Overland on the Hippie Trail

By: Larry Farmer

Narrated by: Larry Lee Farmer

Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

It was a new age, one called the Age of Aquarius, with a restless, ideological generation full of a reverence for new worlds opening up to new ideas. When the Beatles introduced the mystique of India to pop culture, the Hippie Trail was established as hip adventurers traveled overland from Europe to Kathmandu and India.

Hunter was not among these hipsters. Still bitter over the way he was treated as a Marine combat veteran home from the Vietnam War, he felt the allure of the open road in America and in Europe. While getting visas in Vienna, he came across a Polish girl, Ewa, whose Politburo father got her unequal privileges she gladly abused to join Hunter on the trek to India to check out the new-age ashrams.

Shared experiences and hardships bonded them, but Cold War politics made falling in love the worst hardship of all.

©2018 Larry Farmer (P)2018 Larry Farmer

Overland On The Hippie Trail

A very well written novel about a very interesting time. The sixties generation traced the footsteps of The Beatles after their infamous encounter with Indian culture and Eastern religion in 1968. The Beatles flew to India but their devotees admirably went overland in the years following on what became known as the hippie trail. The two main characters, Hunter, a Marine combat veteran from Texas, and Ewa, a Polish girl whose father was a higher up in the Communist regime’s establishment, made this trek just before the fall of the Shah in Iran and just before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, making them among the last Westerners to be able to make such a trek. Their adventurous spirit and curiosity made for a very good follow through to the new mod world The Beatles created through pop culture. India was impoverished yet so much of the cultural splendor was still present. They saw first hand the poverty and the cultural glory by staying with social workers of a Hindu charitable group. A very intriguing story and imagery. A beautiful love story thrown in.

That is why we read books, to escape to a place!

Ever been in love? Ever had a good friend? Ever had that one soul mate? If you have, you might just want to take an amazing adventure with them- and end up in Kathmandu or India. This story leaves the reader feeling as though they are young at heart. Being read by the author, helps the reader feel as though this author, may have presented more non fiction than fiction, and that emotion does transfer in the telling of the story. For me as a reader, that is a big part of the writing of any story. I don’t simply want a fiction book, I want some parts of it to be true. Don’t we all want some part of a fairy tale to be real? Of course we do, even if it is simply an adventure. That is why we read books, to escape to a place! This is a great book to do that with.

Part Travalogue, Part Love Story

Overland on the Hippie Trail is an odd book that hearkens back to the great travelogues of an earlier era; books that capture the geography, the culture and the people the writer encounters, but also, a sense of the momentousness of the occasion - that sense that this was a brief, shining moment in time that was unique to that writer's experience and can never be recaptured. The route he describes has long passed into history. So many countries, from Poland to Iran to India itself have experienced massive political changes that have left the places and the people the hero describes as nothing more than a memory.
In fact, as he admits in the closing notes, the trip Farmer took back then is no longer even possible with the regime changes.
Even the relationship between Hunter and Awa was rooted, to a large extent, in political and cultural experiences that aren't possible in toay's world. The privileged, Eastern block girl, the American G.I. searching for meaning in life and still believing in the innate goodness of a world not yet disillusioned by the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iran Revolution, 9-11 or the rise of Muslim extremism.
Hunter and Awa's love story is in many ways secondary to the snapshot of the world the story presents and if you're looking for a love story, this probably isn't the book for you, even though their story of a love that grew in spite of massive cultural and political differences, survived decades and produced a heartwarming HEA is certainly a feel-good story worth reading. Still, it's the sociological and historical movement the story chronicles that provides the real value and, for anyone who remembers the innocent hopefulness that marked those late Beatles, post Viet Nam days of of the 1970s, it's a trip back to something we've lost that's well worth the journey.

Overland The Hippie Trail

I’m not sure exactly what I expected in this story, from the description I thought it would be a lot different. It was very hard to get into the storyline and listen to the narrator. Not at all what I was expecting.

Not what I expected

This guy is the opposite of everything the hippie trail was. I feel tricked. Full of right wing politics.