In 1968 Andrew Ray was down and almost out. Then he embarked on an odyssey from West to East, before landing in Ian Smith's UDI-riven Rhodesia. It was a trip which altered his life.

Based on "From Wapping to Windsor" by Andrew Ray

Andrew Ray stepped off the plane at Salisbury airport and into the southern African heat. He wore pink Pandit Nehru­style trousers, a multicoloured coat from Kathmandu, half a dozen pieces of heavy Eastern jewellery, and a brown, elaborately­stitched traditional Pakistani hat that made his scalp itch. In his hand was a Zebra­skin walking stick. In his mind were dreams of peace and harmony: a kaleidoscope, psychedelic vision of the Garden of Eden.

Rhodesia in 1968, however, was a land frozen in black and white.

Andrew must have looked as alien to the natives as Livingstone or Stanley, those pallid "discoverers" who turned up in these parts around a century before. The uniform of the white Rhodesian male, without deviation, was the safari suit with shorts, long socks and suede ankle boots, known as veldskoens. Rhodesian mind expanding experiences were limited to rugby, hunting and Lion lager.

Somehow, Andrew had fallen off the hippy trail and into a bastion of white supremacism ­ or, as the white supremacists saw it, a bastion of western, Christian civilisation in darkest Africa.

It had been some journey. The year before, his acting career had ground to a shuddering halt. His days as a household name, as the child actor son of the famous comic Ted Ray, and then a star in his own right ­ on Broadway, the West End and in a string of films ­ had evaporated. As a youth he'd had a seven­year contract with 20th Century Fox. And it wasn't so long ago that he'd had three films opening at the same time, was the lead in a West End play, had every twist and turn in his career avidly followed by the press, and a small fortune in the bank. Now he was broke and unemployed. And he wasn't even 30.

Walking around his manor, Westbourne Grove, was like peering through bleary eyes at the early morning wreckage of a wild all­night party. The guests had gone, leaving their mess in their wake. Every inch of the Grove seemed to hold a memory, every pawnshop a piece of his property. Pawned to stem a rising debts and feed his wife and two young children. One aimless day drifted into the next, as did each successive trip to the off­license for a bottle of wine. On one such journey, however, he bumped into a director of his acquaintance, Donald Howarth. They nodded.

"What are you up to?"Howarth asked.

"Nothing in particular," replied Andrew.

"I'm directing a play that's going to tour India. Want to go?"

The decision didn't require anguished contemplation. The British Council were sponsoring the tour, which would last many months, spanning the length and breadth of the sub­continent.

After flying via Paris, Istanbul and Baghdad, Andrew finally touched down in Karachi. It was morning, but he immediately popped a couple of sleeping pills and knocked back a beer in the airport restaurant.

It may have seemed illogical, but taking sleepers to go out on rather than to go to sleep, was a London habit. The game was to keep awake. He looned into a blanked out state: seeing little and remembering less.

After briefly crashing, Andrew drew back the curtains in his hotel room to the sight of a camel trotting by loaded down with hay. He washed, dressed and emerged, heavy­lidded into the Victorian­style hotel lobby, where a fan whirred gently overhead.

A couple of cast members were milling about, weighing up whether to go straight for a gin and tonic or take in the evening air.

"I was here during the war," said one. "In the army. Hasn't changed much. Still the arsehole of the world."

Outside Andrew absorbed his new surroundings: beggars in rags, women veiled from head to toe, animals and motorised rickshaws. He'd certainly managed to escape the Bayswater Road.

A small child rushed up, swiftly latching on to the new arrivals: "You want to change travellers' cheques? I get good rate. You want hashish? My sister? My brother?" "None of that," exclaimed the ex­army actor. "You buzz off." The child didn't move. The authority of Shakespearian training took over, and the actor lowered his voice an octave or two. "Buzz off!" He turned to Andrew: "It's the only way you know. You'll find they'll never leave you alone. Ruddy pest."

They began rehearsals the next day. The play was George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance, a comedy of manners set in pastoral Surrey in 1907. The theatre's dead concrete walls muffled the actors' voices, so they had use voice projection techniques. Andrew's role required him to mince about on stage in a straw hat and blazer.

On the opening night, he was greeted by a disconcerting sight as he looked out from the stage. Every face in the audience was white. It was the same the following night, and the one after that. In the afternoons a British Council bus was on hand to transport the cast to the British Council Beach, where they could change in the British Council Hut and take a dip in the British Council Sea. (Or at least, that's how it felt to Andrew.) Scones and strawberries were served at teatime. At dinner, it was pork flown in frozen from Singapore. "Watch what you eat old boy," he was advised by a posh young civil servant type. "We don't want you to get the squitters on stage."

There was an endless trail of receptions, cocktail parties and buffets. Acting out the play was effortless compared to the performances the cast had to give at them. Too many functions. Too much small talk. Not enough locals.

"You really should go to the burning ghats. The bodies are cremated and their ashes scattered in the Ganges," advised a frightfully well­spoken ex­pat woman at a local drama society do in a marquee. "The way the skulls burst is astonishing," she said, eyes blazing with enthusiasm. Andrew's just glazed over.

Most of the cast were soon in open revolt, and after the artistic director Richard Cottrell relayed their complaints up the chain, a rota system for attending the functions was introduced, and a handful of locals were invited. Andrew, however, still felt as if he'd been transported back to Tsarist Russia or Louis X1V's France: cosseted in luxury, while outside the desperate clawed at the gate.

Everywhere he went, from Lahore to Rawalpindi to Dacca, it was the same: "Have another scotch." "Have another brandy." "Have another, Have another..." In one hotel four waiters hovered around every guest. The leftovers were shovelled from plate to bin to garbage truck ­ which was then descended upon by the waiting hungry. And when he stepped from the bubble of the hotel or the theatre in to the madness beyond, they were there waiting, palms outstretched, eyes imploring. "Bucksheesh." "Sahib." "Bucksheesh."

They moved to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.

There, with Buddhist and Hindu temples and shrines crowding the narrow streets, in the Himalayan valley surrounded by cloud-topped mountains, things began to crystallise. A Bob Dylan line kept on repeating itself in his mind: "Something's happening here, but you don't know what it is."

Just stepping outside would set off bizarre trains of thought. One day he saw a child of around three taking a crap in the streets. Before it had hit the gutter, a dog was lapping it up. "As a system it seemed to work pretty well," he reasoned. "It certainly saved the street cleaner a job. But there again, who ate the dog's shit?"

Andrew and a couple of others from the cast sought out the local hippie community at a restaurant called the Blue Tibetan. Most of the hippies were away though, building some kind of temple in the foothills, but one of those left behind led them to the source of the most mind-blowing smoke of their lives - and it was perfectly legal.

In a back room at the top of some rickety wooden stairs was the official state hashish shop. Sitting cross-legged on a rope bed was a woman, impassively-stoned and well into her seventies. The English actors hovered in the doorway, not quite sure how to address this particular civil servant.

She defused any awkwardness by ambling over to the safe and producing a lump of black gungy hash about the size of a duck's egg. With one hand she carefully placed it on to the scales, holding out the palm of her other until she was satisfied with the number of rupees the actors graced it with.

From Kathmandu the company moved on to Calcutta, and then to Colombo in Ceylon.

Andrew may have been less absorbed in his performances than ever, but he still delivered. The play itself was running smoothly enough, with no need for rehearsals. In fact, the torrid tropical conditions were the biggest professional obstacle, leaving him and the rest of the cast drenched in sweat at the end of every show.

In Colombo he moved in with Mike Wilson, an old friend from London. Mike had an inspiring story. A former Royal Navy commando, deep-sea diver and sometime film producer, he'd sailed to Ceylon in 1956 with Arthur C Clarke, set up an underwater safari school and later became a mystic, changing his name to Swami Siva-Kalki.

The days assumed a magical hue. While Mike's three children played with his wife Liz in the garden, Mike (whose pipe and beard made him look every inch the deep-sea explorer that he was) and Andrew would meditate inside to Indian chanting and listen to tapes of whales communicating.

One dusk, with a full moon already casting an ethereal glow over the landscape, they set out to have a drink, and were overtaken by the surreal sight of a procession of children singing, dancing and carrying torches with elephants ambling alongside them. It was a religious celebration of some kind.

As 1967 drew to an end, Mike received a telegram from Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones' guitarist, saying he was heading over.

Brian wanted to get away from the harsh English winter, and more pressingly, the harsh English press. He'd been trapped in their glare since the police had raided his flat in Kensington after a party earlier in the year. They'd bust him for possessing enough cannabis to make ten joints. He'd been handed a nine-month jail sentence, but at an appeal hearing his QC argued that he'd now "lcut out drugs, soft, hard or what you will for the future". He was a "highly intelligent, extremely sensitive young man", who had been "catapulted to fame" and was at the "very crossroads of life".

The Court of Appeal cut his sentence down to a £1,000 fine. One of the judges said it was difficult to understand the life that the Rolling Stone led. Their judgement concluded that there was nothing wrong with the jail term, but – "not without considerable doubt" – they deemed that a degree of mercy should be shown.

Mike and Andrew met Brian at the airport. He looked like a modern day Maypole dancer. He was tired, nervous and his hands couldn"t stop shaking. The sunlight only served to heighten his ghostly pallor.

But back at Mike"s, his troubles seemed to lift. Soon Ceylon's answer to the Soho buskers had invaded the garden, performing a wedding ceremony where the bride was a man in drag and the groom wore a monkey suit with a bowler hat.

On Christmas Day Mike's partner Arthur C Clarke showed up, doling out presents to the kids like Santa Claus. Andrew later picked up a script he'd left at Mike's, it was for a film that was apparently being made in London - something called 2001.

The next day, Boxing Day, Brian decided to accompany Andrew to Kandy, where the company had a performance. They wound their way up through the mountains, driving past fertile tea plantations, before stopping at the ancient Temple of the Tooth. Its exquisite edifice was bordered by palm trees. Inside, devotees offered music, prayers and flowers, and what was said to be a remnant of the Buddha's tooth was enshrined. It's claimed the tooth was brought to Ceylon in the fourth century by a Princess who hid it in her hair.

After Andrew's show they took an elephant ride and then headed back to Colombo by train, both lost deep in reflection, neither wishing to break the silence.

Later at Mike's, with Hare Krishna music playing in the background, talk turned to the bizarreness of celebrity. Brian said he was still trying to understand how it had all happened, how his ordinary middle class life in Cheltenham – son of an engineer who played piano at the local church, mother a music teacher – had led him to the hyper celebrity and madness of Rolling Stones. "And what a Shirley Temple trip of a childhood he had," said Mike, pointing his pipe at Andrew.

Less than two years later, on July 3 1969, Brian was found dead in his swimming pool at his country estate in Sussex. He was 27. The official verdict was that he'd drowned while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, but conspiracy theories multiplied and suspicions of foul play have persisted.

Not just the tour, but Andrew's whole life now felt as if it had been hurtling towards this epiphany. He felt an electric impulse surge through his body. Opinions and points of view that had taken years to form dissolved in seconds….

At the airport in Ceylon Mike had given him a book as a parting gift. There were only three dates left on the tour: Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi. Andrew wasn't destined to fulfil them.

Lying on his bed under a mosquito net in his little Bangalore hotel room, he started reading the Buddhist tract Mike had given him. "In the full moon day of May, in the year 623 BC was born in the district of Nepal…”"The words seemed to spring from the page.

He got up, left the hotel and walked into the night. He walked wherever his feet took him, ending up lost – that is, until a man with a donkey carrying his wife and child led him back.

When he left Bangalore to catch the plane to Bombay, Andrew threw all his clothes out of the taxi window. He felt as if he was lowering the flags of the past.

In Bombay he largely spurned the hotel where the rest of the cast were staying and headed to Cowies Guest House in the Colaba District.

Cowies seemed to be full of everyone who'd been drawn to India in the past few months, including a musician friend of Andrew's, John Dowie. Soon the Beatles and the rest of the Stones would be in India. George Harrison was already in Bombay, learning the sitar. But the band of hippies living in Cowies existed in a realm as far removed from the glamour of Swinging London as was imaginable.

Some of the hippies completely identified with the untouchables. They slept in the Sikh temples until they were thrown out; they begged for food and money in the street; their skin was white but they were treated as untouchables.

There was also Marsden Preece, who'd arrived years before. When Andrew saw Marsden he was lying half-conscious in his tatty ground floor room in Cowies. A towel barely covered him, and he held a revolver. He opened his eyes, twiddled his Salvador Dali moustache and fired six rounds into a corner of the room. Marsden had been in Bombay a long time.

Andrew's lifestyle was also changing. His contact with the company had rapidly diminished. Instead he spent his days barefoot and in Indian dress in the marketplace: eating off stalls; sitting and talking to the beggars; listening to sitar players; dropping LSD tabs.

John was tuning his guitar. Marsden was polishing his revolver. Andrew picked up a bible that was lying around: "In the Beginning. Act 1. The Garden of Eden. Afternoon. ADAM: Eve! Eve!" He put the book down, said good night to John and Marsden and walked past the beggars sleeping under sheets on the paving stones to the hotel.

As he walked, he knew what he had to do. It required an act of faith. The play was trivial; meaningless. It would have to somehow continue without him. It was impossible to go on stage again. He had to be re–united with Susan his wife and their two young children who were living in her native Rhodesia. The Garden of Eden.

Rhodesia was a long way away, but the East African Airways office in Bombay was near - on the ground floor of the hotel in fact.

"You obviously can't fly direct, as I expect you know," the travel agent told him. "But we have a flight that stops in Lusaka. The connection leaves tonight."

"Put me on it," said Andrew.

Marsden, John and a van full of hippies drove him to the airport. "Where are you going anyway?" one of them asked. "Rhodesia."

"Bombay to Rhodesia. What a mind blower."

Andrew flew to Karachi (where members of Mao's Red Guard embarked), to Addis Ababa, down to Nairobi, then Dar es Salaam (where the Red Guard got off), and then on to Lusaka. After thousands of miles in the droning aircraft, a van drove him across the mighty Zambezi and he gazed at the mesmerising force of the Victoria Falls. On the Rhodesian side of the border he caught a small plane across to Salisbury, and stepped into another cosmos.

Exactly 27 months before, Rhodesia's Prime Minister, Ian Smith, a former World War II fighter pilot with a glass eye, jutting jaw, and who in plain-speaking harsh southern African vowels constantly invoked Churchill in defence of white privilege (or "civilisation") in Africa, had made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, rather than concede basic economic and political rights to the black majority.

The only other nation to declare independence from Britain had been America in 1776.

Smith, with the support of the vast majority of Rhodesian whites, had set the country on a path to a civil war in which tens of thousands were to die. In fact, the Second Chimurenga (liberation war) as it was called by blacks, was in its incipient stages when Andrew arrived. Guerrillas were already making incursions from Zambia.

Sitting in Salisbury in his multi-coloured coat from Kathmandu, doubts about the wisdom of his sudden departure from India crept in. The company would soon be leaving for Delhi. He wondered if his disappearance had been noted yet. Perhaps they'd reported him missing?

What's more, Susan and the kids were completely unaware he'd arrived, and were out of town, staying on her sister Libby's farm an hour and a half away. He waited for them at Susan's parents' house in the suburb of Avondale.

It was a colonial-style villa with polished red floors, a veranda, and a garden where the English and the African cascaded colourfully into one another. Jacaranda, avocado and palm trees stretched above irises, phlox, gladioli, zinnias and lupins. Rose beds were hemmed by a lawn that remained green even during droughts. Bougainvillea crept up the side of the house.

Not much had changed since he was last there. His parents in law were as hospitable and welcoming as ever. But Rhodesia's own version of apartheid was deeply entrenched. In Avondale the two "kitchen boys" wore white uniforms and padded barefoot around the house, cleaning, serving endless pots of tea and meals. The two "garden boys" wore blue and spent their days weeding, digging, sweeping, watering and cutting the lawn. They lived at the back of the garden in two small "khayas", squat buildings without hot water, little light and few furnishings.

In Rhodesia, blacks were rarely, if ever, spoken to in their own languages by whites, but in English or Chilapalapa, a mix of English, Afrikaans and Zulu. Chilalapala's syntax and vocabulary seemed to be entirely limited to imperatives, to giving orders. "Enza fanakalo&qout; - "Do it like this". "Sebenza mushi" – "Do your work properly". "Hamba lapha shops" – "Go the shops". "Akhona lapha lapha" – "Not there, there."

Waiting for his wife and kids, Andrew pondered how he was going to follow through on his reasons for dramatically leaving Bombay.

Perhaps he could throw Susan over his shoulder, grab a child under each arm and head straight for the Zimbabwe ruins, the ancient remnants of an early African civilisation a few hundred miles south of Salisbury? Apart from not being able to make it to the end of the road, the exodus might not go down well, he thought, if his route passed Cecil Square, where he'd probably encounter a Rhodes and Founders march celebrating the successful putting down of the Matabele Rebellion, the first uprising against white rule.

Susan and the kids finally returned from the farm. In her parents' garden - with one of their dog's scratching a tick that refused to be dislodged from behind its ear, the other waiting patiently for someone to throw a chewed up old tennis ball for it to chase, and a "garden boy" pushing a wheelbarrow slower than seemed humanly possible – Andrew explained his vision of the Garden of Eden to her.

They all headed back to Libby's farm – 12,000 acres with row upon row of golden Virginia tobacco, cotton, cattle and wild bush, dotted with caves with bushmen paintings, granite boulders called kopjes, and leopards, impala and deadly black mamba snakes roaming wild.

If Central Casting had to choose a brother-in-law for Andrew, Libby's husband John would have been the least subtle choice possible.

John was a man's man. A tall, rugged, blunt farmer who was up working on the land at the crack of dawn; a hunter with black hair, blue eyes and skin tanned like hide by the African sun; a generous host who'd ensure that the gin and tonics didn't stop flowing for his guests. He was also utterly, irredeemably racist, right down to the marrow in his bones. Why, Andrew wondered, did so many white Rhodesians loathe Africans, have no interest in their lives or culture, and yet still believe they owned the country? The fact that they enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, higher even than white South Africans', was certainly a factor…

John's opening gambit set the tone for their future, sometimes tense, relationship: "So, I hear you think we should give these moonts a chance," he said. (Moont - along with kaffir, hoetie, toey, bobbejaan - was one of the many derogatory names whites had for blacks, who outnumbered them 17 to one. In fact, white Rhodesians seemed to have as many names for their black countrymen as Eskimos famously had for snow.)

Andrew was on the farm with Susan and the kids for three weeks. Every now and then helicopters dropped by carrying Rhodesian soldiers. They would have a beer and a meal before flying off on their missions. Mostly Andrew sunbathed by the pool, punctuated by visits to the orange grove to pick fruit. He was getting a tan, but he was also starting to get a little tubby.

One night he was watching TV, wishing, as usual, that he could be down in the compound where the Africans lived, sharing a smoke and a drink. The TV offered typically dire fare, some sort of sing along patriotic programme: "This land is your land, This land is my land, From the Inyanga mountains to the Zambezi…"

The phone rang, and a short time later John appeared with a shoulder holster strapped under his arm. &qupt;Some terrorists.." ("freedom fighters" thought Andrew) "..had crossed into Rhodesia.." ("Zimbabwe" thought Andrew) ".. and had been spotted on a farm ten miles away." John was being called out on police reserve. Normally the women and children would have to be taken to neighbours for the night, but luckily not this time as there was another man in the house to stay and protect them: Andrew.

The women and children soon went to bed. Andrew was left alone in the lounge, its walls plastered with the trophy remains of dead animals: leopard and zebra skins, impala skulls, there was even a huge ashtray on top of a stuffed elephant's foot. His mind began to race. Perhaps the house was surrounded? He still had to make the short journey across the front lawn to the cottage where he was staying. Were they about to be attacked? His best, perhaps only, option would be to put up his arms and tell them the truth: "I'm an English Buddhist and I agree with you."

He turned the lights off and ran across the grass.

Back in Salisbury a cable was waiting from his agent. After Bombay, Andrew had never expected to act again, but he'd been offered the lead in a West End play. He returned to London.

But the Garden of Eden dream wasn't over. He ended up moving to an old cottage in Suffolk.