Viking £16.99 pp292

This book reminds us that the origins of contemporary travel writing lie in the impulse of a generation of 1960s longhairs to head off for extended vacations on the Indian subcontinent. It took a decade for authors such as Bruce Chatwin to give it literary shape: the loosely structured anecdotes, the emphasis on chance encounters and a pervasive sense that the travel writer’s job is to hang out, antennae flapping, as much as to journey purposefully towards a destination. But the impetus for the new experiential approach lay in the waves of western babyboomers who embarked on the Asia overland route — the so-called “hippie trail” — from around 1965.

Their agenda included spiritual enlightenment, unlimited cheap dope and the opportunity to loiter for months in a part of the world where a backpacking “head”, in flight from the stifling routines of suburbia, could subsist for a few pence a day. By 1967, the year that the Beatles went to meditate with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, the Indian government estimated that there were 10,000 “youthful” foreigners in the country. Five years later the same number crossed the border from Pakistan in a single week, and in 1973 the French reckoned that India was where 250,000 of its citizens had taken up temporary and sometimes permanent residence.

Thirtysomething years on, much has changed. So much, in fact, that, in retracing the steps of the original hippies, Rory MacLean only has to turn up to secure the material for an absorbing, multilayered narrative. The “reeling hedonists” who journey to India today share little of their predecessors’ desire for spiritual adventure, he feels. As a consequence, few travel books are able to reflect so fruitfully on their own back story as this sweet and sour account of the most recent phase of the faltering East/West dance.

MacLean’s path is strewn with fascinating relics. In Pakistan he bumps into John Butt, the Dylan-loving, Manchester United-supporting Muslim chaplain of Cambridge University who converted to Islam while wandering in the Punjab in 1969 and who still discerns the words of the Prophet in the lines of Dylan songs such as The Gates of Eden. Hetty, a 70-year-old space cadet from Hampstead, whom he meets in Istanbul and again in Kathmandu, is a hippie throwback who firmly believes her son to be one of two reincarnations of a Tibetan Buddhist leader.

At the other extreme, MacLean encounters plenty of locals convinced that Hetty and her tribe are credulous idiots. “The myth of self-
discovery did wonders for our foreign-currency reserves,” one young Indian businessman observes acerbically. “Those gurus sold themselves with the same smart marketing that sold flower power.” Equally cynical is the British Muslim comic Ahmed – “at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” — whom MacLean falls in with at Rawalpindi station and who subjects him to a stream of politically incorrect one-liners.

Almost everybody MacLean meets is keen to add to a rich cacophony of views on the meaning of life. “The only viable, enduring philosophy now is wealth creation,” says Jim, an American oil man building the new pipeline to carry crude oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. Laleh, an embittered Iranian woman, about to be taken to live in Paris by her brother, thinks that MacLean, like all unbelieving westerners, has lost his moral compass: “Hence your dislocation and fragmentation . . . You are a cancer.”

Politically, the book tells a sorry tale. Many of the countries on the overland route have mutated from sleepy dictatorships where travellers shared joints with border guards in remote mountain passes, into vicious hotbeds of Muslim fundamentalism. Once viewed with bemused acceptance, western tourists have become a prime target for suicide bombers.

The section on war-torn Afghanistan is the darkest, and also the most surprising. MacLean offers a full inventory of horrors: two thirds of Afghan children have witnessed the killing of a relative or friend; most of the country’s art treasures have been vandalised by warlords or mullahs; Soviet butterfly mines designed to look like plastic toys have left thousands maimed; when visiting the country today, Australians are advised by their government to hire “permanent armed protection”. And so on.

But then, at an American airbase to which his flight has been diverted, the mood lightens. MacLean finds himself in a servicemen’s bar where everybody is wearing full hippie regalia and dancing to Aquarius, the 1960s anthem. Later, in the devastated city of Bamiyan, he meets Sanjar, the most optimistic character in the whole book, who has managed to build a working community-television station out of bits of discarded technology.

The most damaging development for anybody now contemplating a 4,000-mile road trip, MacLean suggests, is the detailed mapping of every stage of the journey by the pioneers. When the British couple Tony and Maureen Wheeler set off across Asia in a £65 Minivan in 1964, there were no travellers’ guides to the world east of Istanbul. Today, the Wheelers’ Lonely Planet series is the most prominent reminder that journeys into the unknown are a thing of the past. “Rather than inspirational, the travel market is now aspirational,” MacLean notes, regretfully.

The least attractive person he meets is the last, Geoff Crowther, one of the original eastern travellers turned Lonely Planet author, now holed up in Goa, where he is steadily drinking himself stupid. His memory for places shot, Crowther has turned into a sad embodiment of the adage that “if you can remember the 1960s you weren’t really there”.

This self-pitying old lush hardly supports MacLean’s persistent contention that the legacy of the 1960s “is living both in the moment and in the mind . . . striving to understand how it feels to be alive”. But after such a long and interesting journey, you’re not inclined to argue.

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Photographs and account of a young Dane’s journey from Copenhagen to Kathmandu in the late 1960s

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