At first all we could see of the man who'd burst into our room at the YMCA in Lahore were his sandals. He couldn't see us because we were lying under the bed behind a screen of blankets. What he had spotted beneath the door was a meagre ray of light from our candle.

Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan on the cover of Time magazine, 1971.

"What are you doing?" he screamed as I poked my head out of the den where we'd been reading. "No lights I have said! This is a brown-out! We are at war!"

He was in a panic. Two days earlier India had declared war on Pakistan and now all non-Muslims in Lahore — just across the border from India — were potential spies. The YMCA, with its religious affiliations emblazoned across its façade, was an obvious target for the growing war hysteria outside.

A "brown-out" was apparently one step away from a blackout and designed to hamper Indian warplanes. Despite the blanket across our window and the carefully shielded candle, the Young Christian was terrified someone down on the street might see a suspicious light from the hostel.

It was December 5, 1971. My wife and I were on our way to India and thence Downunder. But due to problems in neighbouring Afghanistan we'd arrived here late, the very day they'd sealed the border.

Why were we surprised? Things had been growing progressively more weird since we'd bumped across the desert frontier from northeastern Iran into Afghanistan.

We had sold our VW Beetle in the Afghan capital, Kabul — the last place en route that would tolerate such semi-legal transactions — and continued on by public transport.

But the process of selling the car had proved to be a nightmare anyway. Finding a buyer had been the easy part; getting the vital exit stamp that would let us to leave the country without the car we'd arrived in nearly drove us insane. For whole days we traipsed back and forth across Kabul, lining up for a form here, a stamp there, sometimes being sent back to the same functionary we'd already bribed.

It was during this bureaucratic danse macabre that I became sick, doubling over in agony outside some grubby government building. The pains in my gut were so severe I could hardly breathe, let alone walk. I took a taxi back to our hotel while my wife plodded off to plead our case with yet another government flunky.

Back at our modest hotel I fell into bed, shivering and breathing in shallow grunts. From the depth of my misery I heard a knock at the door and the hotel manager slid into the room, followed by a toothless underling.

"Excuse, please, sir." As I watched helplessly he proceeded to strip the room of everything but the bed I was in. Out went the ratty chair, the bedside table with its plastic flower, the faded print of a mosque and finally, as the toothless one lifted the end of my bed, the floor rug.

Somehow I gleaned that the hotel had been sold. The chattels were being flogged off separately.

Bazaar, Karachi, Pakistan 1970s

My wife returned to find me an island of wretchedness in an empty room. I must have looked fairly green because she dashed downstairs to find me a cup of tea. This turned out to be more complicated than she'd imagined since the hotel no longer owned a cup or a teapot.

Meanwhile, she'd tracked down a doctor, who arrived sometime later, accompanied by a "technician" with a smouldering cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

I gasped out my symptoms. Dr Aziz asked if I'd been smoking hashish (tourist plus hashish equals bellyache?). "No ... not really," I grunted back.

"Your Western doctors know much about medicine, but we know about hashish!" he said proudly. He prodded my gut. Yes, that hurt, I panted. Quite a lot.

"Severe colic," he announced and rattled off instructions to his assistant, who produced a scabrous-looking tin box. He opened it up, lodged his smoking durry in the lid and extracted a syringe, plus a large needle. This, we were told, would fix things. And almost certainly give me hepatitis.

"Is that thing sterile?" my wife asked in alarm.

"Yes, of course," Aziz replied testily, "we sterilise it every day!"

My wife demanded that the hard-working needle be cleansed by fire (the technician's Zippo) and alcohol, after which it was plunged it into my right buttock.

It took a couple more days to tie up the papers for the car. My gut continued to hurt but at least I could move about. We met Dave, a large Englishman with a Zapata moustache, who had a VW Kombi and was heading to Pakistan the next day with his wife. We jumped at the chance of a lift. Big mistake.

The quickest route from Kabul to Pakistan is via the Khyber Pass, a 53km passage through the Hindu Kush range. To the north are towering, snow-covered mountains; to the south magnificent vistas and vertiginous drops.

Guard post, Khyber Pass.

Dave drove like a stoned Possum Bourne, taking regular hits on a monster joint as he threw the Kombi around the hairpins, simultaneously craning his neck to gaze up at the mountains and delivering reports like, "Wow!" and "Aaaaw wow!"

It was a fearful trip. Lying in the back amid clouds of dope smoke clutching my stomach and the grab-handle, I resigned myself to dying.

Somehow we made it over the pass and down to Lahore, where we gratefully wished Dave and his wife happy trails. Now, a couple of days later, it was becoming increasingly clear that we would have to return the way we'd come. The sooner we got out of Pakistan the better.

But how? The trains had been commandeered by the Army. Flights had been cancelled. That left the bus, and we arrived at the depot to find a horde of fearful locals with similar exit strategies in mind.

The ancient buses looked even grottier than usual, each coated from balding tyres to dented roof in a camouflage of brown mud. Even the windows were smeared with the stuff. Each bus was overflowing with people and more were fighting to get aboard.

Two urchins came to our aid. For a small consideration they hauled themselves up through a window and reserved seats for us with their small bodies. We fought our way aboard and took our seats. First hurdle crossed. Then came the hellish journey to Peshawar, near the Afghan border, crushed inside a bone-rattling, overcrowded deathtrap.

Because of the muddy camouflage we couldn't see through the windows, and it was particularly alarming when the bus lurched to a stop so everyone could pile out and dive into a ditch. It happened many times. We presumed there were Indian warplanes overhead, but never saw one.

Finally we arrived at Peshawar and found our way to the Afghan consulate. If we could get a visa straight away we could catch a bus on to Kabul that night

But Afghan bureaucracy had not forgotten us. "Visas? That is not possible," we were told. "We have run out of forms."

It would be two days more — holed up a fleabag hotel — before we could quit the warzone for friendlier, if not greener, pastures.