On the hippie trail Istanbul to Kathmandu and the making of a travel writer

TV host and guidebook writer Steves (Travel as a Political Act) delivers a diverting if underbaked account of his 1978 journey across Asia and Eastern Europe. After college, Steves and his friend, Gene Openshaw, embarked on a trip from Germany to India, with stops in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal. Most of the book consists of entries from Steves's diary, which recount his and Openshaw's experiences hitching rides, visiting museums, and marveling at the wide variety of living conditions they encountered. The timing of their trip predated major political developments in the region, including the shah of Iran's downfall and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, lending the entries an occasionally fascinating, frozen-in-time quality. While Steves mostly achieves his goal of presenting "candid, unvarnished snapshots" of his travels, readers may wish he offered more contemporary reflections on his decades-old observations. Without the added value of hindsight, the sometimes-monotonous entries can feel dashed-off and incomplete--even when one takes the book's brief, reflective epilogue into account. Though Steves's fans may take pleasure in these raw reflections, others will shrug. Photos. (Feb.)

Popular and prolific travel guide author Steves resurrects his travel journal from 1978, when he and his friend Gene Openshaw decide to backpack along an overland trek called the Hippie Trail that became a well-worn route during the 1960s. It traces the Silk Road from Europe to Istanbul, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal and ends in Kathmandu. Steves's journal is condensed and finessed. The author was 23 at the time of writing and displays some of the cultural insensitivity of his age. He writes, for example, about a time he photographed a cremation ritual in India, which upset local people. Readers may see some of Steves's assumptions throughout the book as examples of white male entitlement, whereas others may admire his candor. A highlight of the book is his raw, sensory impressions. VERDICT Steves's journal offers a window into time, before travel through the greater Middle East became vastly more complicated. Recommended for Steves's fans and armchair travelers.--Barrie Olmstead

The well-known TV traveler recounts a sentimental education. Born a few years too late to have been a classic hippie, Steves nonetheless threw his backpack on and, with an old friend, hit the "Hippie Trail"--a congeries of roads and railroad lines leading across Europe to India--in 1978. This book is built on a journal he kept along the way, one that he forgot until, "stuck at home during the pandemic, I stumbled across it." Known for decades for amiable PBS travelogues, Steves shows that the young longhair is the father of the man: All of his evenhandedness, generosity, and curiosity are in evidence from the minute he jumps his first train from Frankfurt to Yugoslavia. That's to say nothing of his resourcefulness, which sometimes involves finessing the rules: In then-Communist Bulgaria, he buys a ticket as far as Sofia but travels on to Plovdiv, convincing the annoyed conductor that he missed his stop. "Relishing my role as the stupid American tourist," Steves writes, "I really played it up." The pals brave Turkish highways with a driver they call the Pirate, cross into Iran and Afghanistan, and make it to India, having survived sketchy lodgings and any number of questionable foods. "What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives?" he wonders. The answers are many: One old gentleman whom Steves meets in Kabul observes that a third of the world eats with forks, a third with chopsticks, and a third with their hands, "and we're all civilized just the same." It's a perfect sentiment for this gentle book, which is very much a young man's, with little bits of purple if not purple-haze prose ("Following this magical procession, we wandered through a timeless village floating in a wonderworld") punctuating the narrative. A pleasure for travel buffs, especially those who once plied the Hippie Trail--or wish they had. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.