And that should be our goal in our sightseeing as we bring the rubble of Rome to life. Dame Mary Beard, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for writing Emperor of Rome, and best wishes with your teaching and your work. Thanks

very much, Rick.

Mary tells us how Emperor Claudius showed the sense of humor that an emperor was expected to have. It's in an extra to today's interview. You can listen in at ricksteves.com/radio. Up next, we get up close and personal as I take you back with me to 1978. A just-graduated history major teams up again with the high school buddy he shared his first non-parental adventures with bumming around Europe. This time, we take on the great unknown of the legendary Hippie Trail all the way to Kathmandu. Oh, baby, it's Travel with Rick Steves. In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. As a 23-year I made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, I documented it in my journal. Leaping off a moving train in Yugoslavia, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for my first time in Harat, battling leeches in Pokhara, making the scene on Freak Street in Kathmandu. It's all in my 60,000 journal, which is now my newest book. To celebrate the release of On the Hippie Trail, I'm joined by my travel partner on that trip, Gene Openshaw, to reminisce about that epic adventure. And you're invited to stow away with us now as we spin a few yarns from what was absolutely my trip of a lifetime. Gene, thanks for joining us. Namaste. Namaste. Hi. Yes. You know, we traveled together in 1973, did a typical European whirlwind tour, and then when we graduated from college, we teamed up again in 1978 and did what really was the ultimate trip on this planet for kids just getting out of school, the hippie trail. Looking back on that, it really was a special trip at a special time for two young guys, wasn't it?

Yeah, it sure caught us at a kind of watershed point in our lives. We just graduated from college, 22 and 23, and we're not looking forward to launching into the conventional corporate path. And we were looking around for what to do and some kind of adventure. You know, and it was also the spirit of the times. Remember, this is 1978. There's still that idea of you want to find yourself and the road less traveled. And I think we got caught up in the spirit of that. And what fit the bill for that? The hippie trail. You know, now I travel because

I know things and I want to see them. I think on this trip, I just wanted to go behind the dark side of the moon. I wanted to be away. India was like the edge of the world. You

know, there be dragons. And I think that was part of the allure for us. And

for younger people, it's hard to imagine a world with no safety net, no internet. You can't withdraw money. You've got it all in your money belt. You've got no guidebooks. You've got no way to connect with your loved ones back home. Kind of scary.

Boy, I think you just put your finger on it, that you just, you don't have, like today, you don't have that connection to your familiar world. You're out there on your own. Wow.

And so, I don't know what got into me. You must have thought I was kind of boring because every night, apparently, I wrote in this journal, just fiendishly interested in documenting it. But this was years before I was a travel teacher. I was a piano teacher at the time. But I had this journal. And then during the pandemic, I kind of just discovered it. It was vivid. And you and I both worked on this book, editing it. And I'm just so thankful that you're my editor anyways in so many of my writing projects, but you happen to have been my travel partner on this trip. What was it like for you to read that journal 40 years later?

Yeah, it was like encountering your 22-year self again. He just sort of walked in the door, and it's you and me and this couple of guys that I kind of forgot even existed, and then here they were. You know what really struck me as I read your journal? It was our bravado. You're writing about this stuff, you're journaling, and it's really good, and you're just describing what we do in a very matter-of way,

and I'm looking at it going, yeah, but it was wow. I've never thought about that bravado. I mean, I don't usually think of me and bravado in the same sentence. Or foolishness, whatever it is. It was bravado, baby. I got to admit, if I was my parent, I'd be nervous about what we were about to do. Oh, absolutely. We were clueless. We had no money. We were not reckless, but we were also saying yes to serendipity. Yes.

But we didn't know what we were getting into. That's

the thing. We got into hairier situations than we expected. And I remember every time we got 100 miles farther away from the Greek Isles, I kept thinking we could still turn around and have a vacation. And we had a huddle because it got scarier and deeper, and we decided to keep on pushing.

I remember that moment when we were talking about turning around. We were in Tehran, if I remember, and that's like almost halfway to India. And we went, do we cut bait and run or do we keep forging ahead? And I remember, in fact, the exact moment that we were totally tapped out from just getting as far as Tehran. And we're on this street corner in Tehran. It's 95 degrees. And we're lost. We pull out a map. And then suddenly we hear this guy go, hey, can I help you? That was Abe, remember? And we ran into this Iranian who took us in, fed us, let us stay in his apartment for a couple days. And I think that was the moment we kind of went, yes, we can do this. We can carry on.

We were in squalor after a three-day bus ride in Tehran hanging out with grease monkeys and hippies, barefoot people whose feet were like hoofs. We were learning that on this hippie trail there was two kinds of travelers, those who know they have worms and those who don't know they have worms. You were sick at the time, and we met Abe.

And it was just that nice oasis that we needed on this long journey. You know, as I think about the trip, there's kind of like three chapters of it. We go from Istanbul, we cross the deserts of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and that was kind of this rough stretch. And then we continue on to the sort of Shangri-La of India with all that intensity. And then we finish the trip at the end of the hippie trail, the ultimate mecca of freaks and hippies and us, Kathmandu.

Oh, man. This is Travel with Rick Steves. I'm joined by my buddy Gene Openshop, and we're sharing memories from our epic hippie trail trip from Istanbul to Kathmandu back in 1978. Gene was 22 and I was 23, and we had no money, but we had lots of what Gene just called bravado. Gene Openshaw's a travel writer. He's a composer, a humorist, a philosopher. His latest book is Michelangelo at Midlife. For more on Gene's work, you can go to his website, geneopenshaw.com. Gene's been a collaborator with me for writing projects for decades, and along with many books that we've co-authored over the years, Gene edited my newest book, which is what we're talking about today, On the Hippie Trail. So, Gene, you were talking about the arch of the trip. It was a long way to get from Istanbul to Kathmandu, and there was no guidebooks, and you and I are both into guidebooks. What are your memories of traveling without

information? Oh, boy, yeah. There really wasn't. It was kind of like a 3,500 like you called it, the dark side of the moon, sort of radio silence, and we didn't know. There was that one guidebook, the bit guide, but it was a staple-bound mimeograph thing. And most of the information that we got was from our fellow travelers. You know, they might call it today, you know, crowdsourcing or

something. Crowdsourcing. But our crowd was the international gang of backpackers on a bus for 42 hours across Turkey. And I would, like a little beggar, go up and down the aisle.

Yeah. It was that, you know, the code of the road. When someone would know

something, you owed it to your fellow traveler to pass that information along. And that's what the bit guide was. It was, as you mentioned, a staple-bound collection of these loose communiques from the road, which also included, to just sort of goose the adventure dimension of this, people who were busted at borders and were in prison and what they needed for their own comfort and health. This person's doing time in Afghanistan because he tried to do this at the border between Iran and Afghanistan, and he needs blankets. It would actually say that.

Talking about borders, you remember getting to the border of Afghanistan? You know, my memory of that border a dull needle stuck in my arm because they decided just

arbitrarily that I needed a vaccination that I didn't have on my card. And my memory was the way that needle bent when they tried to put it into your arm. And then we got on a bus finally and headed for Herat, which was just a delight. Let me read a little bit about Herat, the first stop in Afghanistan. This is just from the book, and I'd like to stoke your memory of that. We took a nighttime walk. Mingling was a bit intensified. I didn't know if it was because of the hashish or because I was in a very good mood, but I was tickled by little things, like a man weighing tomatoes. Hustlers became playful. The sun had gone down, the lanterns came on, chariots with torches charged through the darkness. Harat is small, but it really doesn't matter because no street is ever the same if you walk through it a second or a third time. I just love Harat.

Oh, yeah. That's kind of where the trip sort of began after that long stretch from Istanbul through Iran. Maybe that's also because that's where we first smoked hashish. Where I first smoked. You were the experienced pot smoker, relatively speaking. Yeah, I wasn't exactly Snoop Dogg, but

yeah, I was cut more or less. And I had decided I only want to smoke where I feel comfortable and there's no peer pressure. And it just felt so normal in Afghanistan. So I said, Gene, take me there. But then we would walk, whether you're smoking pot or not. You would just walk in a different direction. And every five or six meters or yards, there'd be another shop, another artisan. And we didn't need a guidebook. We'd just walk and immerse ourselves in that culture.

Yeah, it was almost like in a movie or something, and you'd look at one thing, and then you'd take five or ten steps, and suddenly you're in a different scene. It were like these manger-like settings that the incense or the smoke is coming out. And with the lantern light, it was like a Rembrandt painting. The light sources were just vivid. Yes. And we were getting these little glimpses into Afghani life. And it was very wonderful.

And I remember it was curious for us. How do we properly wave to somebody or greet somebody? What is the physical thing? And we tried different things. And we came up with, in Herat, you kiss your hand, and then you bring your hand to your heart. And that's how we would greet people. And that resonated with people.

It did work. And I'm glad that we came across that because bridging that cultural divide was very difficult. We didn't understand it. And we were about as culturally sensitive as people would be in those days. Nowadays, we take globalism so much for granted. Everybody knows different cultures and accepts them. But we grew up in a time when that was just not as common. We were trying very hard to bridge that divide between us

Westerners and the people around us. My longtime travel buddy Gene Openshaw is reliving the epic travel adventure we shared right out of college in the 1970s, right now on Travel with Rick Steves. Gene's helped edit the journal I wrote on that adventure, which I sort of rediscovered in the downtime we had during the pandemic lockdown. The new book is called On the Hippie Trail. It's being released February 4th. So, Gene, you know, we went finally from Afghanistan over Khyber Pass, and I remember it was like a cultural and an environmental continental divide. We left the Muslim world, and we entered the Hindu world. We left the vast arid expanses, and we entered the Indian subcontinent which is so lush and it was monsoon time. We never saw the mountains but we saw lots of monsoon and it was a beautiful, vibrant, luscious sort of life. And I remember crossing the border of India thinking I'm coming home. It was the weirdest. Do you remember the border of India?

I definitely do. Yeah. What

were your feelings as we crossed into India?

Well, it was a lot of work to get there. And it was finally a sense of just accomplishment. And, you know, when you enter into Pakistan and India, you're also entering into a little more familiar territory because there is that British infrastructure. People spoke English more commonly, and they were used to Western travelers. And so I did feel like when you say we were kind of coming home.

Yeah, and we were ready for a break, so we turned left and went up to Kashmir. Yes. And Kashmir is this mountainous land, part Hindu, part Muslim. It's today conflicted, so I don't think there's much tourism there. But it was a dream land, and even in British times, the elites, whether they were Indian people or English people, they would go up to Kashmir to get away from the heat. And there's a lake there, and to this day it's got the same houseboats that housed the British big shots a century ago. And from the journal I wrote, We closed the deal on our houseboat on Lake Dahl, checked in, and within minutes were lounging on our sun deck. The houseboy stopped by to tell us that the hot water was prepared and we could shower before our duck dinner would be served. We were like rags to riches. Yeah.

We'd spent, you know, all these weeks living on mutton and lamb's eyeballs and... Tough buff, we called it. Tough water buffalo. Water buffalo, and you'd chew it. You couldn't swallow

it, but you'd chew all the nutritional value out of it, and you'd spit out the gristle. Yeah, it was finally getting the payoff for all of our hard travel. And you could sit up there, and the world would come to you on this floating commerce, and we'd have a family that was at our beck and call. And I remember you and I come from a more of an egalitarian world, and we weren't comfortable with our own servants. And it is more of a norm in India than what we were comfortable with.