 |
|
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.”
Thus, in interviewing only the Westerners who took part in the Hippie Trail, Tomory’s account is more of a nostalgic dialogue amongst middle-class travelers than it is a balanced social history of the movement. Still, it vividly captures the mindset of the young people who dropped all in the ’60s and ‘70 to optimistically wander across Asia.
Much like travelers today, the motivation for Hippie Trail wanderers was the allure of exotic countries (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal) and the opportunity to get away from the politicized environment of home. Unlike current travelers, there wasn’t much practical information available about Asia, or what to do when you got there. One of Tomory’s interview subjects journeyed off from England under the impression that in India “you could live in the forest, eat berries, meditate in a cave, wander around naked or do whatever you felt like and nobody would take a blind bit of notice because everyone innately understood what you were doing.” With expectations like this, it’s no wonder that the people of India were baffled and bewildered by their young Western guests.
Though the quest for Eastern spirituality is a big part of the Hippie Trail myth, Tomory writes that the movement was more about seeking freedom from the moral and social restraints of home. True to the rock-n-roll ethos of the time, the presumed availability of sex and drugs in Asia was a big travel motivation — and this naturally lent to the hipster allure. “It you were really hip — it was like being the first to wear a minidress — you went to India,” recalls one German interviewee.
With the hipster reputation, of course, came hipster pretensions. “In Kabul you saw all the people on their way back from India,” reports traveler Carmel Lyons. “The fashion was prayer shawls, the whole look, pyjamas and beads and drifting fabrics and waistcoats and bare feet and harem pants. And god, they were arrogant.”
The root of arrogance, it seems, was often money — the lack of which was seen as a sign of true travel experience and virtue. Naturally, this attitude ignored the fact that relative economic prosperity in the West was what enabled all those temporarily jobless young people to travel in the first place. Thus, Tomory notes, the Hippie Trail travelers who had money pretended not to, and legends abounded as to how cheaply one could wander across Asia. One storied Englishman is said to have hitched from Damascus to Delhi on just $6. In theory this was indeed a remarkable feat, though it infers that people happily exploited Asian hospitality in order to facilitate subcultural pissing contests. (After all, that storied hitchhiker could well have stayed an extra month in England washing dishes and traveled from Damascus to Delhi in a way that benefited local bus drivers and restaurant owners).
At the root of this traveler onedownsmanship lurked the fact that Hippie Trail travel was unavoidably difficult; dangers and sickness abounded (”Ah, Kabul,” one traveler remembers people bragging, “that’s where you found the real dysentery”). Unlike the travelers of today, travelers had to carry all their cash with them at once, and they often languished for months in flophouse hotels waiting for money transfers to come through. News from home was hard to come by, and travelers’ families often gave them up for dead (at times — far more often then than now — travelers did wind up dead). According to one of Tomory’s respondents, travelers had to contend with “traffic accidents, robbers, corrupt officials, bisexual rapists, filthy quarantine camps, Russian cholera vaccine, loss of sanity and, of course, their own penury.”
By comparison, today’s travelers — warned, wired, and ATM-ready — have it easy. Still, it would be an exaggeration to say (as many veterans of the era do) that the hippie epoch was peopled by purer, nobler travelers than we see today. Like present-day backpackers, Hippie Trail wanderers frequently stuck to traveler ghettos — often the same hotels in the same cities: Gulhane or Yener’s in Istanbul; Amir Kabir in Teheran; the whatsisname in Kabul; the Crown in Delhi; the Modern Lodge in Calcutta; the Matchbox and the Hotchpotch in Kathmandu. “Every city of the route had a budget foreigner quarter,” writes Tomory, “and everyone passed [hotel] names to everyone else.” Indeed, as exotic as the scenery was, the Hippie Trail was often a static succession of dorms, drugs, and familiar faces.
Moreover Asia may not have been in the grips of globalization during the ’60s and ’70s — but there is ample evidence that the young travelers of that era were the ones who first introduced it. By the early seventies, Bollywood had produced a hippie-themed Indian musical called Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, and travelers were reporting Jimi Hendrix-style Afro wigs for sale in the furrier’s market of Kabul. (And, for all the disdain heaped upon the pizza-n-burger menus of today’s Asian guesthouses, the anomaly of Western food in Eastern settings may well trace its origin to the likes of Siggi’s Restaurant in Kabul, which served schnitzel and potato salad for homesick hippie palates.)
Ultimately, then, Tomory’s book reveals that the Hippie Trail was not the stuff of legends, but of normal, curious, intrepid people who were making do within the travel conditions of their time. Asia has certainly changed a lot in the years since then — as has the technology that helps us travel there — but the discoveries it offers are still found on a personal level, apart from the labels that attempt to define the experience.
July 3rd, 2003 at 11:16 am
fascinating post, rolf. thanks.
July 8th, 2003 at 8:58 pm
What?
No ATM’s, no Internet cafes, no Lonely Planet guidebooks?
Yep. ‘Tis all true. I stayed in Yener’s in Istanbul in 1974 but moved over to the Gunger; it was only 65 cents a day!
But I was not traveling for spritual enlightenment, I was only looking for cheap hash.
Ah, to be 18 again…(sigh)
July 10th, 2003 at 2:42 pm
Yeah, the legend of The Hippie Trail may be exaggerated, but my trip in 1969 from Copenhagen to Kathmandu definitely influenced the rest of my life!
July 12th, 2003 at 11:49 pm
Hey Rolf,
I’m traveling in Nepal this summer…and have found myself constantly thinking and fantasizing about the old Asia Overland days… and wishing for more information and stories from that time.
Clicked into your site last evening, found the post about Tomory’s book, wandered next door from the Internet cafe to a bookstore (I’m in Pokhara), bought a used copy of it, and stayed up all night reading it.
The only other account of the hippie trail I’ve found so far is a weak, slightly veiled autobiographical novel by Dorthy Mierow called “Kathmandu, Treks, and Hippies Too.” She came here overland, joined the Peace Corp, and stayed on for 30 years until she died… seems to be a local hero in Pokhara among the Nepalis.
She includes some Nepali perspectives on the hippies, as well as how they mixed or clashed with aid workers and missionaries who had already been here.
She also brings up (which is only hinted at in Tomory’s book) the anti-American feelings during that time. I for some reason thought that this was a problem unique to my generation of American backpackers thanks to Clinton and Bush. She writes that other European backpackers and many of the nationals where they traveled would go after Americans because of the Vietnam War. In Tomory’s book, Indian’s were angry with Americans for Nixon’s support of Pakistan during the 1971-72 War, and kept asking US backpackers if they were CIA. This summer most Western backpackers and many Nepalis (even touts) feel the need to bring up the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq within about two minutes of starting a conversation.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’ve been checking the bookshops in Pokhara and Kathmandu for your Vagabonding book, but no luck yet… a few more months perhaps. I should have brought a few copies with me to start pollinating the shops here with.
July 13th, 2003 at 3:12 am
Thanks everyone for the comments. And Erik, thanks for the link to your old Hippie Trail photo gallery. Fascinating stuff. Joe, you might be interested in reading Tomory’s book, as it pretty much concurs with you that Asia travelers were seeking intoxication as much or more than enlightenment back then.
Adam — great to hear that you’re on the road this summer (and let me know if you ever do find copies of Vagabonding floating around India; I’ve started to see a few turn up in Thailand). I’ll have to keep an eye out myself for Mierow’s book. Cleo Odzer wrote a Hippie Trail memoir called Goa Freaks that is supposed to capture the self-absorbed decadence of the drug scene back then. (Though Odzer’s Patpong Sisters, which is about Thai prostitution, ranks as one of the worst books I’ve ever read — so don’t expect much from her prose.)
Indeed, Tomory didn’t deal much with how Asian locals saw the hippies — though I’m not surprised that the drug-addled Westerners didn’t always fare so well in the eyes of natives. I got the impression that one drawback of not having guidebooks was that backpackers back then had no clue about local cultural norms, so they just kind of projected their own fantasies onto the locals. And it was probably not always the best strategy to “wander around naked or do whatever you felt like” in lands that in ways were far more conservative than the lands the hippies were running away from.
As for anti-American feelings mentioned by Mierow in the Hippie Trail era, I’ve heard similar sentiments from other contemporary reports. In his anthropological study The Tourist, Dean MacCannell also talks about the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, and how American hitchhikers in Europe would scrawl “Canadian Student” on their destination cards to better their chances of getting rides. (Indeed, this isn’t the first generation American backpackers have tried the “I’m Canadian, not American” ruse!)
July 23rd, 2003 at 4:44 am
i love the traveller stories and hippie trails but just wanted to know the answer of this question…- What does one do after expierencing a long journey or travel and what does one do after returning…..the same old life…
alwayz wondered………..
July 26th, 2003 at 6:38 pm
Rolf,
Thanks for highlighting Tomory’s great book. I traveled the trail during 1968-70 and knew at least one of the contributors in the book-Jasper Newsome(although I knew him as Ram Giri-his Indian sadhu name). People like Jasper and the others like him I met then were unlike any I�ve come across since; real trail blazers on the �Hippie Trail�. I think it�s important to note that the Hippie Trail evolved out of the European Beatnik(known as the �Beats�)scene (Americans didn�t start showing up in great numbers until the late sixties) which had been traveling to Istanbul, Matala(Crete), Ibiza, Morocco since the early 60s. While many of these were part or full-time University students, others had dropped out and supported themselves with seasonal work and/or dope dealing. There were also a lot of junkies and their quest revolved of course around finding cheap dope-you could buy an ampoule of pharmaceutical morphine in India for about ten cents and the country was saturated with opium.
September 10th, 2003 at 1:56 am
Hi Rolf -
I haven’t read Tomory’s book yet, but I will order it as soon as possible. Recently, I have translated my illustrated article about The Hippie Trail into English, which might interest some of the old veterans. The address is http://www.ponty.dk/hippietr.htm
Regards from Erik Pontoppidan, Copenhagen, Denmark
(on the hippie trail in 1969)
September 25th, 2003 at 8:52 pm
I started out on the hippie trial in ‘68, got waylayed in Istanbul for over a year, and that changed the course of the rest of my life. I did eventually make it to Asia, though not in the relevant time period. I thoroughly enjoyed your photos from ‘69, Erik P. Those were amazing times. Pianoseeds
November 10th, 2003 at 12:41 pm
Hello Rolf and Others: Terrific review which prompted me to buy Tomory’s book. I’m writing a book on Afghanistan in the 20th century and am searching for 2 bits of info - any help would BE GREATLY APPREECIATED: (1). can someone tell me the history of Siggi’s in Kabul?What finally happened to it? and (2). T. Leary was arrested at Kabul Airport in Jan. 1973, coming I believe from Iran (Tomory mentions him being in Mashad). I’d love to know which airline he got off from…..Thanks. I’m a prof at Univ. of New Hampshire, USA. Please answer to mwherold@cisunix.unh.edu . Marc Herold
December 6th, 2003 at 7:18 am
Yeah it was a trip. I went from Canada to Nepal and back for about $1000,00 and I never exploited any of the locals. This trip did totally change my life but I got separated from a person name Vincent Hubert (US) in Goa. Anyone seen him???? - Lou
December 14th, 2003 at 3:24 pm
Some of my exploits where written about in this book Let Sleeping Dogs Lie page 186. I sent many Tibetan Mastiffs to every major city in the US loaded with hash. I also sent a Tibetan pony as well as Lesser Pandas and Himalyan Bears as well all loaded with the finest Nepali cream. I have written a book about my days in Nepali its called the King of Nepal. http://www.kingofnepal.net
November 5th, 2005 at 2:42 am
Hi, over to Laos & Thailand in a couple of weeks and am looking for hippie places to visit & relax for a while. Any suggestions appreciated. Alex
June 4th, 2006 at 3:16 am
I first travelled that road in 1968 - from the UK to Australia. The reverse trip in 1970 and a repeat of the first trip in 1972. All without a Lonely Planet guidebook. It wasn’t all about hippies! There were many people who were just travelling from Australia to Europe and v.v. - who looked upon the hippies as freaks who went to India to get cheap drugs. After that the trip was taken over by Magic Buses carrying people with lots of money and no sense.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Just read the book review above, and yes, guilty as charged.
I traveled out of Istanbul in ‘68 via Tehran, Kabul and ‘Pindi, ended up in the Crown Hotel Delhi.
Met a guy called Mike and we walked in Afghanistan and sat on the back of a truck grinding it’s way over the mountains in the snow on our way to Chitral in Northern Pakistan.
So many memories but so few with any reasonable focus, it would be so good to have a dialogue with similar souls in order to shed a bit more light on such a life changing experience.
Any of you out there?
January 1st, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I was going to take the Hippie Trail in 1968, but got busted in Istanbul with 30 grams of hash and spent the next five years there instead (I am called Eric in “Midnight Express, not a very good movie…). So all got is the stories of all my friends who made it to India.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
What memories come flooding back reading this site. We were not all searching for either enlightenment or drugs - some of us just wanted to travel and see something different. and it didn’t come much more different than Afghanistan in those days. The tribal lands at the top of the Khyber Pass were unforgetable and no words could really explain what it was like. And yes no mobile phones, no email no cheap flights boy did we have a good time
January 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
What memories come flooding back reading this site. We were not all searching for either enlightenment or drugs - some of us just wanted to travel and see something different. and it didn’t come much more different than Afghanistan in those days. The tribal lands at the top of the Khyber Pass were unforgetable and no words could really explain what it was like. And yes no mobile phones, no email no cheap flights boy did we have a good time
January 16th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Not all of us were druggies in search of a cheap source. 40 years later I still recall the sky in Herat, the vivid colours of the buses, the nobility and arrogance of the hill tribesmen, and the splendour of the Kyber Pass.
And for those package holiday seekers who fly in and spend time surrounded by the hotels in Ko Samui, I remember when it was just miles of empty beaches, trees full of monkeys, and the sheer pleasure of having no-one else around for weeks. To get there you didn’t fly, you took the overnight train from bangkok, shared Mekong whisky with all and sundry, got off at Surit Thani, took the bus to Bandon, and then the leaky old ferry across to the island.
I was a traveller, and for 4 years of my life I tried to understand the world I was living in.
Inevitably, that journey and the people I met, travellers and locals, changed my outlook on life in many ways.
To all I shall be eternally grateful.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am
sylvia, i wish you had left somewhere to contact you. tho there were women on the road, there werent all that many of us. contact me if you read this again. india-afghanistan-india-afghanistan and then india india india 1968-1975. I live here in india now, again. oh yes, how it changed our lives.
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Does anyone remember staying in Fire Brigade Road in Delhi about 1969?
August 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I went on the Hippie Trail in 1971. It changed my life. Years after, I still think often about it.
Part of me is still at Yerner’s and the Pudding Shop at Istanbul; Amir Kabir at Tehran,
SuperBehzad at Herat,and all of the special places of Kabul (Khyber Pass, Marco Polo, Nuristan Hotel,
Chicken Street, The 25 hour club etc.) It seems almost impossible that the trail dosen’t exist anymore
as it lives in me 37 years after. It seems so close.
Yves
August 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
You talk of a guy supposedly travelling on 6 dollars, from Delhi to Damascus, well, I travelled on 10 from Delhi to Istanbul, and that is further, unlike what you said, by stereotyping everyone you are painting a fake picture having no money, a result of not knowing exactly where you were going or for how long, a result of living spontaneously, not going to India to get into Hnduism or join the Hari what’sitsnames(?) but to have a life, in some way where you was not being told what to do by western society and its standards, where back then there was even less talk of complying to the reality that consumerism destroys the earth thart sustains us. Your portrait, I must say, most of it I don’t like because it sounds like you yourself was not there. For instance, I shied away from any talk of religion or God though I observed it well and respected it. Didn’t anyone tell you about visions and insight and enlightenment, and seers and saddhus and what it means to meet, occasionally, a real one?
Travelling on 10 dollars with the three of us meant eating hardly anything which deposited back in Europe as three very humble individuals who did not take anything for granted, having gotten used to, after the first few days, not expecting so many things in a day, like spolit western people do stuffing their faces and necks all day long, getting obese. If you want to know what high is, it’s going through things like that that make you realise exactly what it is to have and not to have.
September 8th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Cor blimey . . . . . there is a vibrancy in this thread that matches scratched graffiti on battered roadsigns at desolate road junctions on “the way” . . . wow . . . how do you reply here ?? . Bunny, when in Delhi between Nov 68 and Oct 71 i would stay on the roof of the Crown if i had money and in the temple of the Astronomy Gardens off Connaught Circus if i didn’t. If you are English, had long dark hair and travelled with a Dutch girl and maybe a kid then we met. . . Shivaan(July 23rd ‘03) what happens after returning . . . in many ways there is no coming back, if you have read mountaineer Joe Simpson “Into the Void” you will know coming down a mountain can be harder than going up. I suffered real culture shock returning after 4yrs away and have never fitted back properly into mainstream society . . . . but hey, i’ve only got into computers in the last couple of years and only in the last few weeks did it occur to me to google “overland to India”. The Danish guy has a nice page with real photos, the bus drivers, swagman tours, are interesting and fun but obviously very bus orientated. My favourite read so far has been Tony G at http://www.realtravel.com One problem for me in returning to England was in not knowing anybody who had been out of Europe, in 4 years i had been through Istanbul 5 times, i had been in North Africa and all the countries to the East and i quickly learned that i could not really communicate with anybody about these journeys. Not that i was unwilling to talk, rather that there was not any interest. Terry, in his post above mine, puts it beautifully in his last paragraph.
I got back at the end of ‘71. By winter ‘79 i realized the memories were fading, i was living on a squatted farm overlooking Loch Ness in Scotland and thought i had better try and get some of it down on paper, cos for me at least, it had been pure magic. Now Tony G’s account of the journey has inspired me to get those notes out. I am going to put them on the same site he has used, realtravel, as it seems the best place i have come across and reading the timeless posts on this thread has only given me a stronger sense of purpose to do this. I am thinking it will be fun and nostalgic and probably a glorious waste of time . . . . but, you know . . . we went travelling and we see things a bit different to those that didn’t . . . loadsa love , Paul.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I am looking for a female American called Patsy who was/is an albino. I met her in India in 1969 and we travelled a lot. I also think that those of us who travelled on the route were re-travelling re-visiting past lives as a soul memory. No more no less.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Yes,i was told by saddhu up by Kulu i had been in India in a previous life and i was born in England for a reason, can’t say it is very obvious why though. Sorry, can’t help with Patsy, good luck on the rest of the road. P.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:41 am
I did the overland trip to India with “New Frontier” in 1968. Travelled with a group of 10 in a Ford Transit. I was a very naive untravelled English girl. The trip changed my life. The group broke up in Delhi, but not wanting to go home, I wired home for money and continued on to Perth, then Dampier, Roebourne - it was the most exciting moment of my life, flying into Perth late at night, not knowing a soul. I felt immediately that Oz was the place I should be. I quickly fell in with an Aussie bloke, had two children and never went home apart from holidays. I now live in Melbourne and am trying to find any of the fellow travellers from that trip. Unfortunately I only have first names, except for the driver, Dan Smith. So Gil, Bill Betty,Sonny, anyone - would love to hear from you.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:42 am
hi
it has taken me longer to find this page than it did to travel bu ‘Budget Bus’ from Tottenham Court Road in London to Delhi in Nov 73.
Anyone else on that journey.
October 21st, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Does anyone remember that in Istanbul, there was a book at Yener’s (Or Gulhane) in which travellers wrote their comments and remarks? I wrote mine in the Fall of 1971. What happened to the book? Are there any copies that were later made as souvenirs. Also looking for a Canadian girl named Bev met at Istanbul in 1971 and seen again at Herat, Afghanistan.
Yves
October 28th, 2008 at 12:38 am
bunny Yes I stayed at fire brigade lane in 1969. My partner and I had just arrived in Delhi by
train to discover our bags had been pilfered so looking for a cheap hotel we were taken to
a private house run by a scotch drinking indian lady
by the name of Mrs Bannerje. She was quite a character sitting at a table in the driveway where
you had to pass but not before relating your days activities to her with her helpful advice as
where not to go as so and so sells hashish another buys passports another changes money on the
black market etc. Mrs Bannerjee did not charge travellers money to stay I think she either
enjoyed a procession of young people through her house or else she was on a commission from the
people she told us not to go to. I also remember her mother in law sniffing around the rooms
in case anyone was smoking ganga.
Mrs Bannerjee helped me out as being rather young and trustful I fell foul to a scam where I
parted with my travellers cheques and she advised me how to report the ‘loss’.
Years later I revisited India and took her a bottle of Johnny Walker however her daughter told
me she no longher drank as she had alzhiemers. Still I have fond memories of Mrs Bannerjee she
was like no other lady I met in India.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:03 am
It is really fascinating to hear about all of your experiences on the hippie trail! I am currently researching the hippie legacy: from Ginsberg’s agori fascination and Timothy Leary’s psychedelic manuals inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Dev Anand’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna and the Hunryalists’ new aesthetic, my paper will trace the frontiers explored by those on and off the bus.
I spent a year in Varanasi myself and am fluent in Hindi. I now am really interested in the confluence of “western” and South Asian culture in the 60s and 70s; to what extent did the hippie trail generate a cultural exchange between locals and hippies? I am also generally interested in how the “hippie mentality” (if such a thing exists!) has continued to shape the image of India in the “West”. I am particularly hoping to find anyone who was in the film Hare Rama Hare Krishna, but am also genuinely interested in anyone’s stories that might be relevant to this topic. Please continue to post your experiences or email me (hanshanbanana@hotmail.com).