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In 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, travel writer and Edmonds local Rick Steves found himself in an unusual place: stuck at home. House-bound, Steves embarked on a different kind of journey: an anthropological dig into his own past. He’d stumbled upon a long-forgotten journal he’d kept during his 1978 adventure on the famed Hippie Trail — a 3,000-mile trek from Istanbul to Kathmandu.
In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher, newly graduated from the University of Washington with a history degree. He’d felt the call of the Hippie Trail for two years and finally — with his buddy Gene Openshaw — answered the call, booked the tickets, packed rucksacks, bought a fold-out map of the entire route, tossed in a hard-bound empty journal, and set out on the adventure of a lifetime.
The curated, transcribed journal entries — along with gorgeous color photographs chronicling this journey — are the heart of Steves’ On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.” The 60,000 words that fill the journal are the musings of a 23-year-old on the verge of adulthood, getting to know the world. He takes readers through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal, inviting them along with him as he jumps off a moving train, makes friends in Tehran, gets lost in Lahore, gets high for the first time in Herat, battles leeches in Pokhara, and much more.
In the wake of this adventure, upon returning home, Steves made a decision that changed the trajectory of his life: He turned his piano recital hall into a lecture hall and began a small travel business.
More than entertaining readers with colorful stories of Steves’ adventures and misadventures, On The Hippie Trail captures the spirit of what makes travel enriching: a broadened perspective and the sense of being at home in the world. It is this spirit that still animates Rick Steves and his travel teaching today.
Steves graciously answered some questions about On the Hippie Trail” with My Neighborhood News Network arts columnist Elizabeth Murray.

Elizabeth Murray (EM): You had long forgotten the journal from your Hippie Trail adventure until you stumbled across it during the pandemic. How does it differ from other books you’ve written?
Rick Steves (RS): This book was written before I was a travel writer. I was a piano teacher on 4th and Main in Edmonds, and I had 50 students. I wanted to be a piano teacher all my life. My students would not practice in the summer, so I thought, “I’m not going to fight that; I’m going to Europe.” Every year, I went to Europe. I went there for a few years and thought, that’s my springboard. Now, I want to go beyond Europe.

I dreamed of going to India on the Hippie Trail. The Hippie Trail was a big deal back in the ’70s. The Beatles went to India to visit with the Maharishi, and all of us backpackers dreamed of taking that Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. I wrote this book for myself. It’s my 60,000-word journal, and I also happened to shoot a lot of photographs that turned out beautiful. It was the last year the Hippie Trail was open to the public because after 1978, the Shah fell, and the Ayatollah came in, turning Iran into a theocracy, and you couldn’t travel through there. And then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and you couldn’t travel through there. I wrote this book as a 23-year-old kid, and I wrote it diligently every day, taking detailed notes and telling the story as it unfolded. When I got home, life swept it away, and it ended up in a box. I didn’t look at it until COVID, and I realized, wow, this is quite the intimate, detailed, candid, unvarnished, very honest and not politically correct account of this amazing trip. It was a coming-of-age trip of a lifetime. We just went east until we got to Kathmandu, and the stories that unfolded were amazing. As I read the journal, I thought, boy, this needs to be shared.
EM: What were some things you had forgotten about your trip that came rushing back as you read through your journal?
RS: How we kept wondering, “Should we just bail out of this and go back to Greece and have a good time at the beach with all the other tourists?” Over time, you remember the good things, and you forget the bad things. Gene, my partner, was sick most of the time. It was exhausting. It was scary, but we wanted to keep going, and when we crossed the border into India, strangely, it felt like we were coming home. It’s the most interesting thing, but there were a lot of intimate details in the book that I had forgotten about. When I read the journal, I go, “Oh yeah, I remember, on that airplane ride, you could look through the toilet and you could see the rice paddies below.” That’s pretty cool. You had a hole right from the toilet down under the fields. This [trip] was the first time I ever smoked marijuana, and I treated it kind of like losing my virginity. I didn’t want to just do it. I wanted to do it where it felt right, and when I read the journal, it was also fantastical. I’m not even sure where I was high and where I wasn’t. I mean, there’s these black, demonic leeches coming at me, head over tail, slow and steady; I’d step back, and they’d keep coming at me, wanting to suck my blood. It was pretty dramatic, the way I wrote it up there under an herbal essence waterfall high in a jungle in Nepal. And I thought, “Was it really that dramatic, or was I just having enhanced the experience with a little of the local ganja?” I don’t know. The trip wasn’t just a trip to smoke marijuana; it was about freedom, and part of that was this opportunity to join all the hippies in that ritual.

EM: You mentioned forgetting a lot of the trip. What have you not forgotten; what has stayed with you since then?
RS: The trip planted the seeds of the more aware traveler I would become. You can travel as a tourist, as a traveler and as a pilgrim, and I like to remind people you can mix it all together. The road can be a playground, a school, a church or synagogue, or mosque. There were moments on the trip where I was learning things that are fundamental. We are not the norm. I thought we were the norm. “People who sit on a toilet are the norm.” No, most of the world does not sit on a toilet when it goes to the bathroom. That’s the norm. “People who use spoons and forks, well, of course, that’s the norm.” No, a professor in Istanbul sat me down and said, “Join me at lunch.” He said, “I’m a professor here in Afghanistan. I want you to know that a third of the world eats with spoons and forks like you, a third of the world eats with chopsticks, and a third of the world eats with their fingers like me, and we’re all civilized just the same.” Whoa. There is a lesson, and that was what stuck with me. The fact is, I thought less of him because he ate with his fingers, and the reality is we’re all civilized, just the same. That’s a beautiful revelation you get when you get out of your comfort zone and travel.
EM: You like to say that “meeting locals carbonates your travel experience.” How did that happen on this trip?
RS: Well, you don’t just want to take pictures of people. You want to meet them. You want to step up. I saw a bunch of women walking down the street with big bales of hay on their heads. I step up, say, “hi,” stay and talk a little bit, and then offer to help carry their hay. So I got to put the hay on my head and walk with them. I’m just a clown. That was fun. They still remember me, and I still remember them. Another kid was thrashing hay behind an ox pulling this machine made out of wood that crunches up the hay. So I, in an entertaining, fun-loving way, said, “Can I do it for you?” He let me. I did his work. And he just probably still remembers that crazy American who wanted to thresh the hay for him. Those are the moments that stick with you. We were staying in a Maharaja’s palace in India. There’s this impoverished nobility, the Maharaja, they’ve got these big palaces, but they’ve got no money and a rundown car. They’d make some money by renting it out to tourists. So Gene and I would rent a room there, and there’d be two of us in the whole place with five servants. So we’d get to know the servants, and they’d be standing around swatting flies and bringing us more milk. To get to know them and to run around town with them in a rickshaw. It helps you connect. The mark of a good traveler is how many people you meet.

EM: You’ve said that India is your favorite country, which might surprise people who know you as a European travel expert. Why is India so close to your heart?
RS: I like India because it wallops my ethnocentrism. It rearranges my cultural furniture. It humbles my self-assuredness when it comes to how things are done. I love this notion that you can learn more about your home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. And I love this notion that culture shock is a good thing. It’s not something you want to avoid. Culture shock is constructive. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective. It needs to be curated. And that’s what I like to do now as a travel teacher and a travel writer, is help curate culture shock, not to help people avoid it. India is full of culture shock. That’s what India is all about: culture shock. If you are attracted to culture shock, if you see it as a positive thing, it’s a great destination.
EM: What was something shocking about India on this trip?
RS: India has a whole different approach to fundamental things that I thought I understood, like music. I was a piano teacher back then. I knew Mozart, I knew Beethoven, but then I went to India, and the music sounded like a bunch of garbage. And then I realized, wait a minute, that music is just as sophisticated and beautiful as this other music, I just don’t understand it. I know what meter is, cut time, waltz time, four, four time. There’s no meter in Indian music. I know what mode is. This is major; it’s happy. This is minor; it’s sad. That doesn’t quite apply to Indian music. So you get music without mode and without meter, and it’s beautiful to recognize. This is a whole musical frontier that doesn’t even get let in the door.
Another shock was time; I thought I knew what time was because, in my culture, we treat time like money. The way we talk about it, we invest it, we save it, we waste it, we spend it. That’s what we do with time. For us, time is money. And you go to India, and time is not money. Time is like bubble gum — just play with it. That’s an adjustment for a traveler. It can get you in a bad mood when people don’t respect the value of time, and then [you realize] you’re being ethnocentric.

EM: Those are good lessons. What about the trip inspired you to start your travel company when you returned?
RS: I was afraid to go to India and canceled my trip to India a couple of years before I finally had the nerve to do it. Before that trip, I had a chance to take a class from a guy who had done the Hippie Trail at the University of Washington Experimental College. I went to this class with 20 other backpackers. [The teacher] was terrible. He didn’t care about our experience. He didn’t organize his information. He had first-hand experience. We needed it, and he didn’t share it at all. It really angered me. This was wrong. He had the information; we had the opportunity for the trip of a lifetime, and he didn’t share any of it. It illustrated, to me, the value of good travel teaching. Then, when I did the hippie trail, there was almost no information available on the road. Everybody was just asking each other, “What’s it like? What’s going to happen?” So, it gave me a good appreciation for the importance of travel information and the importance of a teacher who is thoughtful about it. That’s what we are at my company right here in Edmonds, where we employ 100 people. We are mission-driven about the importance of good travel information to help people turn their travel dreams into a smooth and affordable reality. I just love that, and I’m very thankful for it. I’m thankful for the lousy teacher at the UW Experimental College who taught me a class that was a total waste.
Ever since, I’ve been a fanatic about taking seriously this opportunity to let people learn from my experience and have a better trip. I get to go every year, and I started doing what I do at Rick Steves Europe because other people don’t get to go every year. They scrimp, and they save, and they get to go once. Maybe in another decade, they’ll make another trip. A little information can make all the difference in somebody’s travels. At my company, we say content is king. We’re passionate about having TV shows that are not just entertaining but that are informational and inspiring. We’re passionate about writing guidebooks that help people learn from our experience rather than their own to travel better. I’m passionate about doing tours that capitalize on our experience so people can have a more rewarding and experience-filled vacation in Europe. It’s so fun for me. I’m thankful for my niche, and I never get tired of teaching it. It’s so fun to share this whole “On the Hippie Trail” experience because that was [my niche] in its very rough, organic origins.
Two upcoming author talks are available for readers who want to hear more from Steves about “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.”
7 p.m., Feb. 25, Third Place Books,17171 Bothell Way N.E. #A101, Lake Forest Park. Tickets here for $33 (admission includes a copy of the book).
7:30 p.m., Feb. 26, Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., Seattle. Tickets here for a suggested $15 donation, and you can add the book to your order.
Elizabeth Murray is a freelance writer thankful to call Edmonds home. When she’s not busy wrangling her two kids (and husband), you can find her playing ukulele. She can be reached at elmm22@gmail.com.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for your fun interview and thank you, Rick Steves, for finding and sharing your travel business origin story! I can wait to read your new book. I am sure I will lost in the experience of that trip with you as I read it!