My friend Jim mentioned listening to this book and that has prompted me to do the same. And for that I must thank him as this as it has been a fun audiobook listen.
The Hippie Trail is the journey made by young western travelers with no money that stretched from Istanbul to Kathmandu and beyond. It was popular from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s and ended with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While Rick Steves had made many journeys in Europe, it was not until 1978 that he had the courage to undertake the Hippie Trail. His journal from this trip stayed in a drawer until the pandemic times and was just published in February of this year.
Steves said the manuscript was only lightly edited and let us know in advance that his cultural insensitivity was not removed. While he is unlikely now to say some of the things he said then, still, he was thoughtful. He tells about enjoying spending time with a friendly man in Tehran who had all the creature comforts, sitting on his balcony eating ice cream and enjoying each others’ music. “I was really shocked at how good life can be for some, and how relatively miserable it can be for others. Hanging out with Abe was a very rosy picture of Tehran which is not a very rosy city. I had never cared about or even noticed what I was now realizing was a big ethical issue: the giant difference between rich people and poor people, not between rich and poor countries, but the difference within countries.”
I cannot date when our long-time friend Sue did this journey, but it was sometime between 1970 and 1972 and her trip lasted six months. I recall her many letters of that trip as a catalog of harrowing stories, including Afghani men curious to see the western women looking in the transom of their room. Her budget for that six months was $1000. Both she and Rick Steves complained vigorously about merchants charging double the local rate to tourists for lunch, which made it ten cents rather than five.
This trip made him an evangelist for travel to give people a broader perspective. He said, “In my work I’ve shared the lessons I learned on the Hippie Trail now for over 40 years and I’m an evangelist for the notion that good travel is more than bucket lists and selfies. I believe that if more people could have such a transformative experience, especially in their youth, our world would be a more just and stable place.” After he returned home, he began a small travel business and well, we know how that has worked out. When we prepared to travel to Malta for a month in 2019, the only explanation of what you needed to do at the time to have reasonably priced phone and texting came from a Rick Steves explanation.
One last thing I want to remember: this book reminded me of a much-loved book of travel essays by Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu, written in 1988. I wonder how it would look now.
Rick Steves, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, Perseus Books Group, 2025, 224 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.