On A Plane To Munich

Part I of A Travel Journal

I’m going out on a limb here; if I lose all my subscribers, I’ll stop, but some people have asked me for more personal stories, so here we go.  Next week I’ll have a researched piece about octopuses.

Once upon a time, you could board a plane without having to take your shoes off. There was no Transportation Security Administration that had you x-rayed before you were allowed to enter the boarding area. There were no canines who sniffed your luggage for explosives or drugs. In fact, most of the time your luggage remained unchecked.  No matter where you came from; BECAUSE: you could transfer from one plane to another plane, your luggage would be moved from the one plane to the other plane, and at your destination the customs officers would only know where this other plane came from. For example, you could fly from Afghanistan to Munich but transfer in Italy. You and your luggage would switch not only planes but airlines, and for all any official at the Munich airport would know, you just arrived from Rome. Or Venice. Did you bring any large amounts of Chianti, they’d ask? You could honestly answer “No”.

What I DID bring was several kilos – maybe eight or ten? I don’t remember – of red hash from Lebanon back to Germany. Although it was easy to get through customs, it  was quite an adventure…

I left Munich in early January of 1970, together with a friend. We flew to Beirut with the intention to buy hashish, but we had no idea where in Lebanon this was possible. We expected to see fields of magnificent marijuana plants swaying in the wind I guess, not realizing that it was winter. That’s how clueless we were. Selling hash to American GIs stationed in Frankfurt was an easy way to make some money, and the counterculture hippie revolutionary that I was at the time saw no problem with the fact that all of this was illegal. Hash, to me, was a peaceful substance, whereas the war in Vietnam was criminal. So, I borrowed some straight clothes from my mother while I was at home for Christmas, and embarked the plane to Beirut looking like a tourist escaping the German  winter. At that time, Beirut was a favorite vacation spot which was called “Paris of the Middle East”.

The caption for the image reads “Beirut General View 1970 - 1975”

This was the first time I ever left Europe, and I remember how exciting it was to see camels, donkeys, and exotic food stands while a bus took us from the airport to the city. We also passed a Palestinian refugee camp where people lived in tents made out of cardboard, corrugated iron, and some sheets. Many people, close together, with dry, dusty paths between their make-shift hovels. I had never seen such poverty. 

The next day we rented a car and just started driving – out of the city and  into the countryside. When we didn’t find any fields with pot plants, we decided to stop in a village and knock at a door; it couldn’t hurt to just ask where to buy hash, could it. Well, we were successful; some people guided us to a big farmhouse where we were received kindly and with great hospitality. After feeding us falafel, pita bread, and humus – all new to me – we settled down with some hash samples. The farmer had indeed way more than we could possibly buy, which was eight or ten kilos, I forget. We came to an agreement about the price, but we decided to think about it and discuss it in private, and when we left the village to drive back to Beirut we only had some fistfuls of hash in the glove compartment; they gave it to us so we could make up our minds.

By the time we reached the outskirts of the city it was dark. Suddenly some men stopped us, blocking the road; they wore army fatigues and carried machine guns and looked rather frightening. We had to show our passports, they asked where we came from, and then we had to open the trunk of the car. Which was empty. When they didn’t find anything of interest, the soldiers let us drive on, they didn’t check the inside of the car and didn’t look into the glove compartment. Whew! That was quite a scare, and we felt immense relief that we hadn’t bought any hash yet, which would have been in the trunk.

Back at the hotel, we asked for an explanation for this unexpected stop-and-frisk. It turned out that Lebanon’s countryside hosted a number of guerilla factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the soldiers stopped any cars returning to the city at nighttime. They looked for weapons, but what would have happened to us if they had found large quantities of hash – we certainly didn’t want to find out. 

We had to decide – either give up our plan or risk being stopped in the daytime; there was no guarantee that there were absolutely no searches during the day. I didn’t want to give up that easily, so the next morning we drove back to the village, didn’t spend much time socializing, bought the hash, stored it in the trunk, and drove back before it got dark. I certainly felt nervous when we reentered the city, but lo and behold, nobody stopped us. Luckily, the shocking experience of being halted by machine guns didn’t repeat itself.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I constructed a double floor in my suitcase, and we flew back to Munich with a transit stop in Switzerland. We switched planes, our luggage did the same without being checked, and we arrived in Munich on a flight from Zurich or Geneva, I don’t remember. A customs officer asked whether I had any chocolate in my suitcase, and I told him that I didn’t – which was the truth.

I remember the beauty of the city and the kindness of the people. It’s saddening to know that a few years later they had a civil war and bombs destroyed much of what I had seen. But looking at a current website of Beirut, life seems quite normal. People are amazingly resilient…