This is a question that really should have occurred to me before - how *did* all the late 60′s-70′s hippies physically get to India in the numbers culture has told me they did? Flights were of course an option, but only for a few - the prices pre-1980′s were ruinously expensive, and hippies may have been from more elite backgrounds but they were still a ton of broke college kids all the same. And its not like you would take a boat through the Suez or around the horn as a passenger, and no train lines existed for most of that journey. So what gives?
Well you drove of course!
I somehow never learned about the Hippie Trail, but it was a big thing apparently, a gap in knowledge for me. But I see why I forgot it - its an artifact lost to political revolution. British college students renting a bus and riding through…Iran…and Afghanistan….that stopped being an option by 1980. But under the Shah and Khan these were western-looking states open for business. And until the late 1970′s the price of gas was pretty much irrelevant, neither costs nor borders was a barrier. Chalk up another cultural artifact undergirded by - and undone by - global political and economic realities.
(also note the critical fact of Yugoslavia being communist-but-third-way-unaligned to open up that path)
