Reflections on the 1970s Hippie Trail

Last September, I published my book A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974). Six months later, Rick Steves released On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (2025). These are two of the latest in a growing crop of travel books and memoirs from the Hippie Trail, which attracted hundreds of thousands young travelers until it was closed by the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Like millions of others (Rick Steves has 1.2 million followers on Facebook) I am a huge fan of his European guidebooks and PBS specials. His books are down-to-earth, and well researched—very useful when planning a trip or finding yourself looking for a way to avoid the long lines to the Louvre or the Uffizi Galleries. He is also a man who doesn’t hesitate to call-out evil when he sees it, whether through a television special on the history of fascism in Europe or calling out Donald Trump as the fascist he is.

Rick’s new book is beautiful and a delightful read. He tells the story of the journey his and his friend Gene Openshaw did along parts of the old Silk Road that in modern times became known as the Hippie Trail. Having been bitten by the “travel bug” backpacking around Europe in 1973, they met up in Frankfurt in July 1978 and set out for Istanbul. Although not hippies, the two 23-year-olds wanted to see India and Nepal, which in those days were popular destinations for hippies and young adventurers.

My book starts out four years earlier, in September 1974, when my then-girlfriend Elisabeth and I boarded one of two blue Scania buses set for India. We were 20 and had worked in a slaughterhouse over the summer to make money for the trip. The deal was that the buses would take us to New Delhi, park there for five weeks and then take us back to Sweden. We slept on the buses, which had been refurbished for the purpose. There were a couple of fellow travelers who talked of smoking pot on a rooftop in Nepal, but we were heading for southern India, maybe even Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon).

Our two books have similarities, reflecting the fact that our journeys from Istanbul to Srinagar in Kashmir and New Delhi overlapped, but they are still very different. Rick Steves built his book around his lightly edited 60,000-word journal, plus photos that he and Gene took. His story is charming, naïve and has a strong sense of presence. Unlike me, he was an extrovert who didn’t hesitate to ask a farmer if he could try out his ox-driven thresher or ask a female farm worker to carry her heavy load for a bit. It’s all there in the diary and the photos. We see him engaging with people he meets. He and Gene also took many photos of themselves documenting their 55-day-long journey. There was also something romantic about his approach, which was very different from mine.

“The Khyber Pass! I had dreamed of crossing this romantically wild and historically dangerous cultural divide for years. It was very high on my life's checklist of things to do in the top five for sure. I'd read all about its illustrious history as the gateway to India.” (p 82)

When reading his story and hearing him talk about it at his book launch in New York earlier this month, I got the sense that this was not only a trip in the now, but something that would change his life, which it did, once he had returned home. He became a travel writer.

Being a Swede, I was an introvert at home, but an extrovert on the road. I was an atheist, politically radical, and always on the lookout for inequality and poverty. I too was naïve, but also open-minded. Although we traveled somewhat cocooned in our bus to and from India, we had many opportunities to meet and engage with local people, mostly young men who spoke some English. During our five-week train travel through central and southern India, we had nowhere to “hide,” so we had to engage. Like Rick, I wrote a diary of sorts, but my entries were sporadic and not enough for a book. Hence, I had to build the book on my 100-day-long journey by digging into memories, going over my over 1,300 photos (regretting that I only posed for two!), and doing a lot of research. I read everything I could find, from Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Byron, and William Dalrymple—to Marco Polo, Rory Stewart, and Michael Wood.

The result is two very different stories. The strength of Rick Steves’ book is that he invites you to be with him during his journey, to share his perspective as a 23-year-old kid on the adventure of a lifetime, but his framing sometimes limits his story. When he visits “some old, ruined minarets in the distance” (p 82) in Afghanistan, he is not aware that they were part of the Musalla Complex, one of the great wonders of Timurid architecture, which sadly had been blown up by British colonialists in a reckless attempt to stop the Russian empire from advancing in the “Great Game.” I was aware of that from Jan Myrdal’s Afghanistan books and could now add context by quoting Robert Byron’s 1937 book The Road to Oxiana. In this way I could go beyond the perspective of a 20-year-old while still offering my personal take through diary entries, letters home, and photos.

Finally, my trip didn’t change me, but his did. I came back as radical as when I left, as young and dogmatic, reading Marx and Mao, protesting U.S. and Soviet imperialism. He on the other hand started a business that changed many people’s lives. He was an American and an entrepreneur. I on the other hand, was a young Swedish rebel, dreaming of a revolution that never came.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Die - On the Book "I'm Adding Sunshine to My Paint"

Five years old, Harald Sandberg (1912-1983) came down with a double-sided pneumonia. Three doctors in Söderhamn, a city in northern Sweden, said that there was nothing they could do. (This was in the time when the Spanish flue killed tens of millions of people around the world.)

Harald survived, but the disease damaged his heart, and he was told that he was unlikely to see his tenth birthday. He looked forward to that day with trepidation, but it was his father who died on that day, 39 years old.

Early on, Harald wanted to become an artist, but a doctor said that his heart was too week for him to continue school and suggested that he should become a hairdresser. Which he did, and a successful one at that, but he never gave up on his dream.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” tells the story of the first four decades of Harald Sandberg’s life, from his birth on August 13, 1912, to the end of 1955, when he had accomplished his childhood’s dream of becoming an artist – a painter. He had had his first solo exhibits in Stockholm as well as a very successful exhibit in Paris. By then he had also brought three children into the world together with his wife Constance.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” includes a diary that Harald wrote in 1946 during a critical phase of his struggle to become an artist. It also contains two interviews made during the last two years of his life, as well as over 100 photos and illustrations.

The book was written by his son Hans Sandberg.

Over the coming months, I will post excerpts from the book - both texts and pictures - here and on my substack for the book. 

Scan the QR code below to find my book on Amazon.

Hitler, Trump and the "Revolution Against Reason"

The historian Christopher R. Browning (at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has a revealing and terrifying essay in New York Review of Books about Hitler’s quick ascend to power in the first half of 1933. In a review of three books about the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, Browning brings forward many similarities to to today’s world, in particular the U.S. Many things that looks like Trumpian weirdness and anomalies echoes of the 1930s.

Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days starts with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30. Fritzsche notes that there “was no such thing as majority opinion” in fragmented Germany and that the “political system had checkmated itself.” … He continues, “In order to smash the Weimar Republic the men in the room needed the Nazis, and to lever themselves into power, the Nazis needed the men in the room.”

And as we see Trump’s fanatics prepare for a second January 6, we should remember that the “Nazis had no intention of competing in a free and fair election.”

Fritzsche makes the telling argument that violence not only silenced Nazi opponents but was also essential to building support. The ongoing violence, choreographed as public rituals of humiliation that portrayed Nazi opponents as weak and ridiculous, turned entertained spectators into accomplices by virtue of their “voyeuristic pleasure.” The “wave of denunciation” that swept over Germany broadened the ranks of complicity further.

And as the Germans took watched the violence, they changed.

Fritzsche asks how such a “sea change,” in which “more and more Germans” accepted the “necessity of compliance” as well as the Nazi standard of “normality,” was possible. Coercion “played an undeniable role,” he concedes, but ultimately he concludes that “the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life,” and that “to make Germany great was to narrate a great awakening.”

Browning quotes Benjamin Carter Hett’s book The Death of Democracy:

“in many ways, our time more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s,” as the Nazis “were fundamentally a protest reaction against globalization.”

To build the German MAGA movement, truth has to be overcome and replaced by the submission to the Great Leader, the Fuhrer.

The lost war, revolution, unjust peace settlement, economic chaos, and “huge social and technological change” were so intolerable that they led to a rejection of reality by many Germans. And they supported Hitler because he gave “voice to this flight from reality as could no other German politician of his time.” This “hostility to reality translated into contempt for politics” that in turn destroyed the “minimal common ground” that democracy needs to function.

Like Donald Trump, Hitler lied all the time, while revealing his plans to an audience that had stopped reflecting. Truth didn’t matter.

For Hitler his message “had to be simple” and “emotional,” not intellectual. And while he was personally close to no one, he had “a remarkable intuition for the thoughts, hopes, fears, and needs of other people.” Among other traits of Hitler, Hett includes insecurity, intolerance of criticism, bombastic claims about his own achievements, and scorn for intellectuals and experts. Thus without ever mentioning Donald Trump and MAGA, Hett clearly intends to draw parallels between Hitler and the Nazis on the one hand and the current American situation on the other.

And if you are surprised that so many billionaires, powerful and conservative joined forces with a right-wing “national socialist,” you are following in the path of Germany’s conservatives.

Like Ryback and Fritzsche, Hett places ultimate responsibility for Hitler’s ascent on German conservatives, who disdained democracy:

The crisis and the deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation…. To this end, a succession of conservative politicians…courted the Nazis as the only way to retain power on terms congenial to them. Hitler’s regime was the result.

A Swede on the Hippie Trail 1974 - Watch the Video Promo!

 

I've also launched a Substack where I post excerpts from the book. Click here to check it out and subscribe!  

On This Day, 50 Years Ago, I and 40 Swedes Stepped Onto Two Buses Heading for India

50 years ago -- September 3, 1974 -- I and 40 other young and naïve Swedes entered two old Scania buses who were to take us from Stockholm to New Delhi in six weeks. We were not hippies, just ordinary people, but we did travel on what was once called the Silk Road, and in the 1960s became known as the "Hippie Trail." I was 20, an atheist and politically radical, so I was definitively not looking to find a Guru or spiritual enlightenment in India. And I had no desire to end up on a rooftop in Kathmandu, smoking pot. I was interested in the world, and this was an opportunity that had opened, and didn't cost much, since we slept on the buses. You can read more about my 3 1/2-month journey in my new book - A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974) which is now globally available on Amazon. 

Find the book on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/author/hans_sandberg

Heading Home From India and Left Behind on Mount Damavand

After five weeks crisscrossing southern India, we met up in New Delhi, and the long road back to Sweden could start. We drove through Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, and to Iran via Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. As we crossed Mount Damavand, Iran’s and Asia’s largest volcano, I was left behind in my long johns in the middle of the night. Read about it in “A Swede on the Hippie Trail.” 

 Sunset in Pakistan.

Towards the Khyber Pass.

Near Jalalabad.

The Darunta Dam on the Kabul River.

Afghanistan. Near Qalat in Zabur province.

Kids in eastern Turkey.

I don't have any photos from my adventure 

on Mount Damavand, but here is one 

from eastern Turkey. 

Kerala as a Prism of India

After Hyderabad in Telangana, Hassan, Mysuru (Mysore), and Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka, Chennai (Madras) and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, we arrived in Cochin (Kochi) on the Malabar Coast in the state of Kerala. The first humans to settle Kerala followed the coastline according to the British historian Michael Wood.

”A Swede on the Hippie Trail" -- an ebook, paperback and hard cover. Find it on Amazon.

A Ticket to South India

On October 16, we visited the Office of the Divisional Commercial Superintendent in India Railway’s Baroda House to buy train tickets for our journey through central and southern India. This building was once the residence of the Maharaja of Baroda. The walls of the office were covered with shelves stacked with binders and piles of papers behind a paper-filled desk sat an official in a white shirt. He looked over the “Letter of Identification” we had received from the Swedish Embassy, which attested that we were “bona fide students.” He then took out a form and began to fill it out on his typewriter.

The result was a Student Concession Voucher that allowed us to travel to the cities we had specified.

New Delhi - Jhansi-Sanchi - Bhopal - Khandwa-Jalgaon (by bus) - Aurangabad - Hyderabad - Bangalore City - Madras Central/ Egmere - Madurai - Rameshwaram - Madras Egmere/ Central - New Delhi.

Read the story of my journey in my new book on Amazon.