Top Deck travelled road to adventure

The world was a different place. And with a sense of adventure and a willingness to fly by the seat of your pants you could almost travel anywhere.

The compromise between totally going it alone was Top Deck Travel.

I never travelled with Top Deck but I well remember the familiar red and white double decker buses criss-crossing the continent, disgorging fashionably long-haired, bleary-eyed young people onto the city’s streets.

Top Deck was regarded by my contemporaries as a cheap and fun way to see the world, travelling downstairs by day, sleeping upstairs by night.

Now a former tour leader, Australian Trevor Carroll, has lifted the lid on what life was like aboard a Top Deck bus with his book Crossing Continents with Top Deck, the travel revolution of the 70s-90s.

The most adventurous journey of that era for Australians was undoubtedly overland between London and Sydney and vice versa.

The journey, crossing three continents and through 21 countries, took 20 weeks aboard the caravan-style converted Bristol Lodekka double-decker buses that were older than many of their passengers.

The Top Deck Sydney to London tour described in this book, perhaps one of the lengthiest and most arduous of its time, departed Sydney in March 1980.

The first hop crossed Australia to Perth in two old Sydney double-decker buses with 30 passengers.

A series of flights, trains, buses and ferries carried passengers to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma to Kathmandu.

In Kathmandu, the start of the so-called hippie trail to London, the group grew to 60, where they boarded three double-deckers – Casper, Tadpoles and Dinger (every bus had a name) – bound for London.

The 1955 model Bristol Lodekkas each fed and housed 20 passengers from Nepal through India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, France and on to London.

Over the 10 weeks there were major breakdowns, collisions, illness and the US hostage crisis in Iran.

Carroll, a former boilermaker, miner, barman, bus and tour operator, police officer, event manager and now author, left Broken Hill for London at the age of 21. For five years he conducted tours with many of Top Deck itineraries.

His final trip, from Sydney to London, saw the end of that gypsy lifestyle when he fell in love with one of his passengers, Mathilde from the Netherlands. They married and settled on the NSW Central Coast.

Top Deck founder "Skroo" Turner, who later went on to found the Flight Centre group, remembers charging passengers 100 pounds each for the first trip in 1973, a six-week sojourn to France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, plus three pounds a week for the food kitty.

In his foreword he writes: “The overlands to Kathmandu and beyond to Sydney lumbered through war-torn and very unstable countries. The crews ran the tours using their initiative and the smell of an oily rag.”