Anyone else for India?” calls the driver of the Mercedes bus outside Victoria coach station in London. In Istanbul, three American students wait for a train, wearing Moroccan djellabas, playing flutes. Across the Bosphorus, two London girls in long, flowing dresses raise their thumbs to catch a ride east.
In the back of an ex-British Army Bedford, a dozen overlanders squint ahead through the heat and dust at the shimmering Iranian desert.
In Nepal, a planeful of barefoot travellers cheer as dawn breaks over the Himalayas, casting a shadow across the clouds.
In the 1960s and 70s, in flares and open-toed sandals, hundreds of thousands of young westerners headed out of Europe, hitching, driving, bumming lifts to the East. Few could afford to fly; most went overland, crossing Asia alone or in small groups, by whichever mode of transport suited their budget, their whim, their state of mind. Their trips transformed their lives and unleashed forces that for ever changed the way we travel the world.
For many, Jack Kerouac kick-started their journey, his soul stripped naked, his body hungry for release, “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time”, as he wrote in On the Road. Behind him was Allen Ginsberg, famously chanting his poem Howl on the BBC, about “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection”. This new generation of energetic, hungry souls had abandoned their parents’ kingdom come of postponed pleasure to seize the living, transient world. As Tom Wolfe wrote, their footloose decade unfolded with a feeling “out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing”, a feeling that it was “very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world”.
These were ordinary kids who faced almost no unemployment, who feared no hunger, who had the chance to imagine a world without boundaries. As Dylan sang, the times they were a-changin’. In their search for a new way of living, the utopian revolutionaries looked to Asia, to Buddhism and Hinduism, for a more humane and ancient creed.
Verona Bass, the eldest daughter of a South African maize farmer, escaped strait-laced Afrikaans society and in 1967 set out from London for India, feeling invincible: “My friend Nancy and I had met every Saturday afternoon for a year at the Odeon, planning our getaway. We felt there was something exotic in the air, something inevitable making us choose to go east.” In 1968, Tony Wheeler decided to cross Asia after his apprenticeship at Rootes cars in the Midlands. Rootes had modified a Hillman Hunter for the Daily Express London-Sydney marathon. On its front seat lay an open map of Iran. Wheeler was captivated by the swathes of desert and unfamiliar place names: Isfahan, Shiraz, Bam. “People were going to all sorts of places back then, just as they are today, but the Asia overland route was definitely the trip with the biggest buzz.” That route followed much of the old silk road across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan into India. Along its dusty length motored a procession of the weirdest and most unroadworthy vehicles ever to roll and rock across the face of the Earth.
Wheeler and his wife, Maureen, drove a £65 mini van. A Californian named Curt Gibbs hitchhiked to Nepal in a succession of dilapidated lorries, a 2CV and a VW Kombi. Like many other travellers, Verona Bass went east by coach. Her fried-out transport, nicknamed the Blunderbus, departed London three weeks late because of its state of disrepair. Rudy Trippe, a 24-year-old Cornishman, bought a tatty school bus that he planned to drive solo and sell in Pakistan. “I got to the Maidstone bypass and the brakes caught fire. ‘How far are you going in this thing?’ the fireman asked. I told him Lahore. He said, ‘You won’t reach Southend.’”
Trippe reached Istanbul, where he noticed that other independent drivers were carrying passengers further east. “I thought, ‘Just a minute, never mind selling the blinking vehicle. I’ll fill it to the gunwales with freaks: $25 to Tehran, $50 to Kabul.’ I realised then we were the first generation to really go travelling. We didn’t have to go to war. We were lucky. So damn lucky.” The old bus ended up making the 7,500-mile trip between the UK and India 26 times.
The number of young men and women who followed the overland trail between 1962 and 1979, sleeping in orchards under the stars, shaking snakes out of their sleeping bags, will never be known. The Indian government guessed there were 10,000 “youthful” foreigners in the country in 1967. Five years later, when the Beatles’ sojourn in Rishikesh had popularised the route, that same number arrived weekly in India. In Varanasi I recently met an old hippie who estimated that close to 2m travellers had, like him, reached the subcontinent by land. Their spine-jarring passage planted the seeds of Turkish tourism, reaffirmed the concept of travel as education and set the precedent for gap years.
But it also attracted the attention of rip-off artists and passport thieves. Curries were made with dog meat, hashish cut with horse manure. People were robbed and raped. According to the late writer Bruce Chatwin, the travellers may have hastened Afghanistan’s descent into anarchy. The peace-loving hippies influenced Afghans in their ready embrace of Marxism, paving the way for the Soviet invasion. Equally, the casual morality of the young westerners could only have insulted and enraged traditionalists in Iran, stirring a zealous Islamic reawakening.
Until then, the lucky generation coasted over troubles. Joan Rippe left California after college, extending her journey eastwards from Europe as her curiosity and confidence grew. “I felt completely intimidated at every turn, often lonely, but absolutely thrilled by the experience.” In 1978 she took a break from the trail to work with Bell Helicopter in Iran.
In those days the Shah wanted his country to embrace western values and forsake religion for consumerism. When the Islamic revolution began, Rippe was airlifted to safety, though not before helping to save another American traveller. Erik Bengtson had been on the road for over seven years, leaving the States the day Nixon resigned and returning when Reagan was shot. In January 1979 he called Rippe from a telephone box in the middle of a Tehran riot. “Get out,” she told him, hearing gunfire over the line. “Get out now.” Later that same year, the trail was firmly closed by adolescent Revolutionary Guardsmen waving their Kalashnikovs, chasing the last western buses out of Iran.
What happened to flower power? Today, Verona Bass lives in Bath, a poet and an environmentalist who tries not to doubt that All You Need Is Love. Tony Wheeler, who created the travel-guide company Lonely Planet, teaches new generations to move through the world with confidence. Joan Rippe manages a Santa Cruz construction firm and indulges a passion for belly-dancing learnt in Tehran. Curt Gibbs was inspired to run a website promoting carless travel in Los Angeles.
Chris Weeks, who stopped driving overland for the travel company Intertrek when it folded, retrained as an antique-furniture restorer and now lives in Somerset. “I loved almost every minute of being an expedition leader. It changed my whole outlook on life,” he says, remembering an exceptional time. “But I saw that most people in the West have not got a clue about how the Third World lives: the deprivation, the corruption, the lack of medical care and water. Really, what life is about.” Rippe confirms: “Doing the trail was possibly the best thing I ever did for myself. I came home better equipped to understand multicultural issues. I gained an appreciation for Islam and Arab cultures.”
A western passport, once respected, is now a liability in much of the Middle East. No sane tourist holidays in Mosul or Kandahar. Many of the countries the travellers passed through are now political minefields. Only 30 years ago in Goa, Curt Gibbs took part in an extraordinary Christmas-cum-Hanukkah-cum-Diwali feast. His travels had taught him to be self-reliant anywhere in the world, and to eat when hungry.
Two Englishwomen he had met in Corfu, Janet Dubury and Jean Wilson from Burnley, invited him to join a holiday meal under the palm trees for 30 or 40 independent travellers, all of whom had reached India on the hippie trail. At the end of the day, full of home-cooked chicken and ersatz plum pudding, they all raised their glasses to toast the dream of a better world. “Goa was a paradise in those days,” he recalls. “We’d found a little piece of heaven. We didn’t realise then that our actions would be remembered long after we were gone.”
The overland travellers were baby boomers, turning 19 or 20, questioning and rebelling like the world itself. They came of age during a period of political and social revolution, in parallel with the space race, in step with the banishing of borders by Boeing and of pregnancy by the pill. The concurrence of individual lives with historic events convinced many of them that by changing themselves they could change the planet. They sang love songs and never doubted the reach of their grasp.
They set out to find a new way of living, hitching alone to West Bank kibbutzes, drifting through Afghanistan, welcomed as honoured guests in Baghdad. Their journeys did change the world, but in ways that none of them could ever have imagined.
