The Hippie Trail was a gateway to adventure. Then it fell apart

A very gray Europe was still recovering from World War II when entrepreneur Oswald “Paddy” Garrow-Fisher rolled into London in his “Indiaman” bus in 1957, offering tickets for the 12,000-mile, weeks-long trip to faraway Calcutta and Bombay (now Kolkata and Mumbai).

Until then, travel between Europe and Asia was via expensive air routes or expensive — and boring — boat rides. Garrow-Fisher’s service offered an alternative that was marginally more economical but definitely more exciting.

The first passengers — on routes that rolled through Paris, Munich, Sofia, Istanbul, Tehran, Lahore and Delhi — needed to be adventurous. Accommodation was often tented, delays were frequent and the roads bumpy. But those who made the trips weren’t hippies.

More bus services followed, with operators such as Penn Overland or Swagman Tours offering itineraries including Beirut, Kabul, Sri Lanka and all points in between. The services became known as “The Magic Bus,” after an Amsterdam booking agency of the same name.

Independent travelers began tackling the route in whatever vehicles they could press into action. Accounts tell of fire trucks and vans adapted to make the trip. One double-decker bus named “Albert” went back and forth 15 times, sometimes as far as Australia.

By the mid-‘60s, the Hippie Trail was thriving, though followers called it the “Asia overland trip” and themselves “travelers” or “freaks.” Unofficial hubs sprang up, like Istanbul’s Pudding Shop, where a bulletin board helped hook up people heading in the same direction.

Certain destinations also grew into hippie hangouts. “Freak Street” in Kathmandu had the appeal of legally available cannabis. In Kabul — where hashish and stronger drugs were also available and seemingly tolerated — “Chicken Street” was the place to tune in and drop out.

The Beatles traveled by plane rather than bus to India when they hung out at an ashram in the town of Rishikesh in 1968. Their arrival put the mainstream spotlight on Western pursuits of spiritual — and narcotic — quests in Asia and added to their psychedelic appeal.

As more explored, the trail extended its reach, taking followers to Indian destinations like Goa, where a hippie colony sprang up on the beach, and across Southeast Asia to Thailand, Indonesia and then on to Australia.

In the 1970s, the first guidebooks to the Hippie Trail appeared. BIT, a countercultural information center in London, gathered together bundles of notes to create the “Overland to India and Australia.” Lonely Planet’s “Across Asia on the Cheap” followed in 1975.

This was the decade when a serial killer stalked the trail. At least a dozen people, including backpackers, were suspected to have been killed by convicted murderer Charles Sobhraj, whose alleged exploits were recently dramatized in BBC TV series “The Serpent.”

It was also the decade when the Hippie Trail began to break apart. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan both disrupted overland routes. Conflicts and destabilization helped end hippie notions of a path to paradise and enlightenment.

And finally, as commercial air travel became more affordable, young Western adventurers began flying direct to “exotic” Asian destinations to find themselves — often with the safety net of a return ticket home.