Hippie trail


The hippie trail is the name given to the overland journey taken by members of the hippie subculture and others from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s between Europe and South Asia, mainly through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. The hippie trail was a form of alternative tourism, and one of the key elements was travelling as cheaply as possible, mainly to extend the length of time away from home. The term "hippie" became current in the mid-to-late 1960s; "beatnik" was the previous term from the later 1950s.
In every major stop of the hippie trail, there were hotels, restaurants and cafés for Westerners, who networked with each other as they travelled east and west. The hippies tended to interact more with the local population than traditional sightseers did.
The hippie trail largely ended in the late 1970s after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closed the route to Western travelers.

Routes

Journeys would typically start from cities in western Europe, often London, Copenhagen, West Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, or Milan. Many from the United States took Icelandic Airlines to Luxembourg. Most journeys passed through Istanbul, where routes divided. The usual northern route passed through Tehran, Herat, Kandahar, Kabul, Peshawar and Lahore on to India, Nepal and Southeast Asia. An alternative route was from Turkey via Syria, Jordan, and Iraq to Iran and Afghanistan. All travellers had to cross through the Khyber Pass, traversing Peshawar and Lahore in Pakistan and over the Pakistan-India border at Ganda Singh Wala. Common destinations in the eaqst included Delhi, Varanasi, Goa, Bombay, Kathmandu and Bangkok. Kathmandu still has a road, Jhochhen Tole, nicknamed Freak Street in commemoration of the many thousands of hippies who passed through. Further travel to southern India, Kovalam beach in Trivandrum, to Sri Lanka, and points east and south to Australia was sometimes also undertaken.
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Methods of travel

In order to keep costs low, journeys were carried out by hitchhiking, or cheap, private buses that travelled the route. There were also trains that travelled part of the way, particularly across Eastern Europe through Turkey and to Tehran or east to Mashhad, Iran. From these cities, public or private transportation could then be obtained for the rest of the trip. The bulk of travellers were Western Europeans, North Americans, Australians, and Japanese. Ideas and experiences were exchanged in well-known hostels, hotels, and other gathering spots along the way, such as Yener's Café and The Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Sigi's on Chicken Street in Kabul or the Amir Kabir in Tehran. Many used backpacks and, while the majority were young, older people and families occasionally travelled the route. A number drove the entire distance.
Hippies tended to travel light, seeking to pick up and go wherever the action was at any time. Hippies did not worry about money, hotel reservations or other such standard travel planning. A derivative of this style of travel were the hippie trucks and buses, hand-crafted mobile houses built on a truck or bus chassis to facilitate a nomadic lifestyle. Some of these mobile homes were quite elaborate, with beds, toilets, showers and cooking facilities.

Decline of the trail

The hippie trail came to an end in the late 1970s with political changes in previously hospitable countries. In 1979, both the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closed the overland route to Western travelers. The Yom Kippur War also put in place strict visa restrictions for Western citizens in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War had already broken out in 1975, and Chitral and Kashmir became less inviting due to tensions in the area.
Locals also became increasingly weary of Western travelers – notably in the region between Kabul and Peshawar, where residents became increasingly frightened and repulsed by unkempt hippies who were drawn to the region for its famed opium and wild cannabis. Travel organizers Sundowners and Topdeck pioneered a route through Baluchistan. Topdeck continued its trips throughout the Iran–Iraq War and later conflicts, but took its last trip in 1998.
From the mid 2000s, the route has again become somewhat feasible, but continuing conflict and tensions in Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan mean the route is much more difficult and risky to negotiate than in its heyday. In September 2007, Ozbus embarked upon a short-lived service between London and Sydney over the route of the hippie trail, and commercial trips are now offered between Europe and Asia, bypassing Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, by going through Nepal and China to the old Silk Road.

Guides and travelogues

The BIT Guide, recounting collective experiences and reproduced at a fairly low cost, produced the early duplicated stapled-together "foolscap bundle" with a pink cover providing information for travelers and updated by those on the road, warning of pitfalls and places to see and stay. BIT, under Geoff Crowther, lasted from 1972 until the last edition in 1980. The 1971 edition of The Whole Earth Catalog devoted a page to the "Overland Guide to Nepal." In 1973 Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen Wheeler, the creators of the Lonely Planet guidebooks, produced a publication about the hippie trail called Across Asia On The Cheap. They wrote this 94-page pamphlet based upon travel experiences gained by crossing Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Iran from London in a minivan. After having traveled through these regions, they sold the van in Afghanistan and continued on a succession of chicken buses, third-class trains and long-distance trucks. They crossed Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and arrived nine months later in Sydney with a combined 27 cents in their pockets.
Paul Theroux wrote a classic account of the route in The Great Railway Bazaar. Two more recent travel books — The Wrong Way Home by Peter Moore and Magic Bus by Rory Maclean — also retrace the original hippie trail.

In popular culture

The 1981 song "Down Under" by Australian rock band Men at Work sets out with a scene on the hippie trail while under the influence of marijuana:
The Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil" appears to reference the dangers of traveling along the Hippie Trail in the 1960s, in the lines "And I laid traps for troubadours / Who get killed before they reached Bombay."
Asia Minor, a song by the band Horses that was covered by Bob Weir and Kingfish, is about travelling the Hippie Trail.