OVERLAND BEFORE THE HIPPIE TRAIL
Kathmandu and Beyond
with a Van a Man and No Plan
The “Hippie Trail” was a route followed by thousands of young people for about ten years, mostly throughout the 1970s. The route was basically from western Europe to India and Nepal, and the travelers were often searching for enlightenment or adventure. But before that, in the 1960s, others had been drawn into low-cost long-term overland journeying. My husband Mick and I became part of this amorphous group. We did not start out with the goal of getting to Asia, but the allure of continued travel pulled us in.
When we began our journey from Europe in 1965, we not only had no computers, Internet, or cell phones, we had no backpacker guidebooks. Telephones were expensive and hard to find. We had to plan weeks or months ahead to have mail sent to either Thomas Cook & Son or an American Express office, two businesses that would hold mail for travelers. We kept going as far east as possible: Japan. My memoir takes you on that journey.
A Word From The Author
In 2009 I pulled from my closet a box containing 118 letters, four journals, a daily trip log, maps, and hundreds of photographs, all from our world travels between 1965 and 1967. After combining these, I was pleased that I now had one coherent document, but the account sat silently alone until 2020. It was then while we were suddenly isolated and sheltering in place due to the Covid-19 pandemic that I decided to revise and expand that earlier manuscript, and to reflect further on our lives as travelers in the mid-1960s.