Afterword
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
—Lesley Hartley, The Go-Between
The overland route from Turkey to India became impassable in its entirety after 1979. Only a few Westerners—excluding thousands of foreign troops—have trekked even parts of it since, while still fewer have left accounts. Among the latter are Philip Glazebrook, who travelled through Turkey in the early 1980s as far east as the city of Kars, to the northwest of Mount Ararat (not far from what was then Soviet Armenia); Sheila Paine, who travelled in Iran and the Hindu Kush in 1990; Rory Stewart, who made a remarkable—or perhaps foolhardy—journey through the interior of Afghanistan just after 9/11; and Kate Harris, who, in 2018, travelled by bicycle the route along the Silk Road allegedly taken by Marco Polo.1 In addition, a number of journalists have provided useful accounts of the Middle East and the multiple conflicts that have marked the region in recent decades.2 Few, if any, however, have travelled in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
I have often wondered in the years since what the local people thought of us. Prior to the late 1960s, Western visitors to Istanbul, Tehran, or New Delhi had generally been older, wealthy males—businessmen or government officials—who rode in limousines and stayed in high-end hotels and therefore remained largely invisible to most of the population. David Tomory quotes a traveller who noted that, at the time, “a white man travelling third class on a train was considered seriously weird.”3
In contrast, the Western youth who arrived later in the decade stayed in low-rent districts and rubbed shoulders with local people. Simon Dring quotes a Nepalese businessman who noted that the arrival of the hippies broke down stereotypes of “the foreigner” as the wealthy English.4 The hippies, said the businessman, “helped us understand that the children of white men can cheat and lie too, and can be poor and ill, and that they are not all supermen.” More recently, travel writer Rolf Potts, in a review of Tomory’s A Season in Heaven, argues that while hippies were in a sense pioneers, blazing a trail through areas that had seldom seen many visitors before, “they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding.”5
Other less-than-flattering portraits include Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, a 1971 film made by the well-known actor and producer Dev Anand, which claimed to provide insight into the hippie lifestyle—replete, as Richard Gregory notes, with the requisite scene of “chillum-smoking” would-be seekers of transcendence.6 Then, in 1974, F. D. Colaabavala—a retired Indian Army captain turned author of semi-hysterical sex-ridden accounts of seamy spaces—published Hippie Dharma, a sensationalistic exposé of “a bizarre world infested with drugs, sex, nudity, and wanderlust.”7 I read the book while convalescing in New Delhi before flying home and was not impressed. “Unabashed horseshit!” I wrote in my notes.
Granted, Colaabavala’s account was unusually hyperbolic, but there were other contemporary negative depictions. In Karma Cola (1979)—her critique of what has come to be called spiritual tourism—Indian-American writer and filmmaker Gita Mehta introduces Hippie Trail travellers as “that long red line of loonies” who came “straggling in” from Afghanistan to South Asia. “What an entrance,” she exclaims. “Thousands and thousands of them, clashing cymbals, ringing bells, playing flutes, wearing bright colors and weird clothes, singing, dancing and speaking in tongues.”8
Hippies also do not come off well in Paul Theroux’s The Great Railroad Bazaar (1975), in which they variously appear as slovenly, inconsiderate, hedonistic, arrogant, and supremely self-centred. Encountering hippies travelling on a train in Turkey, he notes that some “simply lay on their seats lengthwise, hogging half the compartment, and humped under the astonished eyes of Turkish women.” Nor had hippies shed their middle-class values. During a stop in Herat, Theroux recalls watching “groups of hippies standing in the thorn bushes complaining about the exchange rate.”9
In Theroux’s view, hippies are hypocrites, although they are themselves unaware of their inauthenticity. Writing two years later, in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), V. S. Naipaul similarly dismissed the hippie embrace of Hinduism as a “sentimental wallow.” They may appear to have achieved an inner equanimity, he argues, but theirs is a fragile equilibrium: “they break just at that point where the Hindu begins: the knowledge of the abyss.”10 One suspects that he is largely correct—yet not all of us were spiritual seekers, pretending to a serenity that we did not possess, and many of us did grapple with issues of authenticity.
Such negative commentary notwithstanding, most of us who travelled the trail probably saw our presence as at least benign, and perhaps even beneficial. Some of us viewed ourselves as informal ambassadors, conscious of the image we would leave behind: we didn’t want to be viewed as the archetypal “ugly tourist.” A few travellers I spoke to even believed that our mere presence might have infused the youth of these countries with a sense of possibilities. As Fergus B. learned, however, even the best of intentions can go awry unless they are accompanied by a realistic understanding of the circumstances of others.
Fergus still remembers the incident that taught him this lesson. He was waiting in a train station when a lowly sweeper approached him and asked, “Can I go to America?” Somewhat flustered, but wishing to be helpful, Bordewich gave him some practical information, which the sweeper misinterpreted to mean that Bordewich was offering to take him there. At that point, another man in the waiting room intervened, explaining emphatically that sweepers can’t go anywhere and reproaching Bordewich for sowing false hope—for putting ideas into the heads of such people about things they cannot have. It was, wrote Bordewich, “a small, harsh lesson in the straitjacket of caste and poverty in a place where individual choice, at least for a man such as the sweeper, was non-existent.”
Certainly, there were occasions on which travellers touched the lives of local people, and vice versa. Looking back on it now, though, I don’t think we who made the overland journey to India left any singular, overarching legacy, whether good or bad. We slid across the surface, and our influence upon others was minor and evanescent. Collectively, we were a moment in human history, although a moment not yet wholly forgotten.
Writing of two childhoods, her mother’s and her own, Carolyn Kay Steedman notes that “people use the past to tell the stories of their life.”11 We tell stories repeatedly throughout our lives in an effort to convince ourselves and others of who we were, are, or would like to be. Stories help us to give meaning to the arc of our lives.
My safarnameh—my journey—to India took place twice: the first time as described here, the second—and longer—in the years it took me to recount it. I am not the same person today who made the first journey, but retravelling the route in the course of writing this book enabled me to recognize and reconnect with that youth—his hopes, his failings, and all. If he saw me now, I hope he would not be too displeased with the person he fathered.
With time, I have grown more aware of how fortunate I was to have made the journey while it was still possible. The world has changed enormously since then, and so has the nature of travel. In the West, soaring costs and dwindling wages—another legacy, this one of neoliberalism—have conspired to put long-distance travel out of reach for many people. At the same time, the proliferation of war zones, the advent of rigidly right-wing, dictatorial regimes, and a rising tide of xenophobia have reduced the number of places that might otherwise be inviting to tourists, while to some extent increasing the risk of journeying on one’s own—of seeking to meet others in their own spaces and on their own terms (and perhaps, in the process, coming face to face with oneself). The newly global world has grown smaller and less hospitable, the fences between peoples have grown higher, buttressed by fear, anger, violence, and inequality. If this book has awakened an interest in a region that was once more accessible to visitors from the West, and if it has captured something of the sense of possibility that Western youth once felt, I will consider it a success.
I wonder sometimes of the person that I would be today had my journey ended differently. What if I had not become ill in India and had continued my travels? What if I had made it to Zambia where the woman I then loved waited? Would I still have become a university professor, or would I perhaps have become a journalist, or travel writer, or aid worker, or tour guide? Or something else entirely?
But let’s start at a different beginning. What if I had not made the journey to India at all?
1. See Philip Glazebrook, Journey to Kars: A Modern Traveller in the Ottoman Lands; Sheila Paine, The Afghan Amulet: Travels from the Hindu Kush to Razgrad; Rory Stewart, The Places in Between; and Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road. Another thought-provoking account is that of the Canadian writer, poet, and journalist Mark Abley, in Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail. Although Abley travelled in the spring of 1978, prior to the events of 1979, he bore witness to the growing unrest in Iran following the violent suppression in January 1978 of protests in the city of Qom and was also obliged to revise his itinerary after Afghanistan essentially closed its borders in the wake of the April military coup that toppled Daoud Khan and installed a communist government. Among other things, his reflections capture the sense of an era on the verge of dissolution.
2. See, for example, Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East; and Jason Burke, “False Optimism May Cloud What We See on the Streets of Tehran.”
3. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 82.
4. Simon Dring, On the Road Again: Thirty Years on the Traveller’s Trail to India, 188.
5. Rolf Potts, “Remembering the Hippie Trail,” Vagabonding (blog), August 7, 2015, http://
www .vagablogging .net /remembering -the -hippie -trail .html. 6. Richard Gregory, A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail: Overland to Asia in Search of Hashish, 10.
7. Quoted in Dring, On the Road Again, 185.
8. Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, 5.
9. Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar, 48, 72.
10. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, 20.
11. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, 8.