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When Britons and French came to India on a bus.

When Britons and French came to India on a bus.

Britons and French travelers arriving in India by bus during the 1950s – early overland tourism to India
Long before the well-known group Beatles arrived in Rishikesh or Jerry Garcia was influenced by Benares, there was a cult of carefree young and middle-aged people who frequently rode buses—sometimes referred to as “magicbuses”—for extended periods of time across international borders. Perhaps this was the first time that India opened up to the world as a tourist destination, long before it was viewed as a leisure destination.
The first group of French tourists arrived to India by bus in 1956. The journey began in Paris and brought French people and possibly other Europeans to Bombay. This journey spanned about fourteen thousand kilometers and took nearly sixty days.

After that, a lot of people attempted to traverse the Asian terrain by road using vehicles that had been decommissioned from the military. The 1960s saw the start of this sort of travel. The majority of these vehicles were old and just not suitable for this sort of journey, which nearly covered the entire length of the planet.
One Briton, Jonathan Benyon, went on a few of these excursions, one of which included driving a school bus called “Rocket” while the other was “Silver Express,” a Mercedes-made coach.

When Benyon drove the Mercedes bus from England to India in about twenty days, he passed through France, Holland, Germany, Slovenia & Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia), Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan before arriving in India. This trip cost roughly eighty-five to one hundred British Pounds. In today’s Indian rupees, this equates to about 8,000 to 10,000. After arriving to India, the bus travelled through central India, including Gwalior, where it made a restaurant stop.

The journey would have been enjoyable, but it regrettably ended in the 1970s when relations between nations became somewhat tense and it was more difficult to cross borders than it had been before. Overland road travel, which was now deemed excessively risky, was replaced by air travel, which was now faster, more reliable, and, most importantly, time-bound planned arrivals. Following the fog of World War II, we may confidently follow India’s incoming tourism traffic to the 1950s. The world was now at peace after the conclusion of the war.

(From Rory MacLean’s book, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India)

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