On the Hippie Trail, by Rick Steeves

This was a fun, quick audiobook listen — travel writer and presented Rick Steeves reading (unedited) the journal he kept in his early 20s when he and a friend went on Rick’s first major trip outside Europe. It was the late 70s, just before the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when, as long as you didn’t mind being uncomfortable, you could take a bus all the way to India — and lots of young Americans did. This is definitely a snapshot of a moment in time — Rick points out in the intro that he didn’t edit his youthful journals to try to smooth over some of his views at the time, and you definitely get the sense that he would not have used some of the same descriptors and stereotypes today as he did then when encountering people from different cultures. But even with his admittedly limited perspective at the time, you can already see in him an openness to people and experiences that would go on to make him a great travel writer. Knowing that that “hippie trail” journey would shortly become impossible due to political upheavals in the region adds to the feeling that this journal captures a fleeting slice of life that can’t be revisited, anymore than our own youth (much less adventurous than Rick Steeves’s youth, for most of us) can.