"The Great Backpacking Revolution" - The Origins of Backpacking.

It's been 2 years by now since the pandemic started and closed borders ...

Going through my old photos and yearning for the places where I have been and not the fact that I will be back soon (for example, Myanmar) is depressing. Therefore, for the coming weeks in advance, I propose to go on a fascinating historical journey along the "vagrant roads" from Turkey to India and Nepal.

Half a century ago, thousands of young people traveled between Europe and the countries of Southeast Asia and Hindustan in search of spiritual enlightenment, easy-take drugs, and new experiences. This route was called the "hippie trail" and gave rise to modern budget tourism, without guides and agencies.

If a person is called a traveler in historical literature, then he went to another country for the sake of scientific research, the establishment of political and trade ties. This is a serious, and most importantly, long-term and expensive event. Gradually, transport links developed, and the cost of passenger transportation fell. This led to the fact that since the XX century, foreign travel has become massively available to the middle class of residents.

In the 1950s and 1960s, budget travel became possible. People who set off without a pile of suitcases, moved by public transport, were piled with backpackers. The difference in the economic development of different states also played a significant role in this. For Western Europe, Britain, and America, conditional India or Thailand was perceived as unimaginably cheap countries that could be ridden for months. That is why Asia has turned out to be a popular destination not only for short-term trips but also for long-term freezes, a kind of "wintering".

In 1957, the iconic autobiographical novel "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac was published in the States. A year later, his book "Dharma Tramps" was published, which gave birth to the meme "The Great Backpack Revolution".

“Look, tramps with backpacks fill the world, tramps of the Dharma,” says one of the heroes of the novel. - They do not subscribe to the general requirement to consume food and thus work for the right to consume, what the hell is all this shit for them, refrigerators, televisions, cars, at least new luxurious cars, all these shampoos, deodorants, all this rubbish that doesn't matter in a week it will be in the trash heap, what the hell is this whole system of enslavement: work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. "

In the 1960s, public interest in Eastern religions and spiritual practices, countercultural movements, and the prospect for American guys to fall under the call and go to Vietnam were added to the romanticized image of a marginal traveler.

Between 1962 and 1963, the beatnik icon poet Allen Ginsberg traveled throughout India, stopping in Calcutta and Varanasi.

In 1970, his "Indian Diaries" were published in the USA - travel notes, poems, and reflections were made during this trip.

In 1968, The Beatles came to Indian Rishikesh to visit their guru to practice transcendental meditation and write songs. The musicians eventually fell out with the guru, but this visit was so widely covered in the press that India and Hinduism received unexpected PR. It was after these two events that the number of travelers to this country increased dramatically.

In the early years of its formation, the route was named Asia Overland, or simply The Overland. The term "hippie trail" appeared much later and, most likely, thanks to local journalists, not travelers - the latter for the most part did not consider themselves hippies. If it was necessary to somehow identify themselves, they rather used the words "beatniks", "overlanders" or simply "travelers" and "backpackers".

The land specificity of travel imposed restrictions on travel: India and Nepal became dead ends because it was impossible to enter Burma (now Myanmar) or China further. In Europe, travelers did not stay, and they preferred not to meddle in the Soviet Union because of the difficulties with a visa. Therefore, the basis of the "hippie path" was formed by six countries: Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

Those who wished to continue their journey flew to Bangkok and traveled to Southeast Asia. The route network in the region is named the Banana Pancake Trail, after the banana pancakes, a local street food. This is not a specific itinerary, but just a list of places to visit. Now this name means all the countries of the region, but Southeast Asia has not always been such a popular destination. In the 1970s, there were wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, and in parts of Myanmar, conflicts of varying intensity continue to this day. My impression of Burma is a country of barbed wire. She's there everywhere, like "decor".

The first backpacker areas began to appear on these routes. The demand among visitors for inexpensive service generated supply. All services necessary for a tourist (hotels, cafes, exchange offices, money transfer services, shops) were concentrated in several neighboring streets. For a foreigner, it is incredibly convenient: you don't have to spend a lot of time looking for food, accommodation, souvenirs or equipment - all this turned out to be in one place. 50 years ago, tourists not only bought local things but also sold or exchanged their own. As a result, a resident of Kathmandu could become the proud owner of American jeans, albeit not suitable in size, and the squandered hippie received some money to continue the journey. Here tourists obtained useful information, shared their experience, or found fellow travelers - before the advent of the Internet, such points were extremely important.

The entire journey from Europe to the Indian subcontinent took two to three months. We went through it in several ways.

The first is to get there on your own with numerous changes, combining buses, trains, and, if desired, hitchhiking.

The second is own transport. Many have used the legendary hippie bass for this purpose - Volkswagen minibusses T1 and T2.

The third is BlaBlaCar in the pre-digital era. Travelers, using ads or word of mouth, found drivers with a car or travel companions willing to share the cost of gasoline. For those who knew how to drive, there was another option: to find people ferrying cars to Iran, and drive part of the way, say, in your car.

The fourth is an organized bus trip, in fact - package tourism. Travel companies offered tours from Europe to India and Nepal. The first Indiaman bus, connecting London with the former colony, departed in 1957. And in subsequent years, thanks to the growth of the economy and increased demand, many companies have appeared to offer such services.

In 1970, the London-based informal information center BIT published the first travel guide for land travel to India. It was regularly updated and over the next ten years became the most popular applied literature among the Overlanders. A few years later, several more guides were published on both sides of the Atlantic. Their compilers are both travel companies and ordinary travelers-enthusiasts. Among the latter were spouses Tony and Maureen Wheeler, authors of the Across Asia on the Cheap guide. They did not stop at one edition and two years later published their other book - "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring". This is how the story of the Lonely Planet backpacker bible began.

In the absence of the Internet and mobile phones, communication with the homeland on the road was maintained mainly by mail. Travelers wrote from local post offices, and relatives sent letters on demand to some city on the route.

The situation with visas did not fundamentally differ from the modern one. Visas from developing countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan were generally easier to obtain than they are now - it could be done even on the way. Pakistan was generally visa-free for citizens of some European countries, and the British were also free to travel to India. But not without bureaucratic insanity. Thus, it was advised to obtain an Afghan visa before an Iranian one, and an Iranian visa - before applying for an Iraqi visa. Because the officials of these states wanted to make sure that the traveler intended to leave their country. As for the developed countries, the situation with them has not changed for half a century: as now, they wanted to be convinced of the tourist's solvency. Therefore, it was recommended for a visit to the Singapore embassy to dress neatly and lie when answering the question about the amount of money.

What got better in the countries of the route is the epidemiological situation. In the days of the hippies, some infections were so common that another moniker for the trail in the media was the "hash and hepatitis road." To visit Asian countries, it was necessary to have a certificate of vaccination against cholera, smallpox, and typhus. There have been periods when the Iranian authorities set up quarantine camps on their eastern border, and those who returned home from India by land were fortunate enough to spend several days there.

Political changes and armed conflicts in Asian countries were the main reason why mass travel along the trail stopped.

Afghanistan was the first to fall off the route. In 1978, there was a coup d'état, followed by civil war and the invasion of the Soviet army. In 1979, Iran experienced a regime change: instead of the secular shah, the Islamic clergy came to power. A year later, the Iranian-Iraqi war began. For some time, buses from Europe traveled to India, bypassing Afghanistan. But Iran was increasingly reluctant to issue visas to Europeans. There was no talk of Americans or Canadians at all: the new government was extremely anti-Western. In Europe, the unrest in Yugoslavia also influenced the travel itinerary.

At the same time, the hippie movement began to decline. On the other hand, plane tickets became rapidly cheaper and more accessible to more people. Back in the 1970s, the cost of land - excluding Burma - travel from London to Sydney was roughly equal to the price of a flight on the same route, and now the total cost of visas alone will be more expensive than an air ticket. Many British companies that sent passengers to Hindustan half a century ago are still operating, but they no longer organize such trips. In 2007, the British company OzBus launched a 12-week London-Sydney bus tour, but neither the tour nor the carrier itself survived to this day.

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Such a large-scale and long-term phenomenon as the "hippie trail" left a mark in art and a bunch of memoirs of people involved in the route. However, almost all of this information is in English.

Films:

• Brother and sister

• Wildlife

• Road to Kathmandu

• The last refuge of the hippies

• Hippie Masala: Forever in India

Books:

• The Indian Diaries by Allen Ginsberg.

• Dervla Murphy's "Virgin Land"

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Pictures were taken from Flickr