped dessertspoon each a day. The group travelled from England to Italy, through Jugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Persia, Pakistan, India and Ceylon where they shipped their car to Australia. “In Jugoslavia we bought tomatoes for the equivalent of Id a lb and in Greece the food was extremely good,” Mrs Smart said. They had found the food in Turkey very bad and very dirty and it was not possible to replenish their tinned food supplies there, or in Persia where the food was also very bad. The roughest part of the journey was crossing from Turkey into Persia where the road “simply petered out.” Directions had been vague as to how to reach the next destination and by midnight one day they gave up trying to find their way, stopped the car and slept. Later, they were told that they had spent the night in a dangerous area noted for raids by wild tribesmen. “We had to keep moving to a pretty tight timetable to avoid being bogged down in mud and snow in the high countries and deterred by the monsoons in India,” Mrs Smart explained. They wire rarely able to stop for more than one day at any place. Over the whole journey their speed averaged about 20 miles a day. “We were all exhausted at the end of every day. Many days it

was like driving over a riverbed full of boulders,” Mrs Smart said. She could not have believed before she started out that she could have survived the rough conditions and the filthy conditions they met in Eastern countries. All uncooked foods she soaked in water purified by special tablets. It was a horrifying sight to see bread made in Persia, she said. It passed through a dozen filthy hands, was dropped on the ground, was flattened against a dirty wall and came out as sagging sheets. “We thought at first it was brown paper. It was sold ■ from the greasy head and shoulders of a vendor and was often full of stones.” . Wonderful hospitality and friendship was shown to the travellers in all countries except Tiwkey where pedestrians were hostile td the point of throwing stones at the car. After having been assured by a night watchman at their hotel in Istanbul that the equipment on top of their car would be guarded through the night they were distressed to find their sleeping bags and air mattresses had disappeared by the morning. Sign Language A mishap th the car in Turkey forced the party to push their machine through mud and snow to get help. Asked how they managed with the various languages, Mrs Smart said they usually made themselves understood by sign language, but they had found it necessary to learn to count in Arabic. Mrs Smart attracted much curiosity in Iran and Persia where she frequently had a trail of people following her and peering into her face. In one village, robed women collected their children and rushed them into their houses, later appearing on the roof to peer down on the foreigners. Mrs Smart said she developed a special routine with mime to enable her to buy methylated spirit to run their cooker in the many countries they visited. “There were one or two worrying moments as we lighted the stove, when we feared we may have bought some other liquid and there would be an explosion,” she said. Two billies and a saucepan served as her kitchen. Among unusual foods they had eaten were buffalo milk and goat flesh. “We gave up ordering chicken in Pakistan because the drawn-out performance of killing a bird while we waited for a meal took away our appetites,” she said. In spite of a major accident to the car in Greece and many adventures, all arrived home safely and look back on the journey as “a very rich, illuminating experience, full of fun.”