Floating down the hippie trail: This book tells the history of a heady time but lacks colour

While researching my book on The Beatles last year, I spent an interesting summer afternoon with British journalist and author Duncan Campbell and his former Hollywood movie star wife Julie Christie at their East End apartment in London discussing the counterculture of the sixties among Western youth and what made him chuck an Ogilvy & Mather copywriter’s job nearly half a century ago to hit the hippie trail in India. For Duncan, eager to get away from the tedium of creating ad campaigns to sell more bread, much of the attraction of hitting the road was not knowing what really awaited him on the trail. Julie, who discovered India much later, had backpacked anonymously across Latin America as an escape from her movie career and felt that drugs was a vital component of the sixties counterculture.

Duncan’s adventures as a hippie across India and onwards to Nepal, coinciding as it did with the Bangladesh War, saw him cross the border with foreign correspondents to kickstart his career as a journalist. It also provided him with material for a gripping crime thriller The Paradise Trail written decades later about the procession of fascinating if somewhat dubious characters he met on his travels. The plot is considerably spiced by a serial hippie killer who leaves a bloody trail of ritualistic murders. Many more years later, the tall affable journalist recalled his time as a hippie with some irony but also fond nostalgia for his first engagement with India and the region – a relationship that would deepen for him and later his wife over the years. In any case the hippie trail had been a welcome departure from his advertising copydesk where he informed me with a grin he was replaced by a certain Salman Rushdie.

On the road

The Hippie Trail by Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland with its somewhat jerky narrative and dry matter of fact style certainly does not have the colour and atmosphere of Duncan Campbell’s crime thriller. However it is perhaps the first systematic effort to put together a history of the hippie phenomenon and their journey from the West to the East. As professional historians of modern Western communities and their culture, the authors have bolstered their work with impressive research, based on extensive interviews with hundreds of those who had hit the trail and recounted their experiences and motivations.

Right at the outset, Gemie and Ireland pinpoint the two main triggers of the cultural odyssey across the continents. The first is the functional but nevertheless crucial emergence of the overland coach service that started in the late fifties, becoming a regular feature by the mid-sixties, that brought young men and women at reasonable cost and in relative comfort and security from Western capitals to distant destinations in the East through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan into India and beyond to Nepal. The second factor propelling the hippies was a novel vision of travel inspired by Jack Kerouac’s iconic paean On the Road that celebrated the spiritual dimensions of being on the move.

The nudge of narcotics

These beginnings also explain the end of the hippie trail in the early eighties, marked by the Iranian Revolution and then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that dramatically sealed off the overland route for thousands of starry-eyed young people seeking peace and happiness in exotic Asian climes. At the same time, the eighties, with the advent of the Reagan-Thatcher political era, also marked the fading away of social turmoil among the youth for a less material and better world sparked by the sixties counterculture. All of a sudden, Kerouac’s vision of the road was not so appealing.

The book dispassionately examines the various motives of those who traversed the Hippie trail and their different experiences on the road. It is clear from the interviews that dope, gurus or just a sense of adventure – separately or in combination – provided the push for those who took to the trail. Yet there is little doubt that narcotics and hard drugs provided perhaps the strongest lure of all. Indeed sometimes encountering drugs was the trigger for a spiritual experience as one interviewee Jasper Newcome confessed. He had initially been put off by Hinduism as “comic and childish” but after imbibing from a clay pipe of cannabis found the idols inside the temple “quite sublime and expressive of a deep human yearning”. It is also a fact that a common factor linking the vast chain of small hotels and rest houses that were the abodes of hippies on the trail from Turkey to Kathmandu were dealers and outlets ensuring a steady supply of a variety of drugs.

Unfulfilled dreams

Although quite a few of those interviewed admitted that they had bad experiences on the trail or had made mistakes, the authors found that an overwhelming majority remembered their weeks or months on the trail with fondness as precious moments of freedom from restraints and conventions back home. These memories were also tinged with sadness at the puncturing of their youthful optimism and the failure in the end to live up to their hopes of a better, more meaningful life.

A surprising omission in the book is the lack of acknowledgement of the role played by The Beatles and how their fascinating journey to India in 1968 inspired many more of the younger generation to undertake a similar spiritual quest, turning the earlier steady stream of hippies into a much larger influx from the late sixties onwards. This, despite the authors mentioning the band in several places, even quoting John Lennon describing the sixties counterculture as a “minority experience’.

Nevertheless this is a commendable effort and a valuable addition to the large number of books and films on the life and times of the hippies.

The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, Aleph Book Company.