I travelled the Hippie Trail in its last year. Four decades later, where did it lead?

Mark Abley, then 22, took a break from Oxford classes and trekked across the Hippie Trail in 1978. Within a year, many of the places he and his friends visited, from Iran to Afghanistan, became inaccessible. In “Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail” he revisits his old notebooks to bring his experiences to life and reflect on the idealism and illusions of those who travelled the trail.

“We take notes,” Gustave Flaubert complained in a letter written in Egypt more than a century and a half ago. “We make journeys: emptiness! emptiness! We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, people of taste. What is the good of all that?” The French novelist wondered what had become, what would become, of “the heart, the verve, the sap.” I ask myself the same question.

Decades ago I spent a couple of nights under the stars in an Iranian border town. I was on the rooftop of the Hotel Asia, free to peer over the edge at the shopkeepers and soldiers, the stray cats and students below. They were busy with their lives; they had dreams of their own. I don’t know what they thought of the youthful Westerners smoking, chatting or dozing in the darkness overhead. Many of the travellers were keen to change the world. We would discover, sooner or later, that the world was changing us.

Shaggy-haired or clean-cut, spiritually questing or indifferent, politically radical or otherwise, we were in the midst of a journey that would affect the rest of our lives. My travelling companion Clare, for one, would spend many years as an educator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. But, as she wrote to me in 2021, “Our journey set me up for a lifetime of enjoying travel — it influenced me wanting to join Voluntary Service Overseas and I was delighted to be sent to South Asia.”

I can’t say what the future held for most of the travellers Clare and I encountered. But I know that Paul, whom we met on the train to Istanbul, became a renowned painter, one whose vision of life would be profoundly touched by Sufism. I know that Hugo, who told us of his uncanny struggles in northeastern Iran, went on to be an anthropologist and a climate activist.

My brother-in-law John, who enjoyed a distinguished career in tropical forestry, earned a doctorate in science — “but,” he told me, “the degree that best prepared me to work in international research and development projects was the degree in life and survival I gained thanks to an overland trip from London to Nepal and back.” Climbing down from the rooftop of the continent, all of us shared a mutual challenge: how to retain our idealism while discarding our illusions.

As for me, I wrote a boxful of articles and a handful of books. The first to appear in print was a work of literary travel based on a journey that required three months. Those travels took place in western Canada: I’d come to realize how little I understood about the region where I grew up. Oxford had encouraged me to swagger in my knowledge; Asia had taught me different lessons. I believed I would go back to India one day, probably to Istanbul, possibly to Kathmandu. I never did.

The impressions I gathered between Istanbul and Kathmandu abraded over time. For more than 40 years I buried my tomato-coloured notebooks in a drawer, a filing cabinet, a closet. I earned a living, as people say. I moved on. I survived a bout of cancer. And at last, a desire grew to describe what I had witnessed in Asia and, perhaps, foreseen. The journals are what made this book possible: in their absence, I could have conveyed little more than haphazard facts and hazy impressions. Nor would I have recognized my younger self.

I wish the notebooks held more verve and sap: their densely scrawled pages are the dried-up skin of experience. Rereading them has left me, just as Asia did, with questions. I’ve tried to answer some of them in these pages; I’ve tried to re-create the heart of the journey. But the most urgent questions still give me pause. Can kindness survive ideology? How can religions avoid being twisted into vehicles of hate? What are the responsibilities that come with privilege? Above all, how can cultures survive — how can people live — if they leave the natural world in ruins?

The narrator of Hermann Hesse’s “Journey to the East” never slept on the rooftop of the Hotel Asia. He never saw the Ganges or the Himalaya, never met a half-faced beggar on a Pakistani train or a young bride in Varanasi. Searching for the best way to tell his story, he stumbled: “I do not know. Already this first attempt, begun with the best intentions, leads me into the boundless and incomprehensible. I simply wanted to try to depict what I have remembered of the course of events and individual details of our journey.” It wouldn’t take long, he thought, my sweet lord.

On the afternoon we left Delhi, I bought fresh lychees and Clare bought fresh mangoes. Cows were striding purposefully through the clamorous streets. “The cows won’t be sacred tomorrow,” I wrote in my journal, “and England will seem underpopulated.”

We reached the airport in the throes of a mauve, parakeet-speckled sunset. The airport — in a few years, it would be renamed to honour Indira Gandhi — proved as busy, loud, and hot as a typical Indian railway station. I cast an eye over the magazines at a newsstand. Looking is free. The cover story in Onlooker, illustrated by a picture of a whey-faced cabinet minister, asked: “Are Tantrics Behind Janata’s Troubles?”

As we waited in line to go through Immigration, I noticed a gigantic beetle sitting motionless on a wall. Could it really be bigger than the palm of my hand? Perhaps it had just arrived in India, or perhaps it too was ready to leave. How many years you have this job to be tourist?

At midnight we boarded an Iraqi Airways plane bound for Dubai and Baghdad. Climbing the steps onto the gleaming 747, I thought we’d left Indian soil behind. But Indian soil had not left me. You wouldn’t want to know. I sat down, fastened my seatbelt, and felt something jump inside my T-shirt. A minute later I felt it again, behind my right shoulder. I reached back and grabbed hold, squeezing two folds of cloth together.

“Ew,” said Clare. “What’s that crunching noise?”

I’d killed a large cricket that had taken up residence on my skin. Hello. Hello! Goodbye.

Half the seats on the plane were occupied by Sikh men departing their homeland for jobs in the Persian Gulf. They were travelling to feed their families, I thought, not to search for enlightenment. A man across the aisle gave us his copy of the Times — a copy that was three days old. I dozed over dark lands and a sea. On a stopover in Dubai’s pale, sumptuous airport, the music spilling from the loudspeakers featured, of all things, an early Simon and Garfunkel song: words were falling like the raindrops of a restless dream; amid the silence, a vision remained …

In the wide and bright departure lounge a man in a white robe sat waiting to fly somewhere, a pink-clothed baby no older than three months on his ample lap. I changed out of my insect-sullied T-shirt and into an embroidered shirt I’d purchased in the Delhi bazaar. Who are you?

We reboarded the plane for a short flight at sunrise above the oil-oozing sea and the green marshes of Iraq, controlled by a young strongman named Saddam Hussein. A hot wind blasted our cheeks as we strolled across the tarmac into Baghdad’s airport. How do you feel about this life? The music playing in the terminal building — a mixture of Arabic and American pop — competed with a muezzin’s call to prayer. While the battle raged, through it we heard a boarding announcement for the onward flight to London Heathrow.

None of the flights were delayed. None of our luggage went missing. It was all very efficient, very straightforward. And I realized that after the nerve-racking delay at the Yugoslav border, the nighttime passage through a Turkish city under martial law, the smuggling ride from Iran into Pakistan, my physical distress in the Khyber Pass, the lack of a seat on the train and bus to Khajuraho, the slow and clogged journey from Varanasi to Nepal, the rockslides north of Kathmandu and the breakdown of the vehicle coming back, I’d been steeling myself for a disastrous climax to the trip.

No such luck. Far from enduring any last-minute turmoil or acquiring any last-ditch wisdom, I was being handed a tray of scrambled eggs and juice by a flight attendant in a blue hat.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked with a professional smile.

I looked out at the vagabond wisps of cloud floating above western Asia. The young overlanders on the move 30,000 feet below were travelling through a continent almost entirely at peace, a planet brimming with hope.

Clare was going home. Where is your home? I needed to create a home, somewhere.

Hours after we left Baghdad I stepped, heart thumping, lychee-laden, into the arrivals hall at Heathrow. It felt, by English standards, cacophonous. My face and hands were darkened by the sun. The Indian shirt fitted loosely over my lean frame. Be here now. I walked up to my girlfriend Annie. For a few moments she did not recognize me.

Excerpted from “Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail” by Mark Abley. ©2023 Mark Abley. Published by House of Anansi Press: www.houseofanansi.com

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