Introduction

Journeys

Safarnameh is a Persian word meaning an account of a journey or travel. In her study of the safarnameh in nineteenth-century Iranian literature, Monica Ringer notes that travel has historically been viewed not only as a means of getting from one place to another but as a transformational experience.² Travel may also involve a journey of reflection, a re-experiencing or reinterpretation—or even recognition for the first time—of a previous journey. And so, this book.

My journey in 1976 followed a sprawling and ill-defined route that came to be known as the Hippie Trail. At the time, that term was only beginning to come into circulation, indeed I don’t personally recall anyone who used it. (Moreover, few travellers referred to themselves as hippies.)

The route that I and many others took eastward to India was broadly similar to that of the more famous Silk Road, along which trade goods flowed from China to the West. Like the Hippie Trail, the Silk Road was neither a single route nor clearly defined. Rather, it was an assemblage of what Nick Danziger describes as several “organized caravan routes,” or, in Colin Thubron’s words, “a shifting fretwork of arteries and veins.”³ From China, one of its principal branches ran to the north of the Taklamakan Desert westward across Central Asia to Mashhad, in the far northeast of Iran, while a more southerly branch went through Kashmir to Taxila (a city now in northern Pakistan) and then west to Kabul and onward to Iran. The Hippie Trail most closely paralleled the latter.

I was one of perhaps millions of young people from the West who journeyed to India during the 1960s and 1970s. Our exact number is unknown. In The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland suggest that the total was at least in the hundreds of thousands and more likely a few million.⁴ Tourist data from the International Union of Official Travel Organizations for the period from 1959 to 1979 point to a similarly broad but indeterminate range.⁵ Regardless of our number, though, we were a new kind of traveller, of a type that emerged in the Western world after 1945. We were the rebellious offspring of tourists. The latter, too, were an historical type that first put in an appearance around the middle of the nineteenth century and who, by the 1950s, had become customers of a growing commercial industry. Whereas in 1950 the number of tourists worldwide was a scant 25 million, over the following two decades postwar prosperity, changes in transportation, a series of cultural shifts, and simple demographics transformed travel into a mass phenomenon—what John Urry has evocatively described as an immense flow of “corporeal travel” involved in the “omnivorous producing and ‘consuming [of] places’ from around the globe.”⁶ By 2018, two years before COVID put a temporary halt to travel, the international tourism industry was servicing an estimated 1.4 billion customers, catering to a growing assortment of tastes, lifestyles, and expectations and to a range of consumers, irrespective of age, class, gender, or sexual orientation.⁷

The infrastructure of mass tourism enabled my generation to travel with relative ease, but broader cultural changes, discussed below, also created a desire for a different kind of travel experience. Many of us increasingly rejected the idea of pre-packaged travel in favour of what we viewed as a more authentic experience. The idea—the meaning—of travel subtly changed into an activity intimately tied to the search for and creation of identity. Many of us found the perfect locale for less commercialized travel in our idealized images of India.

For many decades, travel to the Middle and Far East remained largely an elite exercise, indulged in by generally well-to-do Westerners, often British. In the period from the late nineteenth century through to the Second World War, adventurers such as Lady Anne Blunt and her husband, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, Freya Stark, Robert Byron, and Wilfred Thesinger all ventured into these regions. The mid- and late-1950s saw a host of other British adventurers travel further, to India. Among them were members of the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, who drove from London to Singapore in a pair of Land Rovers; Michael Marriott and Nita Marriott, who journeyed by scooter from Britain to Australia; and Eric Newby, who travelled Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, accompanied by diplomat Hugh Carless.⁸ In 1956–57, RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend and travel writer and adventurer Barbara Toy both travelled through Central Asian countries on their respective round-the-world journeys.⁹

For the most part, these elite adventurers made the journey heavily equipped, which allowed them to travel quite independently, with relatively minimal need to rely on local people and resources. By contrast, conventional tourism preferred to shun local resources altogether—its customers wary of accommodations that were often rudimentary and not necessarily very clean, of food and beverages that might not be safe to consume, of transportation that could be crowded and uncomfortable, as well as unpredictable, and of service that didn’t align with Western expectations.

Such conditions were not an attraction compared to the allure of Hawai‘i or the Costa del Sol. As the 1960s began, however, increasing numbers of young Westerners saw the lack of conventional comforts not as off-putting but as a challenge and an enticement, to which cheap costs and the mysteries of the East were an added bonus. The cohort of which I was a part were still tourists, but we tended to embrace less conventional travel as a means of self-discovery and rebirth.

Travel and Self

This alternative mode of travel bears a strong likeness to the traditional pilgrimage. In both cases, the latter especially, a sacred site may constitute the journey’s end, be it Mecca or Lourdes or the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry (now Puducherry). In both instances the traveller seeks some form of transformative spiritual communion. In a traditional pilgrimage, this communion is closely associated with humility and worship, with the pilgrim subordinate to a greater source of power, whereas for modern pilgrims the communion is largely an interior process that involving a search for, or re-formation of, the self. In the words of Paul Theroux, “Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention,” the possibility, as Michael Barnes and Jayne Hoose argue, “of genuine change—and therefore self-transformation”—even if the traveller does not want to be changed.¹⁰ This is because, in the extreme, travel forces a person to be alone with their “self.”

As Paul Theroux notes, travel is often characterized by solitude, disconnection, anonymity, temporariness, and loneliness.¹¹ But these conditions also compel the traveller to be—in the current terminology—“in the present,” to be “mindful.” Real travel cannot be navigated on automatic pilot. As Stephanie Rosenbloom argues in Alone Time, travelling on one’s own can be both a creative and restorative experience, a chance to escape the “noise” of everyday life and reconnect with one’s inner self. And because travel enables travellers to remain anonymous and disconnected from those they know and who know them, it also gives them a chance to try on new roles and identities.

Leaving home entails a voluntary, if unconscious, stripping of the inward and outward symbols of one’s previous identity, a boiling down to one’s essential character, which, by this very process, “emerges as though from an ordeal, fortified and wiser” and is thus “freed up for the creation of new realities and new selves.”¹² One’s past identity may seem to vanish as time on the road increases. Information about what is happening “back home” loses its intensity, acquiring instead an aura of nostalgia. The other world recedes, even as what Tim Severin terms “critical detachment” becomes necessary for psychological and emotional survival in the new environment.¹³ Travellers may often find themselves caught in a liminal space, marked by a tension between a self left behind and one not yet fully formed.¹⁴

Such lofty talk of self-transformation might risk making travellers sound a little like ascetics, renouncing worldly pleasures in favour of spiritual exercises aimed at achieving some form of transcendence. Far from it. As Ian Littlewood notes in Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex, the lure of travel is not necessarily intellectual, spiritual, or tied to the pursuits of high culture. Eroticism and sex are a frequent, sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, element of travel—and, in any case, spirituality and sensuality are often kindred spirits, twin paths of self-knowledge and creation. For many of us who travelled to India during the 1960s and 1970s, there was no puritan separation of the spiritual and the sexual. Sensual pleasure was an intense part of a personal journey.

The Birth of the Countercultural Traveller

During my time on the road, I saw travellers run the gamut from those driving well-equipped travel vans to backpackers carrying small kerosene cookers and pots and pans to a few others with a blanket, a copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and not much more. Some had carefully mapped out their journey; others had only a vague idea of geography, their destination circumscribed by wherever a bus ticket would take them. Some remained connected to the world at home, looking forward to letters waiting at the next Poste Restante; others were adrift and blank-eyed, floating from one hippie haven to another. Some had been travelling only a few weeks or months; others had been travelling for years. Some had clear plans of returning home; others no longer had a real and permanent home to which to return. Some were seeking enlightenment through religion; others an escape through drugs; and many simply an adventure. What we bore in common was a commitment to the journey, irrespective of—and sometimes even encouraged by—minor inconveniences or actual hardships in a region ill-equipped for traditional tourism.

The countercultural traveller did not emerge from nowhere, but out of specific material and cultural conditions. My own life is perhaps instructive. I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1952 to middle-class parents. For most of my growing years, my father was an autobody mechanic, though in his forties he went to university and was later ordained as a United Church minister. My mother was an administrator at the city’s largest hospital. Both had served in the Canadian military, my father as a radio reconnaissance operator in a Staghound armoured car in northern Europe after D-Day; my mother as an air force administrator in Ottawa. Their lives, coming out of the Second World War, were a testament to guarded optimism.¹⁵

Though born seven years after war’s end, I was very much a child of that conflict. Although my parents seldom spoke about the war, movies, documentaries, and books regularly stirred embers of the war to memory. Perhaps more importantly, because it was a worldwide conflict, it gave me lessons in geography, such that by the time I was ten years old, my brain possessed a workable map of the world: its continents, countries, seas, and oceans. Moreover, as both my school and our home were filled with illustrated books about history, art, and architecture, this map was also fleshed out with images of places all around the globe. This imagined world became an extension of the real world where I grew up. I, and probably many others of my generation, took for granted that we would one day travel the globe.

My sense of place in the world, and of the opportunities it presented, was a product of a particular time and place. The growth of transportation systems, particularly the advent of mass air travel, made international travel possible. But several other important economic, socio-demographic, and cultural factors also preconditioned my cohort’s later interest in travelling to India.

The economic period between 1945 and the mid-1970s was a Golden Age in the West, especially for North America’s middle classes, although for many English and European citizens, whose countries had been scarred physically by war, the good times had to wait a little longer. One impact of this staggered prosperity was that proportionately more North Americans travelled to India in the mid-1960s than did their counterparts in Britain and Europe, a trend that changed only later in that decade as the economies of Britain and western Europe improved.¹⁶

The Golden Age coincided also throughout the West with a spike in birth rates between 1946 and 1966. The rates for the predominantly English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States were especially high during the postwar years and did not substantially diminish until the end of the so-called “baby boom.” Many of those who travelled to India during the 1960s were born prior to 1946. By contrast, most of those making the journey in the 1970s, myself included, were baby boomers.

The likelihood of individuals making the journey was also a product of the West’s emergent socio-cultural milieu. As political scientist Ronald Inglehart famously argued in The Silent Revolution (1977), the values of the postwar generation differed from the values of the generation born before the Second World War. Among those who had lived through the war, the focus fell on security and the material comforts available in an era of postwar prosperity. Having known little by way of serious hardships, however, members of the subsequent generation could turn their attention to such things as autonomy, self-expression, and quality of life.

At the heart of the postwar ethos is the modern conception of the self, comprised of such values as personal freedom, individualism, spontaneity, and authenticity—values, as we earlier saw, central to the self-identity of the traveller. Newness and self-discovery were paramount. The self was a project that could only be found, or created, through new experiences—as mediated, for example, through drugs, alcohol, sex, music, or religion. But as an all-encompassing experiential vehicle that brings together each of these modalities, travel was the means par excellence. Albeit unconsciously, many of us who travelled abroad during the 1960s and 1970s were backstopped by a sense of material and psychological security, which, when combined with the sense of immortality typical of youth, allowed us to engage in a degree of adventuring, even risk-taking, that had been rare in previous generations.

Indeed, taking calculated risks became a necessary requirement of individual expression and personal growth. Travelling for many Western youths became part of a coming-of-age ritual in the West. Such rituals were not new but became increasingly common in the West after the late nineteenth century as adolescence came to occupy a distinctive life stage between childhood and adulthood, a stage during which young people were more or less expected to be rebellious.

The Culture of Travel

While by the second half of the twentieth century socio-economic developments and technical advances had put long-distance travel within the reach of more people, popular culture in the form of films, literature, magazines, and music also provoked a desire to see the world. By the 1950s, travel writing had become its own genre, exemplified by the works of Jan Morris and Eric Newby, and major magazines regularly profiled faraway places. Fergus F. told me, for example, that his interest in travel was prompted in part by books and magazines depicting distant places. Specifically, he remembers seeing as a child a National Geographic photo of Buddhist monks in a Tibetan monastery and similar photos in Travel + Leisure, which stimulated a desire to travel, in his words, to “spectacular and exotic places.”

The emergent culture of travel was wedded not only to curiosity but to the psychological desire for freedom. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) crafts a positive mythology about the liberating qualities of travel. The book is almost Homeric in tone, but its celebration of travel was decidedly in tune with the West’s emerging cultural values. Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland note, for example, the book’s appeal not only to North American but also to British youth.¹⁷

The celebration of travel coincided with the growth of the auto industry. The car came to represent a measure of prosperity and status. Roads and highways were expanded, and gas stations built. In North America, especially, suburbs and shopping malls flourished. Travelling long distances by car remained an unusual, and often arduous, activity, but when such trips did occur—a once-in-a-lifetime trip to New York or Los Angeles, say—they left an indelible impression in people’s memory.

The car was not, however, simply an instrument of travel or an emblem of status. It spoke to the possibility of personal reinvention and freedom. Travel was a central theme of many television dramas, best depicted in the American television series Route 66, which I dutifully watched every Friday evening.

The show, which ran from 1960 to 1964, was a sanitized version of Jack Kerouac’s novel. Its main characters (Buz and Tod) drove a red Corvette and each week met up with new and interesting characters. But mostly the show was about the romance and excitement of travel. The point was not to get somewhere. The point was the journey itself. This theme was repeated in other television shows of the time. The Fugitive, The Invaders, and even Star Trek were, like Route 66, travel tales—the first about an escaped convict seeking justice, the second about a man tracking down aliens come to earth, and the third about spreading liberal notions of justice throughout the universe.

Such shows and numerous other books contributed to the desire for travel that emerged in the late 1950s. Several people I interviewed mentioned the influence of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), which followed the exploits of Ken Kesey and his band of LSD-tripping merry pranksters; James Michener’s Caravans (1963), about the search for an American girl who marries an Afghan national and disappears into that country; and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1953).

In short, travel in the postwar period became valued for its own sake. It was now woven into the fabric of Western culture. But it was especially woven into the emergent selves of those of us growing up in the West who felt estranged from the dominant culture. That culture seemed, in Nino Gualtieri’s words, “decadent, exploitative, and superficial.” We sought an escape. Travel became thus an important element of the 1960s and 1970s youth counterculture.¹⁸

Travel as Counterculture

As goes without saying, not everyone wholeheartedly embraced countercultural values. Yet fear and insecurity did spawn a fairly widespread questioning of political authority, and in some cases an outright rejection. For many of us, economic security—which we largely took for granted—was offset by threats of nuclear and conventional war, social discord, alienation, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction, concerns that are still very much with us. The threat of nuclear annihilation touched everyone. I vividly remember the government pamphlets that arrived by mail telling our family how to build our very own bomb shelter (a pointless exercise, as some of us even then suspected), as well as the decisive evening of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While much analysis of the counterculture focuses on the discontent felt by American youth and their rejection of Western values and culture, it is important to acknowledge that these responses were not confined to the United States. The year 1968 was tumultuous not only in the US, marked as it was by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, but also in Europe, where student riots broke out in France and Germany and the Soviet Union brutally put down Alexander Dubček’s reformist movement in Czechoslovakia. The same year saw widespread protests throughout the African continent by students, intellectuals, and workers against neo-colonialism, imperialism, authoritarian rule, and South African apartheid. I was living on the safe outskirts of a small city in Canada at the time, but I haven’t forgotten the visceral anger I felt toward the Cold War belligerents, the US and the USSR. The counterculture, and the political rebellions it spawned, were transnational; figures such as Jerry Rubin, Che Guevara, Steven Biko, and Rudi Dutschke were well known to enraged youth on both sides of the Atlantic.

Similarly, the counterculture drew widely from a shared cultural well of writers, poets, and musicians. Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud and Hermann Hesse, The Who, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix fuelled an idealist ethos that rejected convention in search of an authentic self, born of nature, a lifestyle woven together by a tapestry of art, music, and literature, as well as love and hope, that again transcended borders. California’s communes found an echo in Berlin and Munich, as well as in countless experiments in rural Canada. That Jim Morrison was buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery is symbolic of the cultural and international solidarity of youth during that period.

For at least some of us growing up in the West’s countercultural milieu, travel was not only a means of youthful adventure but also an individual, and often unruly, expression of dissent, while for others travel became, if often unconsciously, both an escape from and a search for. We were engaged, we believed, in making a cultural change. We saw ourselves present at the birth of a new age in which freedom and justice would reign. Travel was a means of finding and articulating that new world.

At the same time, a desire for travel could—and did—manifest itself in numerous places. The question then is, why did so many of us, including me, choose India?

The Orientalist Influence

Mere weeks before I set off on my journey in 1976, I went to see The Man Who Would Be King. The movie, adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 short story, stars the late Sean Connery and Michael Caine.¹⁹

The film is a classic example of Orientalism, a term coined by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said “to describe the Western approach to the Orient: Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice.”²⁰ In the Western imagination, the Orient is a vast and undifferentiated area, stretching from what was once Persia to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. It is the world of the Other, people and places perceived as exotic, mysterious, and dangerous, and, in the most racist and demeaning portrayals, ignorant, untrustworthy, and cowardly—“uncivilized” in traditional Western parlance.

As the twentieth century began, Western audiences were already flooded with many conventional, erroneous, but comfortable, images of the Orient produced by writers, poets, and artists. Books published prior to the war included Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933); among the films were Lives of the Bengal Lancer (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and Elephant Boy (1937). The early postwar era contributed Edmund Hillary’s High Adventure (1955), and the films and television series Casablanca (1942), King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), and Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers (1956–57). The catalogue of Orientalist images was subsequently augmented by writers such as Dervla Murphy and Paul Theroux, films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and the aforementioned The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and songs such as the Crosby, Stills, and Nash classic, “Marrakesh Express” (1969), and Three Dog Night’s “The Road to Shamballa” (1975).²¹

For Edward Said, Orientalism was an instrument of imperialism. For many in the West, however, Orientalism amounted more to an exercise in romanticization, with “the Orient” increasingly seen as a place not only of enormous allure but also of salvation. If the West was the home of crass materialism, the Orient was the locus of wisdom.

Easternization: The Other Side of Orientalism

On the Road was first and foremost a travel tale in the vein of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But much of that book and, even more, of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958) echoed another theme: the growing attraction of Eastern religion and culture.

Long before any of us began travelling to India, Eastern values, beliefs, and practices had already permeated the West’s cultural walls. Sociologist Colin Campbell notes that early interest in eastern philosophies “was confined to a small, elite group of intellectuals, writers, and artists” but grew after the 1960s “to embrace large numbers of ordinary, if generally middle-class, people.”²² Intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley encouraged this embrace through the dissemination of images that meshed with the West’s emerging popular culture. The result was a further enticement to Western youth whose minds had already been filled with images of the lands to which they would soon travel.

The turn to the East was reinforced by cultural icons such as Allan Ginsberg, who visited the ashram at Rishikesh in 1962, and the Beatles, who, along with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, also journeyed to Rishikesh in 1968 to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Within the West, the exotic East became a familiar presence through such books as Be Here Now (1971), by Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), which was popular among spiritual seekers.²³ The emerging counterculture was reflected as well in a newfound interest in Indian music and in instruments such as the sitar and tabla.

The East also came to the West through literature and film. Richard Blais had studied some Islamic and Indian history and art in college and recalled being mesmerized by the films of Satyajit Ray, especially Parash Pathar (1958), Devi (1960), and Charulata (1964), as well as Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din” (1890) and the music of Ravi Shankar.

Donald Redfoot notes that the “Mystic East” was marketed through a series of cultural exchanges by “skillful entrepreneurs” who brought the East to the West. But, as time went on, individuals who travelled to India added to this embrace of Eastern images with their own personal experiences as conveyed by word of mouth or produced in pamphlets and posters.²⁴ Fergus F., who made the journey in 1969, particularly recalled the influence of the underground press in Britain—the magazine OZ and the newspaper International Times—that regularly carried exotic stories about “people who went to India and got involved with taking all kinds of hallucinogens and having all kinds of amazing mental experiences.” He adds, “There were many people who were going to Kathmandu and writing in the underground press about their experiences.” These collective images, part of what Brian Edwards has termed “hippie Orientalism,” were often more laudatory and accepting of the region and its peoples than the depictions found in the West’s dominant cultural discourse.²⁵ At the same time, this acceptance often fell short of a genuine engagement with the East, and depictions were often shallow and largely imaginary. A small press travel guide produced in 1973 captures the positive Orientalism espoused by some travellers:

People of the East, for the most part, have a much better perspective on life, time, people, drugs and living in general than do those of us who come from the West. They are more in touch with its realities than the cultures on this side of the world. We, by telling you the truth about all that we have experienced instead of veering it up to appease one unreal force or another, hope to help bring all of us to better understand ourselves and the Eastern world.²⁶

Not everyone who made the journey embraced such images wholly or uncritically; nor did we continue to hold them when faced with the reality we experienced. The journey we embarked on involved, to one degree or another, both an exchange and an experience, sometimes brief, sometimes extended, albeit filtered through our own personal and cultural circumstances. I had seen poverty and physical affliction before, but never on the scale or intensity that I witnessed on my journey. Those sights, and the stories told me by shopkeepers, hotel owners, guides, and others, have long remained with me. They took root in my later academic efforts to understand the political, historical, and economic factors shaping the lives of the region’s peoples. How far my efforts at fully understanding the people and places I encountered have been successful is difficult to say. What I do know, however, is that I would not have embarked on this later work had I not made the journey.

The Travellers

Many existing accounts depict the new breed of Western travellers of the 1960s and 1970s as searching for, in the words of sociologist Katharine Rankin, “drugs and dharma.”²⁷ In The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Paul Theroux likens a group of hippies on a train in central Turkey to a cult-like tribe made up of castaway teenage girls (“initiates”) whose leaders announce their advanced spiritual status by adopting appropriately exotic garb: “the faded dervish outfit, the ragged shoulder bag, the jewellery—earrings, amulets, bracelets, necklaces.”²⁸ Hippies are similarly depicted as spiritual seekers in several other books, including David Tomory’s A Season in Heaven, based on first-hand accounts provided by former travellers themselves, and Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland’s The Hippie Trail: A History.

Drugs and the search for transcendence, as well as easy sex, were part of the experience of travelling to India, and indeed sometimes the motivation, but by no means always. Such travellers tended to congregate in certain locales, notably Kathmandu and the beaches of Goa, and were therefore more visible, and they also received far greater attention in the Western media. But because so much of the literature focuses on this particular group, it fails to capture the more general nature of Western travellers who journeyed from one end of Asia to the other.

Most of us were in our early to mid-twenties and came from white, middle- or working-class families. We were not wealthy, but we were well off by the standards of the countries in which we travelled. Males were in the majority, though the number of females on the road increased over time.

We set out on the journey with various and overlapping motivations and intentions. My childhood, surrounded by history books and pictorial atlases, had fuelled a deep curiosity about distant lands and peoples. I often thumbed through maps of foreign places, and by the time I was eight I was already dreaming of travelling to them one day.

Curiosity and a search for adventure were prime motivations for many who made the journey, but by no means the only ones. As Hippie Trail veteran Richard Gregory observes, “some sought spiritual enlightenment, some saw opportunities for profit, some were escaping a rigid conventional lifestyle (or the draft) and some just wanted to see the world.”²⁹ Among those I surveyed, John Hunter travelled with his wife to India in 1979 with the specific intent of studying yoga. Allen Dodds went to India in 1974 to visit the Tibetans in Dharamsala and bring them a typewriter donated by the Tibet Society in London. Max (a pseudonym) was inspired by Indian music to make the journey in 1972, while another individual said he travelled to India to learn to play the tabla. And many of us might have repeated George Mallory’s reply when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it was there.”

David Lane recalled wanting nothing more than to escape the boredom of living in the small northern Alberta town of Peace River, not far from where I lived. (He made his escape five years before I did.) Karl (also a pseudonym), a German living at a time when Germany was torn by political violence and social unrest, said his reason for travelling in 1972 was to “look for a meaningful life, a human community, a society without exploitation and alienation.”

Besides curiosity, boredom, or overt alienation, many of us were simply at loose ends, caught between adolescence and social pressures to settle down to job and family. The interregnum of travel was a performative act of freedom.

Some of us made the decision to travel spontaneously; others considered the possibility for quite some time. Many of those I surveyed had heard stories from people they knew about their travel to distant places before embarking on their own trip. Australian John Wall, for example, who journeyed through East Asia in 1964, had a “close friend who had made the trip from London to Singapore,” as well as another who had “travelled to England overland, but returned via Africa, where he was arrested and deported back to Perth at no cost.” Similarly, a friend told Ollie Cooper of his journey to India “in an old VW Kombi.”

Carol McLean had been living and working in England for sixteen months, far from her home country of Canada, when she and four friends (one male, three female) travelled in 1964 to the Levant in a brand-new Volkswagen bus. That was supposed to have been the end of their journey, but, spurred on by a woman in the group who had previously travelled to the Middle East, they set off on a second journey that would end in India.

Robert (a pseudonym) first made the trip in 1970 after meeting a member of a California-based ring of drug smugglers who had travelled the route on “business.” He joined the enterprise and made several trips to Afghanistan over the next few years. Bruce Shore’s then girlfriend (and later wife), Brenda Grant, had partially travelled the route two years earlier before they made the full journey in 1976–77.

In addition, many of the Hippie Trail travellers I contacted had already made shorter trips to places whose cultures pushed the boundaries of their experience. Diane Warren’s journey from England to India in 1972 followed on an earlier “escapade”—her word—in 1967, when she and some friends purchased “a double-decker bus and drove it, via Spain and Italy, to Istanbul.” David Pearson had travelled to Eastern Europe in the early 1960s and was in Prague in 1968 when the Soviet army moved in. Prior to their journey in 1974, Roger and Terry Ledressay had taken a five-week Contiki tour through the Soviet Union. Before travelling to India in 1976, Bruce Shore had lived in Belize and Guatemala for six months, at the age of nineteen, and later journeyed to Europe and the Canary Islands, where he again lived for five months. And David Dudeck’s overland journey along the Hippie Trail, in 1974–75, had been preceded by travel to Spain and Morocco via London in 1971.

My own experience was in many ways similar. Three years before I began my trip to India, I had travelled for five months through southern Europe and the Canary Islands before ending up on the Greek island of Mykonos, where I encountered a group of people returning from India. They were garbed in kaleidoscope-coloured kaftans and beads and brought with them carpets, saris, jewellery, and perfumes—all of which were for sale. They were, in fact, the epitome of Theroux’s exotic hippie travellers. After a month on the island, however, I was running short of money and, in retrospect, feeling rather homesick, so I flew home. But a fire had been lit in my imagination by that encounter.

For many people, India was only part of an extended journey. Henry Hamilton and Alastair Harper, both recent graduates from medical school, travelled from Istanbul to Nepal in October to December 1962 before flying to Hong Kong, where steady jobs awaited. Mark Godfrey set off a year earlier in 1961 on a journey of a few months that lasted four years.

John Wall made his first trip to India in 1964, but the lure of travel brought him back for two more journeys, in 1968 and again in the early 1970s, to see things he had missed on earlier trips. For three years he lived in northwestern Iran, in the city of Tabriz.

Trish Flindall left home in central London at the age of fourteen with plans to become a hairdresser, but in her early twenties she read Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt (1965), an account of bicycling to India. In 1968, Flindall and her sister answered an ad in The Times from “three English boys”—a photographer working for a magazine, a young man heading to India to work for Oxfam, and an artist—who were driving overland in a specially outfitted Land Rover to the east. The journey of seven months ended in Australia.

Bruce Finch and his wife began their journey in 1970, not long after they married. It took them first across Canada, through Latin America, then to Australia and New Zealand, and then to Hong Kong, at which point they flew to Pakistan and travelled overland back to Istanbul and Europe—a journey of five years.

Kaarel and Lana Parn set off in September 1973 from Toronto on a trip that lasted two years and took them around the world. Bruce Shore and Brenda Grant’s journey through the Middle East and Asia lasted thirteen months. David Lane travelled back and forth across Oceania, East Asia, and the Middle East during the years 1967 to 1974. Sometimes he flew, but he often took local buses. “In those days,” he remarked, “life was an extended trip.”

If one was open to new experiences and opportunities, and had no immediate ties to home, life could sometimes evolve in quite unexpected ways. Steve Crawford set off in 1972 with the intent of going to Kathmandu or Goa, but after failing to get a ride east from Istanbul, instead hitchhiked south through Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, eventually ending up in Iran, where he experienced a visa problem. While he waited for the problem to be resolved, he met the editor of the Tehran Journal, who, learning that Steve was a travel journalist, offered him a job as sports editor. Armed with a work permit, Steve stayed in Iran for another sixteen months.

Fate also played a part. David Hodges and Bill Kerr were among the contingent of university students who took part in the ill-fated second Commonwealth Expedition (COMEX 2) in 1967. Not far from Zagreb, one of eleven coaches returning from the three-month round-trip journey from London to New Delhi collided with the unsecured jib of a mobile crane. Fortunately, neither Hodges nor Kerr was on any of the buses, but fourteen of their fellow students were killed. Hodges, who had been the driver of one bus, contracted infectious hepatitis in Afghanistan and was unable to continue on the return trip (he later flew home from Tehran), while Kerr stayed on in India for a year before slowly making his way back to the UK along a path that saw him stay with a Scottish missionary in Kabul, get robbed in Tehran, and travel by dhow from Abadan to Kuwait, before eventually landing in Israel, where he worked for two months in the Timna copper mines.

During the two decades before 1979, after which events in Iran and Afghanistan made the trip impossible, a bizarre caravan of vehicles—cars, vans, minibuses, bicycles, motorcycles, and bicycles—began an overland trek between Turkey and India. Those travelling in them (or occasionally on them) were sometimes joined by hitchhikers. My own journey was largely by local buses, and a few trains in India and Pakistan. Several people I interviewed had dared to take one of the proliferating commercial buses—such as the famous Magic Bus—only to find themselves stranded somewhere, faced with a choice between using local transport or hitchhiking.

The following account is not, of course, intended to be representative of all overland travel to India during this period. It simply recounts my own journey, taken from the extensive notes that I wrote at the time, portions of which are reproduced in the text. These notes are augmented by material I gathered from a total of forty-eight individuals who travelled the Hippie Trail themselves, most of them in roughly the same period that I did. My account may serve to expand on, sometimes confirm, and occasionally challenge prevailing images of those who made the overland journey to India during the so-called hippie era. In the end, though, it remains my personal safarnameh.

1. The names of a number of cities have changed since my travels. I use the older name, which was current at the time, but on first mention I provide the newer name.

2. See Monica M. Ringer, “The Quest for the Secret of Strength in Iranian Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature: Rethinking Tradition in the Safarnameh,” 148–49.

3. Nick Danziger, Danziger’s Travels: Beyond Forbidden Frontiers, 7; Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road, 24.

4. Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History, 6.

5. I draw here on statistics I compiled from the International Union of Official Travel Organizations, International Travel Statistics, for the years from 1959 to 1979. (Note that in 1975 the International Union of Official Travel Organizations became the World Tourism Organization, which later changed its acronym to UNWTO.) These statistics are admirably detailed, allowing one to determine how many people from a given Western country entered one of the Hippie Trail countries in a particular year. Yet the same person might have crossed the same border more than once in a given year (as I did in 1976, in the case of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan), and of course not everyone entering a country was travelling on the Hippie Trail. As a result, estimates vary considerably for each combination of nationality, country of entry, and year.

6. John Urry, “Globalizing the Tourist Gaze,” 141; “[of]” in the original.

7. For more about these shifts in the tourist industry, see Peter Robinson, Sine Heitmann, and Peter U. C. Dieke, Research Themes for Tourism, especially Heitmann’s essay “Tourist Behaviour and Tourism Motivation.” On the initial transition from travel to tourism, see Daniel Boorstin, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel,” 84–85.

8. Tim Slessor, First Overland: London-Singapore by Land Rover; Michael Marriott, “Two-Up”: By Scooter to Australia; and Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

9. Peter Townsend, Earth, My Friend; Barbara Toy, Columbus Was Right! Rover Around the World.

10. Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, 3; Michael Barnes and Jayne Hoose, “Tourists or Travellers? Rediscovering Pilgrimage,” 25.

11. Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar, 5 and 123.

12. Ringer, “The Quest for the Secret of Strength,” 149.

13. Tim Severin, Tracking Marco Polo, 158.

14. See the first chapter, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual,” in Victor Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre.

15. As I later discovered, several of the individuals I interviewed also had parents who served overseas during the war. Trish Flindall’s father, for example, spent four years fighting in Egypt. Roger Ledressay’s father fought in Europe, while Bruce Finch’s father flew thirty-six RAF combat missions over Germany. Arthur (a pseudonym) similarly reported that his father flew with RAF Bomber Command and was eventually shot down, but managed to escape the German army with the help of the Dutch and Belgian underground. Margot Miller’s father was also in the air force and flew dignitaries to the Far East, including India, after the war; in fact, he was in India at the time of Partition in 1947.

16. This shift in the proportional distribution of specific nationalities is evident in the statistics I compiled from the International Union of Official Travel Organizations, International Travel Statistics, 1959 to 1979.

17. Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History, 13.

18. Theodore Roszak defined a counterculture as a “culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion.” The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, 42.

19. “The Man Who Would Be King” first appeared in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales, a collection of short stories published in Allahabad in 1888, but was later reprinted as a stand-alone book.

20. Edward Said, Orientalism, 73.

21. Basil Jay, who travelled the Hippie Trail with his family in 1974, noted that the “beautiful cities” they passed through had already been “made romantic to us through the poems of the likes of Rudyard Kipling, or the Rubyat of Omar Khiam.” 65 Days to Delhi: An Incredible Journey, 5 (spellings per the original).

22. Said, Orientalism, 26.

23. See Grant John Szuveges, “The Overland Hippie Trail to India and Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s,” 48–51.

24. Donald L. Redfoot, “Touristic Authenticity, Touristic Angst, and Modern Reality,” 302.

25. On hippie Orientalism, see Brian Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, chap. 6.

26. T. Master, N. Lahore, and S. Deals, Head East, 1. Nick Danforth has posted the guide on “The Afternoon Map,” accessed September 23, 2024, http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2013/10/the-hippie-trail.html.

27. Katharine Rankin, The Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalism and Social Change in Nepal, 167.

28. Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar, 48.

29. Richard Gregory, A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail: Overland to Asia in Search of Hashish, 5.