Overland Travel
“Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon-shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.”
Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari, 2004
Famous Overland Routes
The Hippie Trail
On his way into Tehran, Paul Theroux bribed his way into a cabin with “a large bald Turk” named Sadik. “It was Sadik who pointed out to me that the hippies were doomed,” Theroux later wrote. “They dressed like wild Indians, he said, but basically they were middle-class Americans. They didn’t understand baksheesh, and because they were always holding tight to their money and expecting to scrounge food and hospitality they would always lose.”
Time, I think, has proved Sadik wrong. The hippies emerged from the baby boomers, from a socio-economic moment peculiar to the West, when there was a safety net of well-to-do parents, easy jobs and welfare at home. They were never doomed, they just grew up, but their spurt of vibrant, iconoclastic counterculture gave the West a way of seeing India at least as pervasive as the British Raj, and established backpacking as an industry. The original Hippie Trail is closed, but young people have continued to travel east of Suez, without worrying about baksheesh, and for better or worse they have been welcomed. They travel cheaply, and some scrounge where they can, but most don’t need to: in India and Nepal, on Southeast Asia’s Banana Pancake Trail, and elsewhere, a sprawl of guest houses, restaurants and markets has been set up to cater to their penny-pinching needs. Many choose to adopt aspects of a hippie identity, but they do so with the wisdom and perhaps the cynicism of hindsight. They do not expect to change the world, and know that they too must grow up, but without the idealism of the sixties and seventies, all that is left to them is debauchery, clothing, and a narrow view of Asia.
Read the full article: Vestiges of the Hippie Trail
