Travel: Pilgrims Progress

Travel companies trade in flights and ferry tickets, hotels and package holidays. But the image that they present is of dealing in a much more subtle commodity: the dream. The word crops up absurdly often in brochures, alongside pictures of impossibly blue water and perpetually perfect skies. And, since daily life is not like that, we predictably lap it up.

Everyone has a dream destination or an ambitious journey lingering in the corner of their soul. Constrained by clocks, cash and courage, few are brave enough to try to realise their deepest dreams and settle for a humdrum holiday that is more of a daydream than a dip into fantasy. Some, though, hang on to a dream and invest the time and energy needed to transcend the everyday. Which is why, as the longest day of the year melts into Midsummer's Night, the travel pages this weekend are devoted to dream holidays. Fi Glover recalls the summer when she had her first taste of glamour and freedom, while Alison Rice checks in to an idyll just off the M4. But to accelerate your aspirations, begin below with a story of two men who chose a public transport passage to India. Along the way, they met Simon Calder

Volleys of snow pummelled the roof as the bus sped across the endless Anatolian plateau. Each time a gigantic truck blasted past in the other direction, the 27-seater slithered sideways. But Gurdev Singh Manku and Bharat Parmar smiled with a serenity born of fortitude and fortune. They were precisely halfway between Essex and Amritsar, and exactly on schedule.

A week earlier, at eight in the morning, Gurdev had finished the night shift at the Cumberland Hotel. He went home to a quiet street in Ilford, Essex, for his last bath for 5,000 miles. Next-door-but-one, Bharat, who works as an estimator at Mansell, picked up his passport and packed up the timetables that were to guide them overland to the city of Amritsar.

"Gurdev is a Sikh," Bharat says, "and I am a Hindu. Amritsar is holy to us both. So we decided to make the journey together." Those three short sentences conceal both the scale of the enterprise -10 countries and two weeks lay between them and their goal - and the way that the quest transcends centuries of tempestuous religious conflict. In Amritsar itself, the occupation of the Golden Temple by Sikh extremists was ended amid much bloodshed by the Indian army in 1984, an event that indirectly led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Yet the two men emphasise that their decision to travel together was nothing more than a neighbourly transaction across a couple of garden fences.

The trip could not have been made three years ago - not for reasons of religious strife, but simply because it has been made possible by the Channel Tunnel: you can now travel by train and bus all the way from Ilford to Amritsar. London Underground, though, does not (yet) sell through-tickets to Kashmir, so at Newbury Park Tube station each paid pounds 1.80 for the ride to Waterloo. As it turned out, that was the most expensive journey per- mile of the whole trip. The second most costly segment followed straight on: the Eurostar train to Brussels. By the time an overnight Eurolines bus from there had dropped them sleepily in Vienna, half the pounds 300 they had allowed for transport had been spent. Luckily, they judged right: it costs the same to reach the Austrian capital as it does to travel all the way from Vienna to Amritsar.

In Vienna, they drowsily paid their first visit to a Sikh temple. True pilgrims, Gurdev and Bharat relied upon the hospitality of those along the way. The Sikh religion provides generously for travellers, offering shelter and food freely. Refreshed, they began properly to enjoy the grand tour, becoming whistlestop tourists. After Vienna, Budapest - and the first in a series of train trips that were ordeals-by-public-transport rather than the sorts of rides that feature in collections of Great Railway Journeys.

"The whole train from Budapest to Belgrade seemed full of black-market traders," Bharat says. "As we got close to the Serbian border it became a mad-house, with people hiding boxes full of trainers and darting all over the place to confuse the guards." The two were able to prevent any additions to their baggage, comprising a small, stout backpack each, containing clothes, books, a video camera - and timetables.

"We memorised the time of every train and bus we needed, but realised that the further east you go the more theoretical they become," says Bharat with an air of comfortable resignation to the travails of the journey. The train and its bedraggled cargo arrived exactly on time in Thessaloniki. Greece's second city is a cosmopolitan place, but it does not have a Sikh community large enough to sustain a temple. Consulting the Lonely Planet guide, they wandered along the Acropol Hotel.

My cue for a tiny part in their adventure took place at six that evening, when I arrived by bicycle at the same cheap hostel and they bade me "Good evening". These, I could tell, were no ordinary backpackers. They outlined their public transport pilgrimage so far. To say they had a train to catch would be an understatement; they were dashing for the overnight express to Istanbul, but agreed to share their adventure when they returned. Several months and many conversations later, they have helped me visualise the journey that should be the sole preserve of the dreamer or the doer.

"The border crossing on the train from Thessaloniki to Turkey was the trickiest of them all," says Gurdev, "because the Greek frontier guards didn't seem to like my turban." Further east, the countries became progressively more Islamic and increasingly friendly to the two British Indians. "All the way through Turkey and Iran, something like 3,000 miles, we were treated with great respect and kindness."

One of the wonders of the modern world, Istanbul bus station is the busiest coach terminal on earth. This choking combination of exhaust fumes and exhausted passengers occupies a full square mile to the west of Turkey's largest city. Touts assail you the instant you arrive. But eventually you find a bus clean across to Tehran. As you cross the bridge across the Bosphorus from Europe into Asia, be sure to gaze down upon the only slice of sea visible for the entire journey between Essex and Kashmir. Then the bus accelerates towards that snowy Anatolian wilderness and into terrain that the Foreign Office warns you against. Were Bharat and Gurdev worried? "When you've been on a bus for 52 hours, all you can think about is a wash and a sleep."

Hidden away in a corner of the Iranian capital is a Sikh temple - a cool, simple structure where the two travellers sheltered from the city, and took tea before the next long haul.

The straight-line link between Tehran and Amritsar runs through Kabul, but political strife in Afghanistan means overlanders must perform a long southerly diversion: across the vast, bleak Iranian desert, crossing into Pakistan just after the wind-blown city of Zahedan.

Pakistan and India have squabbled for half a century, partly over the disputed territory of Kashmir - exactly where the two were heading. More pre-conceptions overturned: "We were welcomed as friends as soon as we crossed into Pakistan," Bharat says. His companion had been worrying about how his turban would be received in Pakistan, but the country has the first significant Sikh community since Britain and a great deal of respect for foreign visitors.

Here, though, the schedule begun to unravel alarmingly. The railway from Quetta to Lahore is a tough 500-mile haul. It is especially tough if you have to bribe a ticket inspector to let you stay in the First Class corridor, crouching between a dozen other travellers to try to find a comfortable position in which to try to grab some sleep. A fellow passenger urged them to leave the increasingly unbearable train with him and take a bus instead. But by the time they had extricated themselves from the tangle of humanity, the last bus had departed for the day. The instigator of the interruption took personal responsibility for their plight and made alternative arrangements for them to get to Lahore.

After 5,000 miles, Lahore would probably constitute a good enough approximation of paradise: broad trees shade the wide avenues from a belligerent sun, while a cool breeze rolls down from the Himalayan foothills and into the gracious city.

The final frontier was a bit sticky. While everyone else they had met had expressed amazement at the journey these two middle-aged gents were making, the Indian immigration officials wondered gruffly why they had bothered. But when the golden vision of Amritsar materialised before the travellers, exuding beauty, dignity and holiness, they knew why for certain.

And then they came home again. Months afterwards they are still full of a trip about which I can only dream, and are thoroughly versed in the virtues of respect and tolerance towards travellers.