On The Hippie Trail

    When I had heard that Rick Steves, the famous travel writer who also has a television and radio show, had written a new book, I immediately picked it up because I want to whet my appetite for our next trip to Asia.  When everything closed down during COVID, Steves found that he had a lot of time on his hands and when he came across an old journal that he had written in 1978, he decided to turn in into a book.  “On the Hippie Trail” is about his journey that started in Frankfurt, crossed through Istanbul, Tehran, Kabul, and Delhi, and finished in Kathmandu, Nepal.  He travelled by bus, train, and plane, and even hitch hiked through part of the trail.  Little did Steves know that 1978 would be the last year that anyone could go on the Hippie Trail because in 1979 the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, so those two countries were too dangerous to tour.  All Rick Steves knew was that at he was up for an adventure and was ready to “catch memories like butterflies.”

   According to Steves, there are two kinds of travel; escape and reality.  Escape travel for me is to have my wife lay on a beach at the Carib Hilton in San Juan while I take long walks along the shore.  We didn’t learn anything or have any broadening experiences, we just got out of town for a week.  But now we are retired and are more interested in reality travel because we want to expose ourselves to places and people whom we would not experience at home.  Reality travel to us, for example, is to walk through the public market in Manila.  We had been to the crowded streets of Cairo and Saigon before but we only saw them from the comfort of our luxury bus.  Mingling among the sights, smells, and crowds of a major city made the experience come alive for us.  As Rick Steves wrote; “I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful.”

   There are limits as to what we are willing to endure on our reality travel trips, however.  I like not having to worry about getting a hotel room or even being concerned about where we are going to stay, so my wife and I enjoy cruising. We like taking cruises because when we get tired of the crowds and the beggars then we can just retreat to ship.  When he was on the Hippie Trail, Rick Steves was young and had no money so he ordered his hotel rooms on the fly where he had to worry about mosquitoes coming through the screen-less open windows, cockroaches on the floor, and worms in the water.  He wrote; “you have to build a hard shell around you. If things get too heavy you must be able to pull inside and mentally repel the onslaught.”  It takes a strong person to repel the heat, the dust, the beggars, and the constant stares by the locals. 

     Rick Steves also wrote: “Europe is the wading pool for world exploration and I was aching to dive into the deep end.”  My wife and I like to joke that all white people have to go to Ireland before they die because almost all white people can trace at least part of their ancestry to that island.  We wanted to stretch ourselves by visiting places that very few of our friends have been to.  Brunei, for example, where we saw a whole village built on stilts.  Paul Theroux, another famous travel writer, once said that he learned that “when everyone tells you not to go to a place then that is the place where you should visit.” My buddies told me not to go to Mexico City because they were worried about crime and the drug cartels.  Yet Mexico City was wonderful and the people could not have been more inviting.  The lesson that I had to relearn is that the most powerful travel experiences are going to places where we are not supposed to go.

   Another great quote by Rick Steves is, “You can go to your grave wearing a big barbecue apron, spending your vacations on your boat at the lake, and think that life was good for you, and not learn anything, and really think that you are the center of this planet, which is fine. I’ve just got this curiosity to get to know the rest of the world.”  He writes that “a tourist goes to shop and take a selfie.  A traveler goes to immerse himself in the culture.”  Unfortunately, my wife and I don’t have the inclination to live in a village in China, for example, for a year.  We are not going to immerse ourselves in a culture.  All that we want to do is to visit a place that is new to us so that the simple things in life can take on a fresh outlook.  For example, we have used the “squat” toilets in Asia and Africa and it makes me appreciate the “sit down” toilets that we have in the U.S.  This is just one of the simple things that we can only appreciate by traveling out of the country.

   Finally, I like reading the books by Rick Steves and Paul Theroux because they inspire me to travel to places where I have never been to before.  My wife and I have made plans to visit Japan and Australia, for example, and I really want to go to India.  One of the reasons as to why I like to travel is because a change of venues triggers different memories and emotions.  It takes me away from my problems and allows me to write about something different, although my efforts in trying to describe the sights and experiences often fall flat.  Still, it is worth the effort.  When I get back home I type all of my notes into my blog in the hope that I can inspire others to travel.