There is a certain irony in maintaining a travel weblog: to regularly update it means, well, that you aren’t really traveling very far from your computer. A look at my last three months of vagablogging entries would imply that this has recently been the case for me. Indeed, here in Ranong, my main task has been writing my second book (as well as a few magazine articles), and — this being a computer-based activity — it’s been easy for me to keep current with my blog.

In a matter of days, however, I will leave Thailand for France, where (in addition to teaching a travel-writing class at the Paris American Academy) I hope to wander that beautiful corner of Europe with random abandon. I intend to have plenty of interesting new experiences, but I don’t plan on sequestering myself into French Internet cafes to report those experiences as they happen. Hence, this weblog will probably be silent for a few weeks. I’ll resume my entries in August, with after-the-fact news from France, new vagabonding advice, and more news and quotations about travel.

In the meantime feel free to browse through my old online stories and photos, ponder various bits of travel advice, catch up on travel quotations, read musings from my life in Asia and beyond, follow my recent American book tour, surf my interviews with a variety of travel writers, chat about travel with other vagabonders, and check out (and interact with) my new book.

I’ll be back and blogging with new news come August. Until then, happy vagabonding!

“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties or ease it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it.”
–Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

For independent travelers just now beginning to travel in Asia, the legendary overland “Hippie Trail” of the ’60s and ’70s is a natural source of fascination and envy. Unlike today’s Lonely Planet-toting backpackers, the counterculture wanderers of the hippie era pioneered their Asian routes by word-of-mouth and trial-and-error. Hence, in indie travel terms, Hippie Trail travelers are to present day backpackers what the Ancient Greeks were to the Ancient Romans: larger-than-life legends, who once wandered a wilder world.

Legends can exaggerate, however — and that’s why it’s nice to have a book like David Tomory’s A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, an oral history that sheds a personal, realistic light on the Hippie Trail. In interviewing 35 people who once wandered the roads between Istanbul and Kathmandu, Tomory reveals the complexities within the travel culture of this era. After all, the Hippie Trail wasn’t the first independent travel phenomenon in modern Asia; it was the first mass independent travel phenomenon in modern Asia. And, like any mass movement, the Hippie Trail was defined as much by its reputation as its reality.

Thus, while hippie-era wanderers were creative, intrepid pioneers in a certain sense, they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding. In short, they had the same charms and weaknesses as any self-conscious, authenticity-seeking counterculture movement of the last half-century — including the travel-hipsters of today. Behind the pretensions of the “movement”, however, were real travelers, having private, inspiring, life-changing experiences — and that’s what Tomory’s book best reveals.

Before I get into the narrative details of A Season in Heaven, I might point out that the book represents a purely Western-slanted look at the Hippie Trail. Asian locals at the time — while friendly enough — were not known to have been terribly impressed with hippie seekers: Indian writer Gita Mehta has referred to the Hippie Trail as “that long line of loonies”, and V.S. Naipaul wrote off hippie fascination with Hinduism as a “sentimental wallow”. Western expatriates and Asia-experts living along the Hippie Trail at the time were just as sardonic — and the New York Times had reported as early as 1968 that “Laos has grown disenchanted with the flower power folk, Thailand will not let them in without a haircut, and Japan now requires a bond of $250 as proof of financial stability.”

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“My fear had nothing to do with the actual French people. What scared me was the idea of French people I’d gotten from movies and situation comedies. When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it’s always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that’s confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we’re done.”
–David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)

“Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to be independent of any other community or polis. Not even the Athenians were able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, is dependency. By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up with a flowering empire held together by naval power and commerce — an empire that, even as it appeared to enhance Athenian might, ate away at Athenian independence and autarky. Master and slave, it turned out, were bound together by mutual insufficiency.

“The characteristic thing about Paris is not so much the extent — though that is vast — as the overwhelming variety of its reputation. It has become so overlaid with successive plasterings of paste and proclamation that it has come to resemble those rotten old houses one sometimes sees during their demolition, whose crumbling frame of walls is only held together by the solid strata of wallpapers.

“What, after all these years, can we say about Paris? There is a word, ‘bogus’, which I have heard used a great deal with various and often inconsistent implications. It seems to me that this scrap of jargon, in every gradation of meaning, every innuendo, every allusion and perversion and ‘bluff’ it is capable of bearing, gives a very adequate expression of the essence of modern Paris.

“Paris is bogus in its lack of genuine nationality. No one can feel a foreigner in Monte Carlo, but Paris is cosmopolitan in the diametrically opposite sense, that it makes everyone a foreigner.”
–Evelyn Waugh, Labels (1930)