The friends who drove a bus behind the Iron Curtain

In the summer of 1968, a group of friends adapted a double-decker bus and took it on a journey to Eastern Europe. Sponsored by two Scotch whisky-makers, they encountered Soviet tanks, a Romanian beer shortage and a perilous Yugoslavian mountain pass.

The bus was an old Reading Transport Corporation AEC Regent MkII - a model that now has its own Wikipedia page and a loyal following. Long past its corporate usefulness, the bus was lined up with an assortment of discarded relics outside a garage in Spittalfield, a small town north of Perth in Scotland.

Ian Jack and his friend Dave Stickland had vague plans for some sort of summer road trip. Driving past the garage one May day in 1968 the students spotted the buses and, on a whim, stopped to price up a single-decker. Single-deckers turned out to be an impossibly expensive £400. But, just as they were leaving, the garage foreman called them back and offered them a less in-demand double-decker for half that.

Buying such a large vehicle was "a ridiculous idea", so they declined and left, Ian says. "But then we got back to the university and the word got around and all of a sudden people wanted to give me some money to buy it."