Hippie Trail - Guides and Travelogues

Guides and Travelogues

The BIT Guide, recounting collective experiences and reproduced at a fairly low-cost, produced the early duplicated stapled-together "foolscap bundle" with a pink cover providing information for travellers and updated by those already on the road, warned of pitfalls and places to see and stay. The BIT information was often reproduced, without credit, by the later well-known commercial guides. The first BIT Guide was produced by the BIT Information & Help Service in London in 1970. The BIT guide reached its peak under the control of Geoff Crowther, who arrived at BIT in 1972, which continued on to 1980 when the last BIT guide was published with a finishing quote "Unlike all the previous editions which have been dragged screaming from various seedy West London basements on the crest of eviction orders, this one was put together in a semi-derelict, Morning Glory-covered, former banana shed in the depths of the rainforest in New South Wales, Australia. This time it's taken three months to put together but then its twice the size and, there's no electricity here and half of everyday is spent keeping lantana, groundsel, leeches, land mullets and 6ft-plus pythons at bay, it's not altogether surprising".

The 1971 edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (The Last Whole Earth Catalog) devoted page 302 to the Overland Guide to Nepal. The guidebook company Lonely Planet got its birth when its founders published writings from their overland trip, driving from the UK to Australia. Tony Wheeler, the creator of the Lonely Planet guidebooks made in his early days a publication on the hippie trail called "Across Asia On The Cheap" (1973). He made this 94-page pamphlet of travel experiences gained by crossing Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Iran from London in an Austin minivan they bought for $130. After having travelled through these regions, they sold the van in Afghanistan and continued on a succession of chicken buses, third-class trains and long-distance trucks. They crossed Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and arrived nine months later in Sydney with a combined 27 cents in their pockets. (Prior to the publication of Across Asia on the Cheap many travelers used the 375-page Student Guide to Asia by David Jenkins, which covered 24 countries.)

Paul Theroux wrote a classic account of the route in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Two more recent travel books — The Wrong Way Home (1999) by Peter Moore and Magic Bus (2008) by Rory Maclean — also retrace the original hippie trail.