Bucephalus Expedition

In the summer of 1964, seven friends packed a battered secondhand Land Rover, named Bucephalus, and drove it from a terraced street in Islington, England to Karachi, Pakistan and back.

Eighty-four days. Fifteen thousand, seven hundred and eighty-eight miles. Fourteen countries.

They crossed the Bosphorus by ferry and the Zagros by night, argued their way past a customs officer too drunk to stand in the Iranian desert, floated in the Dead Sea, watched buzkashi played out beneath Babur's citadel in Kabul, and lashed a shattered steering rod back together with fence wire at an Afghan border post by lamplight. Along the way: the souks of Aleppo before the war, the Khyber Pass while it was still open to travelers like them, the shrines of Isfahan and Mashhad, the tomb of Saladin in Damascus, and the relentless, unasked-for hospitality of strangers the entire way from London to the Khyber and back.

Written from the journals kept at the time and the photographs that survived the journey, Bucephalus Expedition is the record of a world that, in the sixty years since, has been redrawn, closed off, and in places lost outright.