The Trail

On the trail, tens of thousands of Westerners went in search of change, escape, revolution, and freedom. Discover the exhilarating and essential story of their wild trip, connecting West and East, counterculture and wellness culture, the 1960s right up to the present.

We’ve heard the word “hippie,” the flower-powered, free-loving stoner of the 1960s and '70s, with an On the Road paperback, flared jeans, and permanent peace sign. The character lives in our consciousness as a symbol of lackadaisical passivity and Western privilege, a bygone figure of the last century.

But who were the hippies, really? And why were they so obsessed with all things “Eastern”— meditation and mindfulness, yoga and sage, tofu and soy? The question launches us into one of the great untold epics of the recent past. Thomas Wide's The Trail is a sweeping tale of how a generation of young travelers left home in search of enlightenment, adventure, and escape, and along the way quietly remade the modern world. The so-called hippie trail—through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India and Nepal, and onward to Thailand, Bali, Japan, even North Korea—moved in many directions. It was traveled not just by tourists but by locals who had ideas and ambitions of their own, inventing a new economy.

The Trail is at once a sprawling and brilliant story—a narrative of intrigue and intimacy, scamming and deceit, transcendence and change, aliases and alienation—and the startling origin story for so much of what we take for granted about what it feels like to live right now, in an era of modern capitalism. Spanning three continents and five decades, and drawing on more than three hundred interviews conducted across the world and sources in fifteen languages, it brings everyone—British playboys, Afghan hoteliers, Nepali domestic workers, Turkish poets, Tibetan cooks, Thai cannabis farmers, Indian musicians—to vibrant life. It is the first full account of how a generation’s longing for elsewhere shows up everywhere.