The Trail

In the 1960s a new breed of young Westerners took to the hippie trail. Straphanging on buses, hitching lifts in beat-up cars, they followed a trail East through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to Nepal and far beyond, and came home carrying what they’d found. These countercultural travellers thought they were fleeing the modern era. In fact, Thomas Wide reveals, they were the shock troops of globalisation. In this eye-opening exploration of a generation who went on the road, Wide shows how in going East, they adopted new ideas and practices that translated – and mistranslated – into industries, careers and habits in the West, from yoga to mindfulness, meditation to veganism, soy lattes to self-optimisation. Tracking down travellers from California to Kathmandu, Kabul to Maui, and talking to those who interacted with them – Afghan coat-makers, Nepali domestic labourers, Turkish musicians, Thai cannabis farmers – Wide discovers far more than the caricature of footloose hippies spouting peace and love. This, he reveals, was a psychedelic silk road that, like the ancient Silk Road whose routes it traced, was no one single road but a complex and tangled series of encounters that would change lives and cultures. An astonishing account of cultural theft and cultural openness, spiritual insight and spiritual fraud, liberation and commerce, The Trail is a rich, complex and groundbreaking history of a moment which shaped the world in which we now live.