OVERLAND BEFORE THE HIPPIE TRAIL
Kathmandu and Beyond with
a Van a Man and No Plan
Little did they know that their trip would turn into a two-year odyssey in which they would be out of contact with family for months at a time while dodging a cholera epidemic in Iraq, meeting a maharaja in India, sleeping in a palace in Pakistan, and floating down the Mekong River in Laos. The journey would become a way of life, one in which they are increasingly aware that the world, though large and varied, is filled with welcoming people who share a sense of curiosity and openness.
What Readers Are Saying
Can you imagine travelling for two years without a credit card, cell phone or internet connection? Travelling over 40,000 miles, across Europe and Asia, without an itinerary, a guidebook or a plan? Patricia Sullivan and her husband did this while carrying all they own in a duffel bag, an attaché case and a small suitcase. At the end of two years, she still had a smile for everyone she met, a fascination with how other people lived and her marriage was stronger than ever.
Sullivan has something to tell us about the 1960s, about the nature of travel, about the peoples of the world, about what it means to be American and, ultimately, what it means to be human.
Sharif Gemie, author of The Hippie Trail: A History
Patricia Sullivan recounts in touching detail an epic round-the-world trip with her husband Mick through Western Europe and across the Asian continent. In an era predating the “hippie trail” of the late 1960s, their spontaneous, unplanned journey—via boat, train, van, and sundry other means of transportation—immerses the reader in a world that in many cases no longer exists due to the ravages of war and the resulting destruction of cultural monuments and ways of life.
Donna M. Brinton,
author/consultant
Patricia Sullivan writes about a world that is still unbelievably huge in its differences of geography and tradition. At the very beginning of our ultra-modern era the continuing seeds of awful political schism are there. And yet, the sensitive humility with which she describes her experience helps us to see that we can all connect through our deeply common humanity.
Adrian Holliday, author of Intercultural Communication & Ideology and Contesting Grand Narratives of The Intercultural
In her memoir Overland Before the Hippie Trail, Patricia Sullivan gives us an endearing, fascinating account of traveling the world on the cheap in the 1960s. She and her husband, newlyweds in their twenties, set out from San Francisco with little more than a plan to visit Europe, buy a van, and maybe pick up some teaching work along the way. They end up instead on a two-year journey that takes them from Europe to the Middle East to Asia as early pioneers on the Hippie Trail, stopping here and there in places that today seem at once impossibly remote but also hauntingly familiar. A charming and intimate story of a bygone era of travel.
George Bishop, Jr., author of The Night of the Comet