Looking for the Old Hippie Trail

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 03:00 — Anonymous At Old World Wandering, Iain Manley has
a long, worthwhile post on the classic overlander, mixing his personal
experiences as a "novice traveller" on the route with a history of the
trail's literature, from "Across Asia on the Cheap" all the way back to
the Romantics of the 1700. Here's a taste: I knew something of the old
Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in
Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks
making their way out east – "like small clans of tribesmen setting out
for a baraza or new pastures" – on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He
thought "the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of
frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee," and had
"no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose
tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American
consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation
pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?" Theroux, propped up
on his first-class berth "like a pasha," consulting Nagel's
Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, "like a Hindu widow on a
pyre, resigned to suttee," was too much of a prig to characterise the
hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the
Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did
that "somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions,
everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."
World Hum