Latest news with #OntheHippieTrail
Vox
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
A hippie memoir that will send you on a trek through Kathmandu
Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. To get new editions in your inbox, subscribe here . Any time I travel to a new place for which there is no Rick Steves guidebook, I feel a little cheated. Steves, with his impeccable recommendations, sensible budgeting options, and gently corny prose style, has served as the benevolent fairy godfather on more than one trip for me. So it's a treat to read his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail , and meet a Steves who is much younger and much more unsure — perhaps in need of a fairy godparent of his own. In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher who already had the travel bug. Together with a school friend, he was determined to make his way across the so-called Hippie Trail: from Istanbul to Kathmandu, an overland trek by bus and train through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences, and it's that which forms the basis of the new memoir — a young man's story, with minimal intrusions from the old one. Along the Hippie Trail, Steves got high for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned, it was 'as innocent as wine with dinner is in America.' Today, he's an advocate for legalized cannabis.) He rode an elephant in Jaipur and bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. The dreamy travel descriptions are fun, but what's loveliest in this book is to watch Steves slowly open his mind to a world that was bigger and more complicated than he ever expected. 'What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives?' he wonders. Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your mind to the world, but one of the others is reading, which allows you to brush up against the consciousness of another person, touching your mind to theirs. Here are some books to help you do just that. Here are some of the characteristics of the books of Ali Smith, who's been called Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting: sneaky serialization. (Her acclaimed seasonal quartet was linked by a tricky, easy-to-miss series of daisy chain connections.) Linguistic play. (She likes a prose poem integrated into the text and, if she can swing it, a long discussion of etymology.) A set of anti-fascist politics that is not optimistic so much as it is committed to resistance and to the resilient capabilities of art and beauty. (The seasonal quartet contained some of the earliest serious post-Brexit and post-Covid novels.) Smith's new novel, Gliff , contains all of the above, and yet it still feels new and surprising. It's simply not quite what you would expect Gliff takes place in a near-future dystopia, and it tracks two siblings with the fairy-tale names of Rose and Briar. Their bohemian parents have sheltered them from the worst of their authoritarian state, but the state takes its strange and absurd revenge. Sometime in the night, we learn through Briar's child eyes, someone comes to their house and paints a red line all around it, an opaque threat that nonetheless forces them to flee their home. Then the line comes for their camper van. It comes relentlessly, unstoppably, forcing Briar and Rose away from their parents, off the grid, into hiding, and even, eventually, away from each other. Gliff 's title comes from an old Scottish word with many meanings: It can be a short moment, a violent blow, a sudden escape, or a nonsense sound. Its companion novel is due to come out next year and is being advertised as 'a story hidden in the first novel.' It will be titled Glyph . What a treat, what an absolute delight this warm, funny novel is — which is a particular triumph because it is, in some ways, a Me Too novel. A little bit Slings & Arrows , a little bit Dorothy Parker, Mona Acts Out deals with the fraught relationship between esteemed Shakespearian actor Mona Zahid and her old mentor Milton Katz, who has been forced out of the theatrical company he founded after accusations of sexual harassment. Mona, who as she approaches middle age laments that she will soon have to stop playing Ophelia and start playing Gertrude, credits Milton with 'making' her. Yet she's never felt completely comfortable with the way Milton wielded his absolute power at their theater company, a dynamic tracked here with the nuance befitting a book that takes Shakespeare as its subject. Over the course of one disastrous Thanksgiving, Mona gets very high indeed and, little dog in tow, walks out on hosting her in-laws to ramble across Manhattan, trying to get Milton out of her head and also work out the mystery of why her hair currently looks so good. As Mona walks, she occasionally frets over the role she's currently playing: Maria in Twelfth Night , one of Shakesepeare's most sparkling comedies. Mona's playing it dark and cruel, and no one quite understands why: Isn't it supposed to be funny? With Mona Acts Out , Berlinski has pulled off the opposite feat. She's written a sharp analysis of something dark, and she's made it a pure pleasure to read. What a strange phenomenon the Disney Channel of the 2000s was: all those squeaky clean sitcoms about sweet kids with big dreams; all that ever-lurking paranoia that one of the sweet kids would pull a Britney any minute now. If you're a millennial, odds are that you spent some time with Disney Channel as your babysitter. It fed mainstream pop culture one giant pop star after another — and then, somehow, it seemed to fade away, consigned to irrelevance as abruptly and inexplicably as it became, somehow, central in its heyday. Or maybe not so inexplicably. Ashley Spencer's Disney High is a smart, rigorously reported piece of both cultural and corporate history on how a combination of luck and prescience shot the Disney Channel into the zeitgeist over the course of the 2000s, and how corporate inertia let it fall again. Few would call the work Disney built over that decade great art, but it was a hugely formative influence on the childhood and adolescence of a generation. In Disney High , Spencer shows us how it got there. Have you been following all this uproar over book blurbs? I wrote about it here. Happy Valentine's Day! LitHub has some advice from novelists on the art of the sex scene. At Harper's, climate journalist Justin Nobel tells the story of pulling his book from Simon & Schuster after the publisher was bought by a private equity firm with investments in oil and gas. Novelist Lincoln Michel makes the case that books will outlast AI. At the Paris Review, Jamieson Webster celebrates the word-drunk language play of Good Night Moon writer Margaret Wise Brown. See More:
CBC
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Rick Steves' Hippie Trail trek changed his life. The travel writer encourages others to go off the beaten path
Rick Steves never set out to be a travel guru. In the late '70s he had just graduated from university and was starting a career as a piano teacher. He felt the call of the "Hippie Trail" — an overland journey from Istanbul to Kathmandu — and set out with a friend to travel it before getting on with his new life. But something about the long, cross-border bus rides and nights spent sleeping on the floor, surrounded by amateur poets, philosophers and musicians, sucked him in. "I was entering into a world where not a single soul knew I existed and I didn't know a single soul. We had no internet, you know, and we had no safety net. Our parents couldn't come in and rescue us," Steves told The Current host Matt Galloway. He loved the journey so much that not long after, he gave up piano teaching to lead tours, write travel guides and, eventually, host his own TV show. Steves' mission has been to help travellers un-bubble wrap their trips by embracing that same adventurous spirit he first encountered on the Hippie Trail. "To this day, my colleagues and I joke that our mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando," Steves said. Steves spoke with Galloway about his new book On the Hippie Trail, detailing that first journey, and how travelling can be a force for good in the world. This is a new book, but you wrote it back in 1978. It's from your journals … What was it like to go back and read? It's some kind of freaky anthropological dig into the past. I'm looking at a 23-year-old me. I'm exactly three times that [age] right now, 69. It was me before I was a travel writer … and I was just on vacation in the summer. I have not travelled in such a footloose and fancy free way since because I've got the burden — the wonderful burden — of running my business and updating my guidebooks and leading my tours and making my TV shows. But on that trip, it was purely a chance just to get out there and get to know the world. It was travel with abandon … Celebrating the idea that you can learn more about your home and yourself sometimes by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. And I have all these kind of philosophical approaches to travel now. But back then, there was no philosophy that I knew of. I was just a green, naive kid with a few bucks in my money belt … going for the end of the rainbow, as far as hippies were concerned. And that was Kathmandu. It was 1978, which was the last year of the Hippie Trail. After that, the Shah fell and [the] Ayatollah came in and Iran became a theocracy. And the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, so the war broke out. [It's a] storm of weird circumstances that enabled me to have this book. What do you think you were looking for when you went on the trip? I wanted to broaden my world. Maybe that's it. I don't know exactly if I knew what I was looking for at the time. But I realised through my travels that the world is a big and diverse place. And I wanted to meet people that I wouldn't meet at home. And I certainly did. I wanted to rough up my ethnocentrism. I wanted to rearrange my cultural furniture. I wanted to be humbled. I wanted to be more of a citizen of the planet. We struggled with, "Are we doing the right thing? We could turn around and go back to the Greek islands and hang out with all the kids … and just party." But we wanted to experience this. And strangely, I had never been to India, but crossing the border into India after going over the Khyber Pass out of Afghanistan, it was like coming home … I just absolutely loved it. And in augmenting it with marijuana and with hanging out with people that were so interesting and philosophical and poetic and musical from all over the world, it was a dream come true trip. Do you get something more from the travel when the journey is difficult? Nowadays most of us fly from capital city to capital city. I really like going across borders. And the closer to the ground you are, the more you experience, the less money you're spending … the more you're becoming a temporary local. I like this idea of being a cultural chameleon when I cross the border. I drink and I eat what the locals are drinking and eating. I try to morph. [You said that] you can travel as a tourist, a traveller, or a pilgrim. What does it mean to be a traveller? Because I think we know what it means to be a tourist, right? Yeah, a tourist is bucket lists and frequent flyer miles and fun in the sun and just, you know, having a good time, going to Disneyland. I like that. There's no problem with that. But that's a la-la land. To be a traveller, it's to get out of your comfort zone and to learn. To me, it's an opportunity. And I think given the challenges we're confronting in the world today, I think it's important for us to travel … in a way that broadens our perspective. When we travel, I believe we realise that the world is a good place. It's filled with wonderful people, it's filled with love and [we] come home with that notion. And we can then get busy and work on the problems that we need to work on. The year that you went on the Hippie Trail was the last year that anybody could do that because of revolution and war and it changed that part of the world forever. But you say that anyone can still do this. What do you mean by that? When I think of this experience, Matt, it's not a 23-year-old Rick Steves, in 1978, travelling from Istanbul to Kathmandu. I mean, that's physically what it is. But the Hippie Trail is somebody coming of age and deciding they want to … have a broad perspective that travel can give you, and let that make their life more full and with more colours and with more options and with more depth. You can have your hippie trail experience today in 2025, man or woman, old or young, you can get out there and travel with that youthful spirit, travel with an appetite for serendipity. And when serendipity knocks, you say, "yeah."
