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Any Port in a Storm :: Compass Points :: Asia :: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
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AuthorTopic: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail (Read 1,829 times)
kerouac2
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Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Thread Started on Mar 18, 2009, 6:10am »		[Quote]
This site has gathered quite a bit of information about the trip that was so popular in the 1970's.

There is also a collective period photo album of many of the sights along the way.

Some things don't look the way you'd expect, like the Khyber Restaurant in Kabul.
[image]
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #1 on Mar 18, 2009, 11:15am »		[Quote]
Kabul was a cosmopolitan place K2. It even had a zoo. But they had a cocker spaniel in the tiger cage.
I did the trip as a child and a teenager twice. We weren't hippies though.

The trail had been 'discovered' long before hippies came into existence. My father did it so many times on/in so many different vehicles I don't even know how many exactly. His first trip was in '55. He just liked it.
I remember once doing it in an old black Mercedes 170D and once in a VW beetle convertible. When we left Iran in a hurry in March '79 it was to Karachi in a VW van.
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #2 on Mar 18, 2009, 6:49pm »		[Quote]
Oh...I would have loved to have done this trail. I was never a hippie though.
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #3 on Feb 1, 2010, 5:28pm »		[Quote]
I did the post-Afghan War version in 1996, with 9 relative strangers in a converted bus that was old enough to have carried hippies. Would love to do it again in more congenial company. Would love it even better if I could go through Afghanistan.
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #4 on Feb 1, 2010, 6:57pm »		[Quote]
A couple of months ago I read an interesting book called Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India by Rory MacLean. The author re-did the trip that had been made by lots of people in the 1960s and 1970s. He even finds a few leftovers still living along the way -- either in Turkey or in India. What is amazing from today's perspective is that many of the young people left England with practically no money -- a few pounds and made it all the way to India.

HW, you have led an interesting life -- leaving Iran in a hurry in a VW in 1979!
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #5 on Feb 1, 2010, 10:50pm »		[Quote]

Feb 1, 2010, 6:57pm, bjd wrote:
A couple of months ago I read an interesting book called Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India by Rory MacLean. The author re-did the trip that had been made by lots of people in the 1960s and 1970s. He even finds a few leftovers still living along the way -- either in Turkey or in India. What is amazing from today's perspective is that many of the young people left England with practically no money -- a few pounds and made it all the way to India.

HW, you have led an interesting life -- leaving Iran in a hurry in a VW in 1979!

I read the book as well and was utterly fascinated by it however,didn't you find that it was very much like the guy was trying too hard to somehow bring back a by gone era to the point of seeming as Bixa would say,"get a generation"?
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #6 on Feb 2, 2010, 8:10am »		[Quote]

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HW, you have led an interesting life -- leaving Iran in a hurry in a VW in 1979!

LOL! Yes, we left I think just after the Shah left, I'm not sure Khomeini had returned. Must have been in the beginning of March because I remember we celebrated my 15th birthday (there! Now you all know my age ;)) with Crimean sparkling wine on an Aeroflot plane bound for Kuala Lumpur. My father returned to Bushehr on the Persian Gulf and stayed until October '79 when it wasn't safe enough anymore. But even then he drove the VW back to Germany and in December, just before Christmas he picked us up at Frankfurt airport and it was snowing and the van was full of presents!

I know we picked up quite a few young people on the route on other trips in the region but one stands out in particular. He was a young Englishman wearing a union jack jeans/jacket combination. He just had a bedroll and what we'd now call a daypack. We picked him up just outside Yazd, us boys shared a room with him in Bam and I remember we complained to my father about the foul smelling stuff he was smoking, he just laughed.

[image]

After Bam we got our Pakistan visas in Zahedan and then came the practcally blind drive through the desert until we hit Pakistan. The Englishman stayed with us all through Quetta, Sukkur and Multan until we got to Lahore and my father dropped him off at the railway station because of course he was India- bound. I think we missed him because he was a busker of sorts and know card tricks and stuff like that. We continued up to Murray and Abbotabad and eventually ended up in the Swat Valley (after we'd tried going to Chitral but the VW couldn't make it) that was so peaceful and green nobody would have predicted it would turn into a war zone 30+ years later.

We returned to Iran through Afghanistan on that trip and the next place we saw the kind of green that we'd seen in the Swat Valley was the rice growing area on the Caspian Sea.

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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #7 on Feb 2, 2010, 8:23am »		[Quote]
Interesting story, HW! That's the kind of stuff you'll always remember.

Casimira, I didn't get the impression that MacLean was trying to "get a generation". I do think he rather admired all those hippies, bus drivers and others who did the trip. When we see how paranoid everybody is now about going anywhere ("I'm looking for a safe hostel in Paris"), it's quite something that young people just went off and trusted to their luck and chance encounters like the Englishman picked up by HW's family.
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deyana
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #8 on Feb 2, 2010, 6:40pm »		[Quote]
So interesting. I knew a couple who did a similar trail (by van), they did this several years back. They were a Canadian couple , and their trip started in the UK and ended in India, where they finally got married.

Yes, I'd just love to do it too. Spindrift, if you are serious about this, maybe we could somehow arrange it some time in the future? I imagine it could be tricky in certain parts of the route, but man, what an experience it would be!
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #9 on Feb 2, 2010, 6:50pm »		[Quote]
I would have haved loved to see Bam before it was destroyed by the earthquake.

I have not yet given up hope on doing an endless overland trip like that once I have stopped working. The roads are still open in all of those countries north of Afghanistan.
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #10 on Feb 2, 2010, 6:54pm »		[Quote]
Kerouac, if you ever do that trip and you wouldn't mind me tagging along, just let me know. I would really like to do something like this. I've wanted to ever since my friends told me about their own adventure.

p.s. I speak one of the vital languages, so I might even be of some help. :)
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #11 on Feb 4, 2010, 6:12pm »		[Quote]
How much do you charge?
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #12 on Feb 4, 2010, 10:16pm »		[Quote]
I'm up for it too....how many have we got now?
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #13 on Feb 4, 2010, 10:22pm »		[Quote]
I'm sure I've mentioned it before but Maurice (my trekking companion) and I are looking for several intrepid travellers to join our trek into Western Tibet, round and about Mount Kailash and then the gorges of ancient Guge. We'd start in Kathmandu, fly to Simikot, trek with ponies to the Tibetan border and then continue in 4WDs.... It's the ancient pilgrim route up from India into Tibet.... It is a long and hacking journey, no grumbling allowed and obtains one great merit in this or the next life.
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Re: Istanbul to India overland - The Hippie Trail
« Reply #14 on Feb 5, 2010, 12:27am »		[Quote]

Feb 4, 2010, 6:12pm, kerouac2 wrote:
How much do you charge?


I was about to ask you the same thing. :)

Spindrift, that's me, you and Kerouac, anyone else who like to join us and risk life and limb on this amazing adventure, please sign on the dotted line ------------> ........................
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