Books & Poetry

Back in the late 1960s, a stuttering stream of vehicles relayed wide-eyed westerners from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Radicalised by Vietnam, the overlanders – or ‘intrepids’ as author Maclean tweely has it – finally found the impetus to take the Kerouac-style road trip of their dreams, this time in bright yellow school-buses, Messerschmitt bubble cars, reclaimed Royal Mail vans and multi-coloured VW campers.

Maclean picks up the trail 30 years later, travelling across Asia on local transport and the occasional plane when the going gets too tough. (Much of the route is now literally a war path.) The resulting travelogue is as much a history of travel writing as an attempt to understand the idealism of the ’60s and the impact of the revelatory opening up of the East as a tour destination. Ambivalence greets his enquiries as to whether the would-be revolutionaries left a positive legacy: ‘We are grateful to the hippies,’ admits one local, ‘because they taught us how to make Nescafé.’ The creaking hippies Maclean meets en route are sad figures, and their sentimentalising of the past gets tiresome.

There are some wonderfully rendered scenes, though, especially one of aid workers and diplomats on a US military base in Afghanistan (complete with Burger King outlets) grooving to a Wurlitzer in a rare moment of abandon.