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Rick Steves – on the hippie trail
Wednesday, 5 February 2025
There’s hardly a better known travel name in the USA than Rick Steves, whether it’s for his travel guidebooks, the European tours he leads or his regular television appearance. So it’s a pleasant surprise to encounter another younger Rick Steves and I contributed a cover blurb for his new book Rick Steves on the hippie trail:
• We all know Rick Steves as the much-loved Europe expert, but here’s an earlier incarnation: Rick as the long-haired shoestring traveler thumbing a ride on that epic counter-cultural voyage of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the hippie trail. And what a trip he had!
His publisher’s description reports: In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied ‘Hippie Trail’ from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year-old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
This book contains edited selections from Rick’s journal and travel photos with a 45-years-later preface and postscript reflecting on how the journey changed his life. Stow away with Rick Steves on the adventure of a lifetime through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Rick Steves is one of America’s best loved travel writers. Now discover the adventure that started him on that journey.
Rick’s trek along the hippie trail was in 1978, six years after Maureen and I made our own hippie trail trip, and Rick made the trip with consummate timing, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the Ayatollah’s arrival in Iran were about to bring that amazing route crashing disastrously to an end. There were no hippie trail trekkers by the end of the 1970s.

Apart from travelling with superb timing Rick did something else terrific, he kept a thousand-word-a-day diary of his trip, and here it is 45-years-later, the hippie trail exactly as he experienced it.
I’ve blogged about Rick’s writing before – check my books of 2009 blog for a mention of his book Travel as a Political Act which even features such un-American activity as travelling to Iran and Cuba and enjoying it. And of course there’s somebody else who made a once-in-a-lifetime trip and didn’t publish a book about it until over 40 years later. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic 1933-34 walk from London to Istanbul didn’t emerge as his wonderful book A Time of Gifts until 1977.
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