However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. I liked that a lot. Rick Steves has a nostalgic twinkle in his eye as he tells me about a adventure through Asia , during which he backpacked through six countries with his friend Gene and scribbled about every eye-opening moment along the way.
We're sitting across from each other in a New York City conference room more than 40 years after the journey, and he's holding his latest book, a hardcover titled On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer out February 4 from Avalon Travel.
The tome, essentially a glowed-up version of his tattered travel diary from that trip, also includes photographs of a year-old Steves riding atop VW buses, standing still on busy streets, and chatting with strangers in Istanbul and Tehran. It captures a young American man experiencing world expansion and culture shockβwhile loving every minute of it.
Believe it, though: When Steves embarked on this trip in the '70s, he was a piano teacher in Washington taking a short respite from daily life. By the time he returned home, he knew that travel needed to play a more central role in his future. His finger jabs on the second-to-last page, at the postscript. I let my piano students go. I turned my recital hall into a lecture hall and began a small travel business.
Though the book tells the vivid tales of his trip in his own words, I wanted to hear more about the reflection brought on by compiling these notes, and sharing them with a wider audience. What stood out from that life-changing adventureβand what does he think other travelers can learn from it? Below, Steves shares the moments big and small and smoky that effectively turned him into a travel writerβplus, the quests on his horizon.
