In 1949 Nancy Blessley advertised in a prominent English paper:
- Young woman requires two female companions for a bus-cum-hitch-hike via France, Spain, the North African Coast, Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda and the Belgian Congo to Kenya. Low costs.
She picked up Joy Daneman in Britain and Mary Jaques-Aldridge in Paris. Six years later, Mary would go on to write a book about the trip: Trio's Trek: The Story of a Ten-Thousand Mile Hitch-Hike, W.H. Allen London, 1955.
Fundamentally the book is a rather plainly written travelogue, and I doubt it met with much success in its time. But today, some 50 years later, the glimpse back to those post war years, with three prudish young women game enough to hitch from London, through France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to Egypt is full of curios. They hitched only little after Egypt, but still, their story is worth a glimpse.
I mean, after the trip, Mary and Joy write:
- Surely hitch-hiking is one of the best methods of getting to know the people of a country when one is only passing through!
"What a pity, that some of the world's politicians can't go, incognito of course, on a hitch-hiking trip!", remarked Joy.
and if you think times were safer back then, I'd reconsider. If anything we have here three young women with a little courage in a time where the countries they were visiting were more feared than hitch-hiking. Things have changed a little since then.
The incredible rise in tourism since their trip shines on through. Who today could travel through Europe and Northern Africa to write of two Frenchmen met in Aswan:
- I learned they were tourists, which made them the first we had met anywhere on our travels.
Incredible! In times when tourists were so rare and so unusual you could get away with many things unimaginable today. Consider this passing remark on Morocco:
- ... every vehicle we hailed stopped with almost embarrassing promptness, the drivers being surprisingly friendly ...
Or this amazing truck ride across the Libyan Desert:
- With a certain amount of squeezing there was room for all three of us in the driver's cab, together with the driver and his mate." The truck drove 12 miles and hour, left Friday and expected to have crossed the desert by Monday. A pile of Arabs came along riding on top of the trailer. "Every now and again the Arabs would plunge a hand into the bowl and pick out what they considered to be choice morsels for us. Usually they were lumps of fat which we detested, but we had no alternative but to accept and eat them.
