For Americans of a certain age and income bracket, Europe is synonymous with Rick Steves, a one-man travel impresario whose guidebooks and tour groups have introduced the continent to thousands of newcomers. Before he became his own brand, Steves was just another scruffy backpacker abroad, an experience he recounts in On the Hippie Trail, a new book that follows his travels across India and Central Asia in the 1970s.
Most youthful trips start with a burst of excitement, and On the Hippie Trail’s opening chapters bring to mind A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s classic account of his teenage journey across Europe in the 1930s, and an obvious literary antecedent. The parallels between the two books go beyond their diaristic formats and exotic settings. Both are glimpses into worlds that were already fading from view as the authors embarked on their journeys.
When Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, he slept under hayricks, encountered barons, peasants, and stolid German burghers, and even palled around with an apprentice chimneysweep. This was a final tour of premodern Europe before World War II, a land of agrarian villages, horse-drawn carts, and grand estates. Steves got to experience something similar in the 1970s, when a few adventurous souls from Europe and the United States pioneered a route that ran overland from Istanbul to the holy cities of India.
Like A Time of Gifts, Steves’s book is based on his original travel diary, and to his credit, he seems to have understood he was experiencing something special. “It was like entering a time-passed world,” he writes of visiting an isolated valley in Kashmir. “Not a trace of the 20th century could be found, nor the 19th or 18th.” Today, Iran and Afghanistan are almost inaccessible to Westerners, while generations of travelers have thoroughly demystified India. Steves’s journey took place just before globalization, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would close the fabled hippie trail forever.
Even without the political upheavals of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the route Steves followed was fated to change sooner or later. Although Central Asia and India were difficult to get to in Steves’s youth, a trickle of Western thrill-seekers had already reshaped local behavior. Across Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Steves and his travel companion, Gene, meet with peddlers, taxi drivers, and scammers who had readily adapted themselves to the hippie trail’s strange economy. In Kashmir, the owner of a houseboat-for-rent proudly shows Steves a handwritten journal of glowing reviews from previous American visitors, a Yelp page avant la lettre. Throughout the trip, Steves keeps bumping into the same few backpackers, a hint that the hippie trail was perhaps a bit less wide open than we might imagine. Then as now, Western expats tend to stick together, even when they’ve traveled halfway across the world to encounter the exotic ‘other’.
By the time he’s arrived at the houseboat, a succession of sleepless nights has caused Steves to forgo rough living in favor of more comfortable accommodations. At one point, he compares his pampered existence to the life of a British colonial bureaucrat. For many Western travelers, the lure of the hippie trail went beyond adventure, spiritualism, or a fascination with the exotic. It was also a chance to live beyond their means and enjoy some unearned privileges. The same could be said today of Americans living abroad in Budapest, Bangkok, or Mexico City.
There are more tourists today than at any point in human history, but the era On the Hippie Trail chronicles marked the closing of a travel frontier. Slowly but surely, Western media and commerce have penetrated to the farthest reaches of the globe. When Steves was backpacking around Central Asia, Coca-Cola had made it even to Afghanistan. Today, modern communications technology, the internet, and social media have followed.
Contra boomer optimism, this hasn’t made us all open and tolerant, nor revealed that culture, custom, and religion are superficial differences to be bridged over a meal or a gram of hashish. People often have an instrumental relationship with technology. They will use the tools at their disposal, but aren’t necessarily interested in the society that produced their phone or their computer (or their gun or Stinger missile). The Islamic world’s incurious approach to technology was keenly observed by V.S. Naipaul, who traveled Central Asia in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, just a few years after Steves visited Tehran. As Naipaul would have predicted, the internet age has not inaugurated an era of peace and mutual understanding, but it has made just about every corner of the world more accessible, and perhaps less interesting.
Steves, who approaches foreign societies with a benign but vague curiosity, seems to think that cross-cultural understanding is merely a matter of goodwill. Fermor, whose encounters with other cultures were far more immersive, knew better. He threw himself into learning foreign languages and arcane facts about ancient migration patterns not just out of genuine curiosity, but because he understood that such things still matter a great deal.
One of Steves’s tips for Americans traveling abroad is to speak English slowly and deliberately when talking to waiters, hotel managers, and locals. It’s good advice, but the progression from Fermor, who picked up German while traveling Central Europe and eagerly experimented with Hungarian and Romanian as his journey continued, to Steves’s simplified dialect of backpacker English, to younger tourists, who typically communicate via algorithm, is quietly depressing. The decline in language mirrors a broader decline in cultural curiosity. One well-documented consequence of tourism is how readily locals adapt to the wants and desires of deep-pocketed visitors. Lord Byron’s travels in Greece inspired generations of English travelers to follow suit, who in turn spurred the creation of the Greek tourist industry. The Banana Pancake Trail across Southeast Asia, a latter-day successor to Steves’s old stomping grounds, takes its name from the culinary preferences of Western backpackers. The teenage Rick Steves couldn’t help but notice that earlier generations of hippies had done more than trekked across Central Asia. They’d created new economies and travel subcultures in their wake.
If the polyglot, multitalented Fermor is the traveler we wish we could be, Steves is the traveler we might reasonably aspire to emulate: adventurous and fairly curious about foreign cultures, but often befuddled by strange languages and interested in creature comforts. But what happens to travel in a post-Rick Steves world? Thanks in part to his efforts, Europe has become more accessible than ever to tourists, and other international destinations aren’t far behind. Steves himself has warned of the baleful consequences of social media tourism on certain iconic locales, which are in danger of becoming little more than expensive backdrops for the Instagram set.
Certain younger travelers clearly think they’re following in Fermor and Steves’ footsteps. One character who comes to mind is the British microcelebrity Miles Routledge, better known by the online nom de plume Lord Miles. Miles certainly travels widely. He owes his first burst of fame to getting stuck in Afghanistan during the chaos of the American withdrawal. At present, it seems that he’s being detained by the Saudi Arabian government. But travel to Lord Miles is a kind of performance for social media (or perhaps, if recent headlines are to be believed, a way to scam online betting markets). Miles would likely insist that he’s today’s answer to Fermor, Rebecca West, Robert Byron, and a host of other great British travel writers. His actual output is not all that different from someone posing obnoxiously in front of the Eiffel Tower for the perfect photo. And in that sense, he is the current generation’s travel guru.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
