In Search of Shipki La

When a young American draft dodger from the Vietnam War disappears, his anxious parents seek the help of a Buffalo, New York, investigation company. The last coded postcard they received from their son indicated that he was hiding out in Afghanistan. The investigator photographs two bearded American young men camped in Kabul arguing with a better-dressed Englishman, but neither is the missing son. The trail goes cold. Thirty-five years later, a western Australian friend of the widowed mother uncovers the names of an Australian couple who were camped in Kabul at the time and might be able to provide clues to the young man's disappearance. The search is renewed, taking the investigators to Pakistan, the Indian Himalayas, the red-light area of Bangkok, and to the neighboring Laos.

John Pollard is a keen traveler, having visited more than sixty countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. During his time in Cambridge as a PhD student, he managed to visit almost all the countries of Europe by car, including those behind the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. After a postdoctoral year in America in the late 1960s, he and his wife drove from the United Kingdom to India on their way home to Australia, crossing Europe and passing through Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They made several more adventurous journeys in the same car three decades later. When he retired in 2002 after thirty-three years at Macquarie University, John was dean of the faculty of economic and financial studies. He has written four major academic books that appear in a variety of translations--Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.