Rick Steves is arguably the country’s most beloved travel writer and guide since Mark Twain, and millions know him from his long-running series on traveling through Europe.
But his latest book is a departure from his favorite continent, which he shares with viewers and readers of his popular guidebook series.
Instead of writing about Paris or Berlin, he turns the mirror around and looks at himself as a 23-year-old recent college graduate who’d been making a living as a piano teacher.
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During the pandemic, when Steves was as homebound as everyone else, he dug out a detailed journal he’d kept about his 1978 trip along the so-called “hippie trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu.
“I read it and thought, ‘This is actually a treasure, because you can’t do this trip anymore,’” Steves said in a Rick Steves Travel Talks video on YouTube.
This was a well-known overland journey of 3,000 miles that involved so many unknowns, discomforts and hardships that relatively few hippies actually attempted it.
But Steves had been a hardcore travel junkie since he was young, and he had yearned for years to tackle it. Instead, he spent his summers in Europe every year on a break from his piano lessons. Eventually, though, he said he decided to go for it.
On July 14, 1978, Steves set out from Europe on a 56-day epic adventure through 10 countries, joined by his college friend, Gene Overshaw. Luckily for his readers, he kept an astonishingly detailed diary of every aspect of the trip, perhaps foreshadowing his future career as a travel writer.
Without much else to do, Steves began the process of editing his journal and making it into a publishable memoir, which was published last month.
Upon its release, it soared immediately to No. 3 on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list, a testament both to his popularity as a travel show host and guide and to the breezy, colorful style of the book, which brings readers along with him as he learns many life lessons that will come to serve him well in the future.
Over the decades, Steves has preached fervently to the public about the value of travel to enlarge our horizons, push our brains to think in new ways and bring the world closer.
As a young man, Steves travels from one adventure to another in the book and the reader can can see the fledgling travel guru emerge, as he learns the joy of talking to everyday people on the street, even if he can’t speak their language.
He also learns to travel on a dime, bedding down nervously in a series of rooms he describes as “filth, bugs, broken windows, cigarette butts stuffed into sooty holes in hotel rooms lit by dangling bulbs.”
After a while, he wrote that the two companions decided to up their hotel budget to $5 a night to get a better night’s sleep.
Steves and his friend travel mostly by local buses, including an epic journey from Istanbul to Tehran that he described as three miserable days in a bus driven by a man he dubbed “the pirate” who hated Steves on sight. Because they were the last people on the bus, they ended up on makeshift chairs over the wheels – a decidedly uncomfortable way to travel thousands of miles.
In those days, there were no formal guidebooks published on how to take the “hippie trail,” and of course no Internet, either.
The two companions just winged it as best they could, talking to fellow travelers and borrowing their notes whenever they were able. Their only written guide was a map they brought with them.
Since they were using film to shoot photos – before the digital camera era – they limited themselves to 8-10 shots a day so they wouldn’t run out of film before the end of the trip.
After traveling as cheaply as possible through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, they finally arrived in India – the destination that Steves had been particularly anxious to see. He described the bouncy “A-class” bus that spent “12 hours winding through treacherous mountain roads to the hidden land of Kashmir.
“The bus made good time, considering its age and the condition of the terrain we had to cross. It was 200 miles of almost continuously winding switchback narrow roads spiced with dreadful cliffs, huge falling boulders, local natives, lots of trucks and military vehicles, and constant signs reminding drivers with tacky little rhymes and slogans like, “Drive carefully – your family needs you” or “Better late than dead.”
Finally, in Kashmir, the friends rented a houseboat and allowed themselves to relax and rest up. After visiting highlights of India, including the Taj Mahal and going to the holy river Ganges in Varnasi, they traveled on to Nepal, where its capital, Kathmandu, marked the end of the “hippie trail.”
“It was the end of the rainbow for hippie travelers back then,” Steves recalled. Some of them just never left, remaining to subsist on marijuana and whatever they could scrounge.
Steves himself used weed for the first time on the trip, in an environment where everyone else seemed to be doing it, and today he’s a spokesman for legalized marijuana.
Finally, in Kathmandu, Steves and Openshaw collected their belongings, including a mink pelt named “Ringworm” that Steves had purchased along the way and flew back to Europe.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. It was only the beginning. Permanently changed by his experience, Steves left the piano job and opened a small travel business that grew and grew.
In 1980 – two years after the hippie trail – he published his first book, which is still in print today and on its 40th edition, “Europe Through the Back Door.”
Today, he runs a travel emporium – Rick Steves Europe – from his hometown of Edmonds, Washington with 100 employees, selling guidebooks, European tours and accessories like money belts and packing cubes on RickSteves.com. He also offers 100 full-length travel shows on his website from his long-running PBS series. He also has a radio show and a syndicated travel column.
Every Monday night, Steves holds a live, online free travel show full of tips with special guests.
P.S. For those of you aware of Steves’ recent cancer diagnosis, he has posted on his Facebook page that his treatment is over and, as of this writing, he’s considered cancer-free.
- Details: “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer” by Rick Steves
- Avalon Travel, Hatchette Book Group, 2025
- Price: $30