On the Hippie Trail

In the spring of 1978, Rick Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher recently graduated from the University of Washington. He had spent several summers backpacking through Europe, but a deeper ambition drew him east: the "Hippie Trail," a 3,000-mile overland route from Istanbul to Kathmandu that echoed the ancient Silk Road. Hundreds of thousands of young Western backpackers had made this trek since the 1960s, yet Rick had tried and failed twice, canceling out of fear. This time he teamed up with Gene Openshaw, his high school friend and a Stanford graduate in Comparative Religious Studies. They packed minimal clothes, medicine, cameras rationed to nine shots per day, a fold-out map, and a blank journal in which Rick committed to writing a thousand words daily. That journal, forgotten for 42 years and rediscovered during the pandemic, forms the basis of the book. Rick notes that the text preserves his candid, unvarnished 23-year-old voice.

Rick met Gene at the Frankfurt airport, and on the train to Yugoslavia they spread their map and discussed what little they knew about each country ahead. A British traveler warned them about drug-framing at borders and political instability. In Belgrade, unable to afford a hotel, they slept in a parked train car that lurched into motion during the night; they leapt off in the dark, escaping with bruises but shaken by how easily they could have died.

In Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Rick's friend Svetoslav and the Tancheva family risked serious consequences to host them, hiding their luggage so neighbors would not suspect Western visitors. Rick and Gene reciprocated with smuggled gifts, including a calculator, blue jeans, and a Beatles album, worth about six weeks' Bulgarian wages. When they departed, Rick notes this was "the last oasis": Between Bulgaria and the journey's end, he knew not a soul.

In Istanbul, they boarded a bus to Tehran that proved far worse than advertised: non-reclining seats over the engine, a scarred driver Rick dubbed "the Pirate," and a backup driver who crashed through the highway median at night. Rick borrowed a crucial traveler's publication called "The BIT Guide: Overland to India" and copied it extensively. At the Turkey-Iran border, they checked their packs for planted drugs. In Tabriz, they witnessed armored riot squads preparing for unrest against the Shah, Iran's Western-backed ruler. After four nights on the bus, they reached Tehran.

Rick arrived physically wrecked, privately wondering if the trip was worth it. Gene fell ill. Lost while searching for the Pakistan embassy, they were rescued by Abbas ("Abe"), a friendly government translator who offered them refuge. Rick was struck by the gap between Abe's comfortable apartment and the poverty outside, a disparity he describes as a newly realized ethical issue about inequality within countries. Abe discussed Iran's political turmoil, supporting the Shah but conceding his days might be numbered. Once Gene recovered, they secured bus tickets east.

In Mashhad, every room was booked for a religious festival; they slept on ponchos at a campground and visited the turquoise-domed Imam Reza shrine. At the Iran-Afghanistan border, a desolate no-man's-land of abandoned vehicles, they endured five hours of customs. On the Afghan side, drivers doubled the fare; when tourists refused, one Afghan pulled a knife before a compromise was brokered. At a rest stop, Rick observed Afghan men drinking tea and smoking hashish.

Herat transformed the journey. At the best hotel in town, Rick declared the trip had "turned around wonderfully." Gene bought hashish, and Rick tried marijuana for the first time, framing the choice as culturally motivated. They explored the lantern-lit bazaar, stumbled into a hotel wedding, and rented bicycles to visit surrounding villages. An express bus then carried them across the desert to Kabul, where soldiers boarded searching for guns amid a Soviet-instigated revolution. While Gene recovered from another illness, Rick explored alone. A professor taught him that a third of the world eats with utensils, a third with chopsticks, and a third with their fingers, "and we're all civilized just the same."

The Khyber Pass crossing, which Rick describes as a top-five life experience, came next. They stopped in a tribal village to pay a toll where Pashtun tribesmen with rifles stood guard. Descending into Pakistan, they took a train to Lahore, visited the Badshahi Mosque, and learned about the violent India-Pakistan partition.

Walking across the India-Pakistan border, Rick felt overwhelming joy after three weeks of hard travel. In Amritsar, they visited the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, moved by the openness of being welcomed into its innermost sanctum. They bused through mountain switchbacks to Kashmir, settling into a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar. From the sundeck, sipping tea, Rick savored the moment he had worked toward for 25 days. They explored by shikara (a small Kashmiri gondola), rode horses to 9,000 feet, and visited a remote dwelling where a family lived completely detached from the modern world.

Flying to Delhi during India's worst monsoon in 70 years, they plunged into Old Delhi's bazaar and toured the Gandhi Museum and the Lakshmi Narayan Temple, Rick's first major Hindu temple. Determined to see village India, they bused to Jaitpur, a hamlet with no hotel, car, or English speaker, where half the village crowded into a hut to observe them. In Jaipur, they stayed as sole guests in a Maharaja's mansion and rode an elephant near the Amber Fort. In Agra, the Taj Mahal exceeded all expectations. In Varanasi, they rose at dawn and rowed past the ghats, or stepped riverfront landings, to witness bathing pilgrims and open-air cremations. Rick reflects on India's simultaneous squalor and joy, finding he can think of the country "in terms of bulk joy rather than joy per person."

Crossing into Nepal, where a bureaucrat stamped their passports at a desk in a tea shop, Rick noticed an immediate difference: Everyone smiled. He notes this was one of the world's poorest countries yet seemed proud and happy. In Pokhara, they paddled a canoe on Phewa Lake and hiked through jungle to a tropical waterfall. Flying to Kathmandu, the Hippie Trail's eastern terminus, they found a hotel on Durbar Square overlooking pagoda temples. Rick calls it "a living museum, a cultural circus, a story that doesn't need a plot." They visited the 2,000-year-old Swayambhunath Buddhist stupa, saw Kumari Devi (the "living virgin goddess," a girl sequestered from age five until puberty), and frequented the legendary hippie bakery Pie & Chai, where Rick calls his memories "pure happiness."

On their last day, from a hilltop temple overlooking Kathmandu Valley, Rick told Gene he could not remember ever being more content. He took a final walk through old Kathmandu at night, past silent pagodas and a mother singing softly to her child, and had one last slice of apple pie at Pie & Chai. In a postscript written decades later, Rick reveals that 1978 was the Hippie Trail's final summer: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 ended safe overland travel permanently. He argues the trip's essence was about a young person on the verge of adulthood getting to know the world, an experience still available today. After returning home, he let his piano students go, turned his recital hall into a lecture hall, and launched the small travel business that became his life's work.