Rick Steves: On the Hippie Trail
Travel writer recounts his 1978 overland journey from Istanbul to Kathmandu at age 23, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal.
Why we picked this
Steves made this journey in 1978, through countries that have since become unreachable — the account carries a documentary weight beyond ordinary travel writing.
In 1978, Rick Steves was twenty-three years old and set out overland from Istanbul to Kathmandu along what travelers then called the Hippie Trail — a route through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal that has since been closed off by decades of political upheaval and conflict. The journey he’s recounting is therefore also a portrait of a world that no longer exists, at least not in the form he encountered it.
Steves has spent the intervening decades becoming the best-known American travel writer and broadcaster working in the European tradition: methodical, deeply researched, and consistently interested in travel as a form of education rather than escape. On the Hippie Trail applies that sensibility retrospectively to a younger, less experienced version of himself making his way through misadventures across some of the most consequential countries on earth.
The Chicago Humanities Festival event at Francis W. Parker School is an opportunity to hear Steves work through what that trip meant then and what it looks like now, as personal history and as a window into a political geography that the intervening years have transformed almost beyond recognition.