A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail
Last Updated 25 January 2026
Dedicated to anyone ever busted for cannabis
Most literature about the 'Hippie Trail' available in 2025, both academic and commercial, was written by people who had almost no understanding of the subject and did little useful research. It's embarrassingly poor.
Richard Gregory, who went on the Hippie Trail himself as a teenager, was astonished to find that no other author ever seems to have consulted the contemporary press archives, a curious omission as the term 'Hippie Trail' was rarely used outside Fleet Street in those days.
So this long-form piece provides a comprehensive history of the Hippie Trail that is based on documentary evidence rather than the 'magical thinking' used elsewhere (and thoroughly debunked herein), while its conclusions are summarised in the following definitions:
Hippie Trail n. UK media term for the overland journey between Europe and the primary sources of cannabis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal (or Goa in winter), originally called the Hashish Trail by the US media and often involving smuggling, as undertaken between 1965 and 1980 by 'hippies' of all nationalities.
Hippie n. US media term for a participant in the 1960s youth subculture that evolved from the 'beatniks', whose adherents often identified as 'freaks' or 'heads' and who scandalised society by endorsing cannabis, opposing the Vietnam war and draft, being sexually liberal and letting male hair grow to its natural length.
The approach is unashamedly polemic - because, unlike almost everything else written on the subject, the text is backed up by research and documentary evidence.
The project began on 4 December 2008 when I published the first iteration of this page as 'A Brief History of the Hippie Trail', a 1,400 word treatment for a documentary that was never made, written from memory. I later got serious, doing extensive research and expanding the page to 70,000 words (with a 15,000 word Appendix).
Countless thousands read it for free, but as I am not keen to have my work buried in AI slop my 'Pukka History of the Hippie Trail' will no longer be available online - it has been published in book form as a limited edition hardback, to be sold while stocks last. On Sale Here.
This spin-off project was undertaken in 2025.
It is being published in book form as a limited edition hardback - all contributors get a free copy, some copies will go to reference libraries, the remainder will be put on public sale in order to recover some of the costs. No profit will be made. On Sale Here.
Anyone thinking of buying a copy should understand that it is a history book - if you are looking for salacious tales of sex and drugs you will be disappointed.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that the young people of the 1970s indulged in such pastimes with the customary enthusiasm. Take it as read.
What you will get instead are the facts about the Magic Bus company, based on documentary evidence, interviews with pivotal insiders, and actual research - an apparently novel approach that I would recommend to others.
As recently as 2021 Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler went on record as saying that "I don't think there ever was a single Magic Bus, or company or business named Magic Bus. I think the name was just applied to any bus heading out from Europe to India".
As with the Hippie Trail, what you read elsewhere about Magic Bus is likely to be nonsense, as the people who are considered experts are mostly "fucking clueless".
And you may quote me.
The 1996 book A Season In Heaven by David Tomory is the source of some of the most pernicious falsehoods about the Hippie Trail - and it is endorsed by Tony Wheeler.
The cover describes Tomory as "a veteran of the road to Kathmandu", though the text reveals that he never actually went there. "It's terrific!" says publisher Wheeler.
Tomory's own contribution is small - most of the book consists of anecdotes transcribed from interviews, using the technique known as 'oral history'. But like the false claim on the book's cover, none of the statements made are fact-checked (and many are total bollocks).
Cat Stevens wrote songs in Kathmandu? You read it here first, though Cat himself had denied it in 1972. Yet this garbage is repeated by most subsequent writers.
Sigi's Hotel in Kabul was on Chicken Street? As above, it's complete nonsense, though Tony Wheeler claims he went there himself and it was "halfway down".
I took a nice photograph of Sigi's in 1974, and so did Tony Walton a year earlier. Both of these images show a broad tree-lined pavement in front of the hotel, unlike any shot of Chicken Street ever taken.
These are the two best-known examples in the book, but there are many more. Using the 'oral history' technique without fact-checking is worse than useless, and much also depends on who you invite to give testimony.
One of the most clueless things that I have seen written about the Hippie Trail is the idea that it began in "the mid-1950s" - which Wikipedia currently insists is the case.
This nonsense seems to have originated with a couple of clowns named Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, whose ivory tower apparently places their heads in the clouds:
"This is the first history of the Hippie Trail", proclaims the blurb on the cover of their 2017 tome - but inside the text clearly states that "Richard Gregory has written A Brief History of the Hippie Trail: Overland from Europe to Asia in Search of Hashish" - and gives a URL for this very page (first published in 2008, almost a decade earlier).
"Only two or three of our interviewees willingly accepted the term hippie as a self-description", they say - and one contributor was "part of a British Army expedition which travelled by Land Rover from Britain to Nepal and back".
Garbage in, garbage out. The authors also misrepresent my written output and fabricate an absurd statement that they attribute to me. Academics? Scumbags, more like.
"It is easy to identify a year as the beginning of the hippie trail: 1957", they say. "When Kerouac's writing met Paddy Garrow-Fisher's coaches, a new type of travel along a new route could be imagined: the hippie trail began..."
This would have been news to Paddy, who didn't need coaches to travel to India and whose story is told in my book All Aboard The Indiaman. On Sale Here.
The earliest known use of the term 'Hippie Trail' is found in The Times of India from 12 December 1968 and concerns hippies caught with large amounts of hashish in Delhi. The first appearance of the term that has been discovered in Europe was from the Daily Mirror in May 1969.
Before that it was known as the 'Hashish Trail' in USA, a term used in both America and India until 1973. The two terms were interchangeable and they described the same phenomenon - young westerners travelling overland from Europe to Asia in their thousands in search of hashish.
UK press coverage of the Hippie Trail pretty much ended after 1973, though the numbers on the road from Europe continued to increase massively, especially to Goa, and there was still some media coverage in India, Canada and USA. It all came to an end in 1980, when Iran became problematic and air travel became affordable.
The revisionism began in earnest in the 1990s, with Simon Dring fronting radio and TV broadcasts for the BBC (and a coffee-table book too) - suddenly, everyone who had been overland to India for whatever reason was deemed to have travelled on the Hippie Trail.
It was nonsense on stilts, compounded by the pernicious falsehoods in David Tomory's influential book, endorsed by Tony Wheeler and repeated thereafter by just about every other writer to address the subject - none of whom thought it wise to consult the press archives.
Tony Wheeler is frequently wrong about the Hippie Trail because he has never bothered to do any proper research (or pay one of his minions to do it). But I wouldn't say he was dishonest, just hopelessly misguided.
Another so-called 'expert' on the Hippie Trail is Canadian author Rory MacLean, best known for his book Magic Bus - in which he claims that the Magic Bus company began in "a cockroach-infested office on Amsterdam's Dam Square".
No such office ever existed. Nothing MacLean wrote about the company should be treated as factual, and I would caution readers to be wary about the rest of his book.
"I started driving to India in '66", says 'Rudy', a bus driver who MacLean claims to meet in Teheran. "My Bedford was a tatty Barnstaple school bus".
Rudy is clearly based on Jon Benyon, who appears in the acknowledgements - but Jon didn't drive his bus from Barnstaple to India until 1972, and doesn't claim to have met Timothy Leary (a story probably inspired by David Tomory, along with those about Sigi and Cat Stevens).
Jon does tell the tale on his website of driving the first double-decker bus into Kathmandu, while MacLean has Rudy in Teheran saying "Hey, did I tell you that I drove the first double-decker bus into Kathmandu?"
One has to wonder what else in the book is fiction - some passages are obvious candidates - and MacLean later wrote a piece in The Guardian in which he claimed that hippies inspired al-Qaeda. Twat.
Hippie Trail destinations reported in the media.
I drew a map to accompany the original Brief History of the Hippie Trail in 2008. It has since been finessed slightly but the destinations have never changed.
Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chitral, Kashmir, Manali and Nepal were the sources of hashish. Hippies knew it, and so did the contemporary media, which reported all of them as destinations on the Hippie Trail.
Goa was not a producer of hashish, but it was common for hippies to bring it down from the mountains and relax on the beaches there, particularly for Xmas and New Year.
The media reports were clear - the Hippie Trail, originally called the Hashish Trail, was all about cannabis.
Written by the clueless for the gullible.
Tony Wheeler, David Tomory, Simon Dring, Rory MacLean, Gemie & Ireland, Mark Liechty, Uncle Tom Cobley and all - these are the supposed 'experts' on the Hippie Trail.
None of them seem to have consulted the contemporary press archives to find out what the term 'Hippie Trail' was actually describing, and none of them seem aware that it was originally called the Hashish Trail either. But most will tell you that Cat Stevens wrote songs in Kathmandu and that Sigi's Hotel was on Chicken Street.
I call it 'the circle jerk of cluelessness'.
Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg in the Himalayas 1962, photographed by Joanne Kyger.
Snyder and Kyger were the only Beat writers to visit Kathmandu - neither had a good word to say about it, and they encouraged nobody else to go there.
Many in the 'jerk circle' claim that Jack Kerouac and other Beats inspired the Hippie Trail, and Mark Liechty even makes a false claim in support of this risible theory.
The only Beats to visit Kathmandu were Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, who had nothing good to say about it. Allen Ginsberg, who had ample opportunity, didn't even bother. And Jack Kerouac never went anywhere near it.
Referring to Ginsberg and Snyder's 1962 trip, Liechty falsely claims that "Accounts of their sojourn soon appeared in places like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's trend-setting City Lights Review, inspiring others to set out on the Road to Kathmandu".
He is thinking of City Lights Journal #1, which he clearly hasn't read - it has contributions from Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac, but Kathmandu is not mentioned in it.
Others claim that Kerouac's Dharma Bums contains a 'vision' of the Hippie Trail, but that book doesn't mention Kathmandu either (or Kabul, or Goa). It is all rather desperate 'fanboy' stuff, and easily debunked.
*******
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1877
Often conflated with the Hippie Trail is what I prefer to call the Guru Trail, a completely different (and much older) activity that went to completely different destinations for completely different reasons.
It arguably began with Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to have travelled overland to Tibet in 1867 and spent two years there, studying and developing her 'psychic powers' - but none of her contemporary writings survive and her later recollections were contradictory.
What is beyond doubt is that Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and later sailed to India, becoming one of the first western converts to Buddhism. She then set up shop in London.
Indian gurus began to tour USA and Europe in the 1890s, with westerners seeking enlightenment in India ever since - in the early 20th century spiritual seekers on the Guru Trail travelled by ship, and some even set themselves up as 'Euro Gurus' in the Himalayas.
Popular pilgrim destinations included Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Almora, Rishikesh and (later) Dharamsala, all visited by Allen Ginsberg in 1962 - though he never went to any of the actual Hippie Trail destinations, even in 1970.
Members of the 'jerk circle' also insist that The Beatles were on the Hippie Trail in 1968, though they flew to Delhi and went to Rishikesh. "We made a mistake", said John Lennon when he got back, with his scathing song Sexy Sadie laying it down for all to see.
The actual Hippie Trail was known as the Hashish Trail at the time, with the term coined by Time magazine in 1967 and specifying Kathmandu as the destination.
Gemie & Ireland associated my name with the assertion that hippies "travelled from Afghanistan, through Chitral and Kashmir to Nepal", which may be the most ignorant statement in their book (though competition is stiff).
The direct road from Afghanistan to Chitral was not open to westerners - they had to use the Khyber Pass into Pakistan and travel up from Peshawar; to get from Chitral to Kashmir they had to come back down the mountain, travel the Grand Trunk Road, and cross the border from Pakistan into India. Any other route would require them to cross the Line of Control, heavily mined and guarded.
Pioneered by Eight Finger Eddie, followed by Wilko Johnson and others, the Hippie Triangle linked the primary destinations of the Hippie Trail.
Travelling from Kashmir to Nepal also involved a trip along the Grand Trunk Road. It may have been theoretically possible to go from Srinagar to Ladakh then on to Manali but I have never heard of any hippies doing that and they would still have needed to come back down to the plains for a road that went up to Nepal anyway.
Gemie & Ireland not only fail at history, they are crap at politics and geography too. They clearly didn't understand my original 2008 map so I drew another one in the style of the London Underground.
For the bigger picture they need to understand the classic Hippie Triangle, pioneered by Eight Finger Eddie in 1966 and travelled by others such as Wilko Johnson.
The Hippie Trail proper started and ended in Herat. Some bypassed Afghanistan but there was only one crossing into India and everyone used it (at Ferozepore between 1965 and 1971, Wagah/Attari at other times).
The choice then was the mountains or the beaches.
A typical advertisement from the Australian press.
"The trip that we did became known as the hippie trail. But at the time we called it the Asia overland route" - Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler in 2020, showing his ignorance of the subject as usual.
While my access to the contemporary Australian press was limited, I found very few references to the Hippie Trail in it - none in the 1960s and just a handful in the 1970s (one of which was solely about Queensland).
The newspapers had many advertisements for what was known as the Asia Overland, though. Early ones involved ships to Bombay or Colombo, often with a short stopover in Singapore, but from 1971 onwards direct flights were offered to Kathmandu, which connected with overland tour buses to England by various routes.
Antipodeans had long been using the Overland route - the Indiaman had relied on them since the 1950s - but this was not remotely the same as the Hippie Trail described in the western (and indeed the Indian) newspapers.
As far as I can tell, the term 'Hippie Trail' didn't become popular down under until a song by Men At Work topped the charts in 1981 - and suddenly almost everyone had been on it, all the way to Earl's Court.
But the actual Hippie Trail, unsurprisingly, was something that actual hippies actually did, reported extensively in the media at the time - though you wouldn't know it from all the garbage produced by the modern 'jerk circle'.
Another example of popular cluelessness - promoted by Wikipedia and others - is the claim that the Hippie Trail went overland from Europe to South-East Asia.
But there was no road (or railway) at the time.
The Oxford & Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition used Land Rovers on the wartime Ledo Road through Burma to reach Singapore in 1956; Peter Townsend (with help from Fred Warner) did the same in a Land Rover in 1957; Eric Edis and crew made it in a Land Rover in 1958, returning the same way with another crew later that year; Roy Follows and Noel Dudgeon drove a Willys Jeep from Singapore to England in the interval. All found it a struggle.
All had difficulty obtaining visas (and Edis resorted to forgery). All were warned of insurgents and potential attacks, with armed escorts sometimes provided.
By 1960 both India and Burma had stopped issuing travel permits altogether and what was left of the Ledo Road and its bridges had mostly been reclaimed by the jungle.
It seems that no other westerners travelled overland from India through the Burmese jungle to Thailand for the rest of the 20th century - and certainly not any hippies.
New roads have recently been built, and Indian engineers have been working on the India-Burma-Thailand Trilateral Highway - but the difficult section in northern Burma has reportedly "been delayed since 2015 due to the termination of the contractor's agreement".
I don't doubt that Indian engineers will prevail if the money is provided, but hippies are in short supply these days.
*******
The book of A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail contains most of what was originally published on this page.
It benefits from a revised structure and edit - the version on this page was partly a live blog of my research - plus an additional layer of fact-checking (never a bad thing).
The only downside is that you will now have to pay for it - but the British Library will have a copy and you could ask your local librarian to order one (the same applies to my other titles, published simultaneously).
All three books of The India Overland Trilogy - A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail, A History of Magic Bus and All Aboard The Indiaman - are now On Sale Here.
Buying direct is the cheapest option, but is only available for UK addresses. Overseas sales are handled by eBay - they deal with the various postage rates and customs duties involved (and charge for it) but as Mrs Goggins has retired it is the most convenient method. I deal with the orders myself and drop them off at the post office.
Despite what you may read elsewhere the books are not available on Amazon - and (second-hand copies apart) they never will be. Don't be fooled.
As I write this, Amazon offer all three books for sale and will apparently take your money, declaring that the goods are "Usually dispatched within 6 to 7 months" [sic].
They are lying.
If I listed my books on Amazon they would skim 15% of the sale price off the top and impose other charges - they would make a profit and I would make a loss on each sale. Call me old-fashioned, but I am not interested.
I'm not sure how many of Amazon's customers would be willing to wait six months for a drone to come along and drop the books in their duck pond anyway.
As for a digital version, Amazon would skim 40% off the sale price for that - and buyers may find that they can't access it if they don't upgrade their hardware.
I currently have no intention of publishing digital versions of my books on Amazon or anywhere else.
I published a collection of 45 reviews of material about the Hippie Trail on this website in January 2025 under the title 'The Hippie Trail Canon'. They quickly became a magnet for swarms of AI robots and sadly had to be withdrawn.
The full 70,000-word version of this page, its 15,000-word appendix, and my 70-minute documentary film Blazing The Hippie Trail were also withdrawn for the same reason.
I wrote the song Along The Hippie Trail in 2016.
As befits such an epic subject it is relatively lengthy, even though I cut out one of the verses, and a full performance will run to at least six minutes.
About twenty seconds of a live performance was used in a crappy movie called The Beatles And India, which is twenty seconds more than the fab four's music got. A studio single produced by myself and featuring harmonica virtuoso Tyler Hatwell was predictably prepared to coincide with the film.
Digital audio of Along The Hippie Trail is now available from iTunes, Amazon and other outlets at very reasonable prices. A limited edition CD single was pressed as a highly fungible token for promotional purposes, and predictably sunk without trace. So it goes.
There is a music video on YouTube as well, which is also bundled as a bonus item on Bandcamp - if you want to support the project, that is where to buy the record, but if streaming is your thing then head over to Spotify.
I made my first website in 1998, before Google existed.
For 27 years I have been writing on the web to amuse, entertain and educate anyone who is interested - free to all, no login required, no cookies, no advertising, and all paid for out of my own pocket.
I was hooked from the moment in 1998 that the first email came in - it was from a total stranger who liked what I was doing - and I have had countless people email me from around the world since then. Bless 'em all.
But now the thrill is gone.
In 2025 there was a change. Where previously most traffic to this site was from humans who found me through links, recommendations and search engines, it is now dominated by AI robots, whose operators are aggressively trying to monetize the free content by mixing it with all the garbage out there and spewing out the resulting chimera as if it were authoritative information.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
I intend to publish the best of this website in book form. I will leave some current content online but I doubt that I will ever write for the web again. So it goes.
Be seeing you.
Richard Gregory
25 January 2026
A native of Shepherd's Bush in London (where he still lives) Richard Gregory bought a one-way bus ticket to Kathmandu as a teenager, making his own way home using a mixture of public transport and hitch-hiking.
Many people called him a 'hippie' back then, and fifty years later some still do. Funny old world.
Richard took up signwriting in the 1970s, spending much of his working life as a freelancer, and went into computing in the 1990s, specialising in print and web publishing.
A self-taught musician, he has performed around London for many years, offering original and cover material for fun and fronting a band with his son Julian - there is nothing quite like Richard Gregory On Stage.
In 2025 Richard wrote The India Overland Trilogy as an antidote to all the garbage produced elsewhere.
"I hate hippies... they want to save the Earth but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad."
Eric Theodore Cartman
