Tourism and the Counterculture Traveller: Reconsidering the Hippie Trail

By the 1960s, tourism was already becoming a large commercial industry selling travel as a purchasable commodity. A subset of conventional tourists were youths from western countries who made the journey to India along what became known as the Hippie Trail, a route that partially replicated the fabled Silk Road. Termed “hippies” by the popular press, the number who made the journey is estimated as close to two million. The emergence of these countercultural travellers was the product of specific material and cultural conditions. This paper is abridged from a soon to be published book based on my own experiences and interviews with forty-eight individuals who made the journey in the 1960s and 1970s. I focus here on the socio-demographic characteristics of travellers and the cultural milieu of the time. Specifically emphasized is the mutual impact of fiction and non-fiction writings, films, and music in shaping images conducive to a desire to travel the Hippie Trail.