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Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail
A poet and journalist looks back on a remarkable journey from Turkey to Nepal in 1978, when the region was on the brink of massive transformation.
In the spring of 1978, at age twenty-two, Mark Abley put aside his studies at Oxford and set off with a friend on a three-month trek across the celebrated Hippie Trail — a sprawling route between Europe and South Asia, peppered with Western bohemians and vagabonds. It was a time when the Shah of Iran still reigned supreme, Afghanistan lay at peace, and city streets from Turkey to India teemed with unrest. Within a year, many of the places he visited would become inaccessible to foreign travellers.
Drawing from the tattered notebooks he filled as a youthful wanderer, Abley brings his kaleidoscope of experiences back to life with vivid dancing in a Turkish disco, clambering across a glacier in Kashmir, travelling by train among Baluchi tribesmen who smuggled kitchen appliances over international borders. He also reflects on the impact of the Hippie Trail and the illusions of those who journeyed along it. The lively immediacy of Abley’s journals combined with the measured wisdom of his mature, contemporary voice provides rich insight, bringing vibrant witness and historical perspective to this beautifully written portrait of a region during a time of irrevocable change.
In the spring of 1978, at age twenty-two, Mark Abley put aside his studies at Oxford and set off with a friend on a three-month trek across the celebrated Hippie Trail — a sprawling route between Europe and South Asia, peppered with Western bohemians and vagabonds. It was a time when the Shah of Iran still reigned supreme, Afghanistan lay at peace, and city streets from Turkey to India teemed with unrest. Within a year, many of the places he visited would become inaccessible to foreign travellers.
Drawing from the tattered notebooks he filled as a youthful wanderer, Abley brings his kaleidoscope of experiences back to life with vivid dancing in a Turkish disco, clambering across a glacier in Kashmir, travelling by train among Baluchi tribesmen who smuggled kitchen appliances over international borders. He also reflects on the impact of the Hippie Trail and the illusions of those who journeyed along it. The lively immediacy of Abley’s journals combined with the measured wisdom of his mature, contemporary voice provides rich insight, bringing vibrant witness and historical perspective to this beautifully written portrait of a region during a time of irrevocable change.
287 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 7, 2023
14 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
Mark Abley
22 books25 followersMark Abley is a Rhodes Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a husband and a father of two. He grew up in Western Canada, spent several years in England, and has lived in the Montreal area since the early 1980s. His first love was poetry, and he has published four collections. But he is best known for his many books of nonfiction, notably Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind.
His new book, Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, describes his travels across west and south Asia in the spring of 1978. Mark kept detailed journals during his three-month journey, allowing him to recreate his experiences from the standpoint of a much older man.
In 2022 Mark was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Saskatchewan for his contributions to the literary community.
His new book, Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, describes his travels across west and south Asia in the spring of 1978. Mark kept detailed journals during his three-month journey, allowing him to recreate his experiences from the standpoint of a much older man.
In 2022 Mark was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Saskatchewan for his contributions to the literary community.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
October 19, 2023
Not sure why I didn't enjoy this even more, as it checked so many of my boxes - India/Pakistan/Nepal, travel in the pre-"Lonely Planet" late '70s when places like Kabul, Tehran and Kashmir were still tourist/hippy havens - but for some reason it was just a solid "liked it" but little more. I think it may have been a combination of the author's somnambulant self-narration and the fact that he is a professional poet, and so wrote in a considerably more artsy style than someone like the hard-edged and deeply funny Dervla Murphy (who covered much of the same territory).
Still, an interesting and informative listen. I particularly liked his now-nostalgic coverage of Srinagar's Dal Lake in all its former houseboat glory, and his time in Amritsar and the Golden Temple. In fact, I found this latter section so interesting that I also borrowed Sikhs: A Story of a People, Their Faith and Culture from our library, hoping it was one of DK's "for younger reader" books where I could get a nice overview of the religion and its history in 72 pages. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the 324-page "for grownups" version, so will spend the next few days looking at pictures and reading captions, but skipping much of the (I'm sure excellent) text, as it wasn't that interesting.
Still, an interesting and informative listen. I particularly liked his now-nostalgic coverage of Srinagar's Dal Lake in all its former houseboat glory, and his time in Amritsar and the Golden Temple. In fact, I found this latter section so interesting that I also borrowed Sikhs: A Story of a People, Their Faith and Culture from our library, hoping it was one of DK's "for younger reader" books where I could get a nice overview of the religion and its history in 72 pages. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the 324-page "for grownups" version, so will spend the next few days looking at pictures and reading captions, but skipping much of the (I'm sure excellent) text, as it wasn't that interesting.
January 31, 2023
4.5 thank you to House of Anansai Press for the ARC!
I genuinely really enjoyed this! As a student who, if I had the means to travel for three months, would have a vastly different experience in the regions Mark and Clare got to visit, it’s fascinating to merge Mark’s POV with eastern literature and historical accounts of political and environmental changes in the past 40 years. Anyways, give it a read when it comes out:)
I genuinely really enjoyed this! As a student who, if I had the means to travel for three months, would have a vastly different experience in the regions Mark and Clare got to visit, it’s fascinating to merge Mark’s POV with eastern literature and historical accounts of political and environmental changes in the past 40 years. Anyways, give it a read when it comes out:)
April 15, 2023
A very enjoyable read & highly recommended for anyone who has travelled the ‘hippy trail’ between Europe & Kathmandu, or vice versa, between the mid- 60s & the early 80s. I first made this trip from Kathmandu to London on an organised Overland tour in 1970, when Afghanistan was at peace under a king, & the Islamic Revolution against the regime of the Shah of Iran was still 8 years in the future. When I returned as a tour leader, about 18 months after Mark Abley’s journey, things had changed. Afghanistan had closed its borders, Iran was dysfunctional under the embryonic Islamic regime. The route I followed, through the deserts of Iran & Baluchistan, via Bam, Zahedan to Quetta was much the same as Mark, except we had our own bus. The American hostages had been taken just a few days before we left London - we thought it would be over by the time we reached Iran’s borders & we had been given just 4 days to cross the country from Turkey to Pakistan. Many of Mark’s thoughts & experiences I can relate to. As Mark points out, not all travellers on the hippy trail were heading east to get high. The sights and experiences were unique & on looking back I feel privileged to have been able to travel on a number of Overlands during that period. The population of all that area of Asia has more than doubled - we thought it was bad enough in the ‘70s. Earthquakes, war & political divisions have changed these countries irreparably & it is from descriptive books like Mark’s that the reader can experience sights, the thoughts & feelings of these ‘halcyon’ days of international travel.
May 25, 2023
4.5 stars
May 26, 2023
I travelled the Hippie Trail at the same time as the author. Only I went overland from Bangkok to Istanbul. His thoughtful, fascinating retelling of his journey encouraged me to dig out my old journals and like him find a young woman that at times I found hard to recognize. I am so glad I read his book.
March 26, 2025
I gave it 50 pages before deciding to DNF. I loved the idea of this memoir, about traveling in Asia in the late 70’s before all the revolutions and religious extremism exploded in the region. However, Abley structured the book so oddly. It was like he had discovered a stranger’s journals and decided to mash them together with some wikipedia level facts about the places visited. It seemed so removed and flat, the story.
Another thing that struck me was his sense of embarrassment about how naive he had been back in the seventies, how privileged and unaware of other cultures. The constant viewing of his younger self through twenty-first century eyes took me out of the memoir. It read like an apology. It was odd. That’s great he has grown and developed over the years. However, the way he went about noting it was awkward.
Life is too short to waste time reading poorly written books.
Another thing that struck me was his sense of embarrassment about how naive he had been back in the seventies, how privileged and unaware of other cultures. The constant viewing of his younger self through twenty-first century eyes took me out of the memoir. It read like an apology. It was odd. That’s great he has grown and developed over the years. However, the way he went about noting it was awkward.
Life is too short to waste time reading poorly written books.
June 4, 2024
A pair of well-behaved young Oxford students on a 3-month overland tour from London through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal in the spring of 1978, a journey through liminal spaces in a liminal time, recaptured and reinterpreted 45 years later - offering layered reflections on the people, the time, and the places.
The book’s title promises a story of adventures from “Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail”, but the author and his companion are definitively not hippies. They are not in search of enlightenment or cheap highs or free love. There will be no stories of painful self-discovery in ashrams, or hashish-fueled felonies, but there will be lots of descriptions of old buildings and bird sightings.
Their journey proceeds in a relatively predictable arc, from London to Istanbul by train, quickly though Turkey and then Iran, on the precipice of the Islamic Revolution - the longest and most interesting part of the book. They find themselves barred at the last moment from entering Afghanistan, as that country starts its fall into chaos. They regroup, find a way through southern Iran into Pakistan and then India, where they are overwhelmed by the crowds and the beggars, the heat and the noise. The end of the Hippie Trail is Kathmandu, where they eat apple pie and listen to rock music.
Along the way, they have brief encounters with other travelers and with locals including some students in Iran; they are invited to a wedding and into homes (the experiences are invariably awkward and confusing); they visit bazaars, temples, mosques, and museums; they interact with beggars and border guards, hotel clerks and hustlers. They endure overcrowded and uncomfortable bus trips and train rides, dirty and uncomfortable hotel rooms, unfamiliar spicy food, and minor illnesses (note: nobody, except maybe your mom, cares about your sore throat, and nobody, even your mom, needs to hear about that embarrassing bout of diarrhea).
I enjoyed Abley’s earlier book on language death (Spoken Here), and I thought that I would enjoy this book more than I did.
Some of this is simply due to the limits of his project, attempting to reconstruct a personal story from so many years ago, and using it as a frame to look at larger issues: political and economic inequality, colonialism and Westernization, and environmental degradation.
Although Abley set out to act as a camera, diligently recording everything in his journal, and has a poet’s sensitivity, too many of the details have faded over time - I rarely felt that I could see and smell and hear what was happening, even in places that I know well. But even when I was drawn in, the story was too small, subdued, pedestrian.
The travellers only skim across the surface of these countries, spending a few days here and there, not enough time to understand anything meaningful about the people and politics (the understanding comes to the author later through reading and reflection), or to do more than capture impressions. They travel from town to town, temple to temple, without knowing the history or languages, without guides, without asking questions.
While Abley does a good job of retroactively filling in context, and updating us on the political and environmental situation of the region, he can’t (and is clear that he won’t) make the story more interesting. Outside of a couple of suspenseful moments (an unsettling evening in Turkey with some drunk men, sharing a train from Iran to Pakistan with smugglers), and chance sightings of the last Shah of Iran and Indira Gandhi, there is not much adventure to hold your attention.
By the end, I didn’t care enough about the author and his companion, or about what they saw or thought. The author’s younger self is self-consciously earnest but unformed, uninformed, and uninteresting, and his companion Clare is sketched in a brittle, unflattering, and incomplete way. They don’t seem to like each other much, and it’s not clear why they traveled together, which doesn’t make them fun people to spend time with (even in a book).
And I was put off by the author’s moralizing Orientalist perspective: that someone from “the West” traveling to “the East” is an entitled and colonialist act, something that must be collectively atoned for. Travel can be irresponsible, it can be exploitative, but it can also open minds and build connections between people, and we should not have to apologise for it (read Aziz Abu Sarah’s Crossing Boundaries about responsible travel).
The book’s title promises a story of adventures from “Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail”, but the author and his companion are definitively not hippies. They are not in search of enlightenment or cheap highs or free love. There will be no stories of painful self-discovery in ashrams, or hashish-fueled felonies, but there will be lots of descriptions of old buildings and bird sightings.
Their journey proceeds in a relatively predictable arc, from London to Istanbul by train, quickly though Turkey and then Iran, on the precipice of the Islamic Revolution - the longest and most interesting part of the book. They find themselves barred at the last moment from entering Afghanistan, as that country starts its fall into chaos. They regroup, find a way through southern Iran into Pakistan and then India, where they are overwhelmed by the crowds and the beggars, the heat and the noise. The end of the Hippie Trail is Kathmandu, where they eat apple pie and listen to rock music.
Along the way, they have brief encounters with other travelers and with locals including some students in Iran; they are invited to a wedding and into homes (the experiences are invariably awkward and confusing); they visit bazaars, temples, mosques, and museums; they interact with beggars and border guards, hotel clerks and hustlers. They endure overcrowded and uncomfortable bus trips and train rides, dirty and uncomfortable hotel rooms, unfamiliar spicy food, and minor illnesses (note: nobody, except maybe your mom, cares about your sore throat, and nobody, even your mom, needs to hear about that embarrassing bout of diarrhea).
I enjoyed Abley’s earlier book on language death (Spoken Here), and I thought that I would enjoy this book more than I did.
Some of this is simply due to the limits of his project, attempting to reconstruct a personal story from so many years ago, and using it as a frame to look at larger issues: political and economic inequality, colonialism and Westernization, and environmental degradation.
Although Abley set out to act as a camera, diligently recording everything in his journal, and has a poet’s sensitivity, too many of the details have faded over time - I rarely felt that I could see and smell and hear what was happening, even in places that I know well. But even when I was drawn in, the story was too small, subdued, pedestrian.
The travellers only skim across the surface of these countries, spending a few days here and there, not enough time to understand anything meaningful about the people and politics (the understanding comes to the author later through reading and reflection), or to do more than capture impressions. They travel from town to town, temple to temple, without knowing the history or languages, without guides, without asking questions.
While Abley does a good job of retroactively filling in context, and updating us on the political and environmental situation of the region, he can’t (and is clear that he won’t) make the story more interesting. Outside of a couple of suspenseful moments (an unsettling evening in Turkey with some drunk men, sharing a train from Iran to Pakistan with smugglers), and chance sightings of the last Shah of Iran and Indira Gandhi, there is not much adventure to hold your attention.
By the end, I didn’t care enough about the author and his companion, or about what they saw or thought. The author’s younger self is self-consciously earnest but unformed, uninformed, and uninteresting, and his companion Clare is sketched in a brittle, unflattering, and incomplete way. They don’t seem to like each other much, and it’s not clear why they traveled together, which doesn’t make them fun people to spend time with (even in a book).
And I was put off by the author’s moralizing Orientalist perspective: that someone from “the West” traveling to “the East” is an entitled and colonialist act, something that must be collectively atoned for. Travel can be irresponsible, it can be exploitative, but it can also open minds and build connections between people, and we should not have to apologise for it (read Aziz Abu Sarah’s Crossing Boundaries about responsible travel).
December 29, 2023
The overland route between Europe and India, so popular with counterculture young people (though they represented only a portion of travelers) that it gained the moniker “Hippie Trail”, was violently cut off in the late 1970s due to revolutions in first Afghanistan and then Iran. Canadian journalist Mark Abley, then a student at Oxford, decided to travel this route in early 1978 with a female friend. Already literary-minded, he set down his impressions in a couple of notebooks, but these then remained untouched for decades. This account of the journey was finally published in 2023.
In writing this book decades later, Abley recognized that he actually knew very little about what he was seeing at the time back in 1978. Though impressed by tourist sites he visited, he was ignorant of these countries’ histories and cultures, and he wasn’t aware of the context of the already incipient political turmoil. So, in retelling his journey on the basis of his notebooks, he read other writers’ works on the region, some of them published long after his journey. The result is that Strange Bewildering Time may be a (merely) decent popular account of Turkish, Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian history before and after 1978, but it isn’t terribly informative about this overland route as a phenomenon. Details on transportation used or hotels stayed at are followed by long historical digressions, some of which are the typical social-justice platitudes of 2023 and jerk the reader out of that long-ago era. This would have been a much stronger book if it had been written before the turn of the millennium, when memories were fresher and the author wasn’t so concerned about saving face.
I collect books on the Istanbul–Kathmandu route and found Strange Bewildering Time a mediocre account compared to, say, David Tomory’s fantastic oral history A Season in Heaven. Even when it comes to accounts from the last days of the trail, Borna Bebek’s Santhana is more entertaining.
In writing this book decades later, Abley recognized that he actually knew very little about what he was seeing at the time back in 1978. Though impressed by tourist sites he visited, he was ignorant of these countries’ histories and cultures, and he wasn’t aware of the context of the already incipient political turmoil. So, in retelling his journey on the basis of his notebooks, he read other writers’ works on the region, some of them published long after his journey. The result is that Strange Bewildering Time may be a (merely) decent popular account of Turkish, Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian history before and after 1978, but it isn’t terribly informative about this overland route as a phenomenon. Details on transportation used or hotels stayed at are followed by long historical digressions, some of which are the typical social-justice platitudes of 2023 and jerk the reader out of that long-ago era. This would have been a much stronger book if it had been written before the turn of the millennium, when memories were fresher and the author wasn’t so concerned about saving face.
I collect books on the Istanbul–Kathmandu route and found Strange Bewildering Time a mediocre account compared to, say, David Tomory’s fantastic oral history A Season in Heaven. Even when it comes to accounts from the last days of the trail, Borna Bebek’s Santhana is more entertaining.
February 7, 2026
Mark Abley took a journey by public transport and hitchhiking along the famed Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu in 1978, a year before the Shah of Iran was deposed, and during unrest in Afghanistan that eventually led to war in 1979. Although he didn't know this yet, it would be the last year of the Hippie Trail. He wrote copious journals during the three-month trek that enabled him to write this book so many years later. As an older, wiser man looking back at the journey, he is conscience-stricken by the naivety of the travellers and the generosity of the hospitality he and his travelling partner received in remote towns. At some points during the journey, his travelling partner chided him for being morose, and you can sense his sentiment in his descriptions. It's fascinating to read the double voice of the young man and woman touring temples and antique villages in search of old architecture and art and the wiser voice, new guidebooks and Wikipedia at his disposal, who explains, for example, how an abandoned village in southeastern Turkey was not in fact destroyed by earthquake but by the slaughtering of Armenians. This book is a testament to how history doesn't always progress and to the importance of taking notes and journalling. Although the narrator feels pained by his travelling companion's father's bankroll and other privileges, the book illustrates that all people should get out there and see the world if they can, while it is still relatively peaceful.
July 2, 2023
Poet-journalist Abley, here more the latter than the former, re-pieces his young seeker's journey along the now defunct "hippie trail" between Europe and South Asia in 1978. The last of the long-haired vagabonds, the then twenty-two-year-old Abley nervously negotiated Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, each before the sociopolitical shake-ups of which he felt the first pokey portends. Abley creates a fluid, tangible trot from his 45-year-old jottings, while reframing his experiences with contemporary resignation.
September 27, 2023
This is an excellent travel book: it took me along for an exciting and always interesting ride through a fascinating part of the world and introduced me to a host of interesting characters. More than that, it took me back to when I was young, curious and adventurous. I wish I had taken notes during my own travels, as the author did; I enjoyed reading his reflections on his thoughts and feelings during his trip. I also liked a comment on the back cover: "Mark Abley eloquently shows that if we keep our desire to search and express, the best parts of youth don't die."
March 20, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. I have traveled in this way taking local transport, but am younger so missed this trip.
Mark digs deep into the history and culture with great sensitivity for the people. All the details portrayed the incredible adventure in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal he shared with Clare who suffered as a woman traveler. In the epilogue he follows up from 1978 to the present conditions.
Authentic trials and tribulations from, Istanbul to lovely Katmandu in the last year of the Hippie Trail.
Mark digs deep into the history and culture with great sensitivity for the people. All the details portrayed the incredible adventure in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal he shared with Clare who suffered as a woman traveler. In the epilogue he follows up from 1978 to the present conditions.
Authentic trials and tribulations from, Istanbul to lovely Katmandu in the last year of the Hippie Trail.
May 31, 2025
Pros: present day, retroactive reflections of the author’s journey on the hippie trail as a young man, so contained a lot of socio-political analysis of the present day, gleaned from what he witnessed the last year that North Americans and Europeans struck out backpacking on the historic land journey across Asia. Cons: they closed the Afghan border weeks before the author was due to cross it from Iran, so I missed an account of what it was like to experience 70s Kabul pre-military coup. Oh well looks like I’ll just read more books!
May 6, 2023
Yes, I enjoyed the read. But I had high hopes for more. Author Mark Abley uses his journal from 1978, when he was a 22-year-old student at Oxford and took a trip across Europe and South Asia with notable time spent in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal at a time when it was safe and affordable to do so. However, that would end soon after his journey. It has the makings of a fantastic story and there are glimpses of that - including interesting insights - but I just wanted more.
July 11, 2023
My words are simple. I liked it. For the first time out of all of my readings a story was told in a nonfiction manner. I didn't know it could be done yet, it is. Mark took me on an adventure into the Hippie Trail with some historical background that was quite inquisitive. A story doesn't always have to be dramatic or action driven to be true, it only needs to be genuine.
July 26, 2023
A very interesting travelogue of 1978. Travels that cannot be done anymore. It was quite fascinating to read of all these places. I had to Google image some of them to see the beauty of the temples, etc.
Best quote: "the gods we worship are the gods we create; we cannot worship the God who creates us." pg 207
Best quote: "the gods we worship are the gods we create; we cannot worship the God who creates us." pg 207
March 5, 2024
A thoughtful and jntrospective memoir of the author’s journey from Istanbul to Nepal. This memoir will be enjoyed by anyone who has done all or part of this journey. Unlike any travel memoir that I have read before,. Highly recommended .
December 7, 2024
My words are simple. I liked it. For the first time out of all of my readings a story was told in a nonfiction manner. I didn't know it could be done yet, it is. Mark took me on an adventure into the Hippie Trail with some historical background that was quite inquisitive. A story doesn't always have to be dramatic or action driven to be true, it only needs to be genuine.
April 23, 2023
I really enjoyed reading this book. Mark's descriptions of his experiences on the Hippie Trail provide a glimpse into a world in the cusp of unimaginable changes.
April 24, 2023
With some interesting travel scenery and reflections, overall this travel memoir was not transporting nor enlightening, and fairly disjointed. It’s ok to be naive and honest.
August 13, 2023
Incredible heart on an incredible journey! Loved it!
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August 17, 2024Interesting, ruminative book. Updates the history of places as he goes.
September 25, 2024
An enjoyable account of a pair of young students attending Oxford, as they travelled along the Hippy Trail in 1978.
October 15, 2024
A nice review of an old travel tale
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March 13, 2025Not great.
August 12, 2025
A wonderful examination and exploration. Quite the ride.
September 8, 2024
I enjoyed the self reflection, with different points of perspective being given from the author as both a young and old man. The writing highlighted an oftentimes depressing shift in culture, not just between countries but inside them too. Overall a solid book that made me think and self reflect whilst also being amusing and lighthearted at the right times, so as to balance out the depressing and the dreary. Would recommend.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews