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

The journey of Rick Steves and his friend Gene Openshaw along the Hippie Trail was very different from mine. I traveled alone and with the mindset that I would discover the road's secrets and my own destiny or die trying, and at times death seemed not far off. On the other hand, from the account in On the Hippie Trail, it is clear that Steves and Openshaw approached their journey with a tourist mindset. It was inevitable that they had to rough it sometimes, but they had far more money than I ever had, and they even went souvenir and clothes shopping along the way. In my struggle for survival, it never occurred to me to collect souvenirs.

I suppose that I was an anomaly compared to the majority of foreign travelers during that time in that part of the world, but I met a number of likeminded people, those who had approached their journey with an open mind and a nonexistent timetable. Most of these folks traveled alone, as I did, and hooked up with fellow nomads from time to time along the way for one night stands or occasionally more lengthy stints. In contrast, Steves comes close to panic when his friend is late meeting him in Germany before the trip. He writes: "What if something happened? What if I was destined to spend the next eight weeks alone?" He doesn't seem too pleased with the prospect at all. There is no hint or suggestion in the narrative of he and Openshaw getting together with female fellow travelers; it must have occurred to them from time to time, but the only mention of female companionship is a vague allusion to a girlfriend back home.

Another indication of the tourist mindset is Steves' occasional remonstration, when things got tough, that he regretted going and he wished he were back home. In all honesty I can't remember that thought coming to me once during my many years of travels. He writes, for instance: "Home is a very nice thought anytime you're on the road to India. It's even more appealing when you're sick." Even when I occasionally got very sick, it never occurred to me that once I got healed I would ever go anywhere but onward. As I wrote in my memoir World Without Pain: The Story of a Search, upon reaching Goa, India, on my second trip to the Subcontinent I felt thusly: "Perhaps the journey itself, the search, was the point of it all. But if it was then there was no end, no goal, no destination. One could not arrive; one could not rest, except intermittently. And home? I couldn't go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular phase of the journey, not an absolute."

I mean no disrespect to Steves when I contrast his journey and mine. What I hope to do is show the difference between the attitudes of traveling as a tourist and traveling as a perennial nomad. In fact, it took a lot of courage for Steves and his friend to accomplish the journey as they did, through dangerous countries on a shoestring budget. He'd been going to Europe every summer for years, and he finally worked up the nerve to head farther east. Most people would take one glance at the dangers and hardships and run the other way. Kabul, Afghanistan, for example, was a tough place to pass through back then, even at the best of times, when there was a small area along one street that catered specifically to young travelers. For some reason Steves calls this area Chicken Street, but I never heard this expression when on several occasions I passed through. I always heard it called Freak Street. There was a Freak Street in Kandahar for awhile too. As far as I know, they were named after the ultimate Freak Street in Kathmandu, Nepal, the end of the Hippie Trail.

Upon entering India, Steves and Openshaw made a beeline for Kashmir, and I envy them their idyllic stay in a houseboat on Nagin Lake in Srinagar. Kashmir and the hill country around it is one of the places in India that I always wanted to visit but never did. I made up for it, though, by living for several months in Kodaikanal, a lakeside town in the Western Ghats, a mountain range in Tamil Nadu in southern India. To me, Kodaikanal was and always will be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

Other intriguing places that Steves and Openshaw visited but I missed include Jaipur in Rajasthan and Varanasi, the Hindu holy city on the Ganges River. They were making a fairly straight shot across northern India for Nepal, while on my journeys upon reaching India I veered south, making for the former Portuguese colony of Goa about midway down the west coast. On my first trip I made it just in time for Christmas. Goa is one of the few predominantly Christian enclaves in India, and in the Hippie Trail days of the sixties and seventies in late December hoards of young western travelers made a beeline for it. I then, on that first trip, continued south into Sri Lanka before turning about and heading north for Kathmandu.

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I want to emphasize that despite my constantly contrasting nomadic traveling and tourist traveling, if the only opportunity to see other lands is to travel as a tourist, then by all means do it. It is better to discover other lands, peoples, and cultures as a tourist than not at all. I urge you, though, to avoid restrictive tours that lead you about from place to place and give you no opportunity to explore on your own. Remember that the nomadic lifestyle is a mindset, not a set of rules of behavior that dictate you have to discover the world in this way or that. Improvisation is the key. Whatever works for you, do it. But whatever path you take, always keep yourself open to the unexpected. You are a citizen of the world; even more, of the universe. I am reminded of the catchphrase in the unorthodox film The Big Lebowski with Jeff Bridges: "The Dude abides." Well, so does the perennial nomad. Or, as the Grateful Dead put it in their inimitable way: "Keep on Truckin'." It's been a long strange trip so far, hasn't it? Enjoy it. And continue.

In closing, although I have been a bit critical of this book, mainly because I was so disappointed that it did not turn out to be an in-depth memoir, I have to admit that it is an entertaining read. For me it brought back a lot of memories. And in the brief postscript, (present day) Steves expresses some profound thoughts on the value of traveling, stressing that "the flip side of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding through travel. Travelers learn that fear is for people who don't get out much; that culture shock is the growing pains of that broadening perspective; that we're all children of God - and by traveling we get to know the family." True words indeed. In these days of distrust and suspicion, if everyone could reach out and get to know our global neighbors better, we would realize that what we have in common far outweighs our differences.