Book Review: On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer by Rick Steves; Part One

I began to travel in earnest in the mid-1970s. When I did, it was not as a tourist who goes for a pre-designated amount of time and then returns home, or as a "there and back again" adventure such as Bilbo Baggins undertook in The Hobbit. I left with an open mind and with a view to discover my destiny, which I knew would include writing, but other than that I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know if I would ever return to the land of my birth, and that was fine with me.

My first journey took me to Mexico and Central America. On my next trip I flew to Europe and hitchhiked around; however, as winter approached I caught rumors that dedicated young travelers were taking the Overland Trail, also known as the Hippie Trail, across the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent. That appealed to me. It was exciting and dangerous, a true leap from a relatively safe place into a void of uncertainty. When I made the decision to go east I was in Greece, so I hitched back north to a friend's village in Holland, worked in factories for a couple of weeks to get a little pocket money, and then traveled through Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to the Turkish border. From there I began hitchhiking rides on long-haul trucks, accosting European drivers stopped at borders and persuading them to let me ride shotgun. In this way I managed to make it all the way to Kandahar in Afghanistan before switching to cheap local transportation. I crossed Pakistan into India, spent Christmas on the idyllic beaches of Goa, continued south to Sri Lanka and then north to Nepal, where I hiked alone into the Himalayas on unmarked trails. I ran out of money and almost starved to death in Delhi until my father rescued me with one hundred dollars wired to the United States embassy. With that I managed to get back to Europe.

On my second journey on the Hippie Trail, I was penniless and returning to India for metaphysical reasons. I hitchhiked with private cars all the way through Turkey and Iran to the Pakistan border; I had to circle south of Afghanistan because I didn't have seven dollars for a visa. Hitching through Pakistan to India was damned dangerous and I had several close calls. Once I managed to get to India, I continued hitchhiking with the friendly local truckers until I made it back to my destination: Calangute Beach in Goa.

All that to say that I am familiar with the Hippie Trail and have memories of many adventures while traversing west to east, east to west, and west to east again on it. So when I heard about Rick Steves' new book about the Hippie Trail, I was very excited to obtain a copy as soon as possible. I imagined a fascinating, in-depth memoir that would complement my own account, World Without Pain: The Story of a Search. I can't afford to buy books these days, but I was among the first to snag a copy of On the Hippie Trail from the local library.

In short, even before I began reading, I felt a keen sense of disappointment. I understand that it was partially my fault because in my anticipation I created an impression of what I thought the book would be. I was prepared to lose myself in a traveler's reminiscences of his youthful adventures, but it was nothing like that. It's not Steves' fault; it's just that the book is much different than I envisioned it. Instead of a deep memoir, it is more of a photo album accompanied by a sparse text consisting of a journal Steves kept during the trip that has been transcribed and edited by someone else. Still, the photos are fun to see and evoke lots of memories; when I had hit that trail I had never brought along a camera, and cell phones were nonexistent, of course, so the only images that remain of my journey are in my memories and in the words I composed after the events.

For years Steves had been coming to Europe for his summer vacations, but in 1978 he decided to go farther, to check out the Hippie Trail. He teamed up with his friend Gene Openshaw in Germany and together, in the summer of 1978, they began their trip. Incidentally, 1978 is the year I took my second trip on the Hippie Trail, when I hitchhiked almost all the way, when my passport was stolen in Iran and I begged on the streets of Tehran for two weeks before I could get another one. We never ran into each other, though, although they stopped in briefly at the Amir Kabir Hotel, the so-called Hippie Hilton, where I stayed while I was there, because by the time they passed through I was long gone. I had traveled through earlier, when it was still winter, and had left Tehran on the first day of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, which takes place in late March.

(To be continued)