Extract

The Hippie Trail is a historical analysis written by two former travellers (‘Trail-ers’) Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland. For Gemie, this was the first time he was thinking about the trail ‘in academic terms’ but was a topic that was ‘very familiar in terms of the background of the people involved, their aims, their culture’.1 Gemie and Ireland take a unique approach to the history of the Hippie Trail. Looking at the trail from 1957–79, the authors study the travel of the hippie swiftly through Europe with a stopover in Greece for a few days before taking a more leisurely journey through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, until they reached their final destination, India. They attempt to challenge existing assumptions about hippies. To do so, they discuss the use of drugs on the trail, sex, and love, the difference between tourism and travelling and finally, the religious aspect of the trail. In addition to this, they devote a chapter to assessing the representation of the Hippie Trail in literature and popular entertainment. Gemie and Ireland interview eighty former travellers. While doing so enables them to effectively analyse the ‘internal journeys’ of trailers, some of the arguments about the wider significance of the hippie trail are less convincing.

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