Happy Hippie Trail Is Now Off-Limits
Nov. 12 -- He was roughing it in Iran in 1978, when the country was convulsing with revolutionary fervor and violence during the Islamic revolution. But today, John McCleary is relieved his stepson will be skipping Bali on his travels.
It's not that McCleary, a resident of Monterey, Calif., explicitly forbade his 25-year-old stepson from stopping by the Indonesian island on his way back from Australia later this year.
It was his wife, Joan Jeffers McCleary, a former activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the tumultuous '60s, who talked her son out of the visit. She was fearful after last month's devastating bomb attack at a Bali nightclub, which killed nearly 200 people, most of them tourists.
In his heyday, the 59-year-old McCleary — author of The Hippie Dictionary, a 670-page cultural encyclopedia of the '60s and '70s — had been to some pretty hairy places, and he says the prospect of a trip to Bali doesn't really bother him.
But he concedes that terrorist attacks such as the bomb blasts that ripped through the Sari nightclub on Bali's Kuta beach last month do change things a bit these days.
"It's cutting down on the number of countries you can go to," says McCleary. "There are less and less places that are safe."
In the Swinging '60s, when peace and love seemed imminently possible, free spirits in search of adventure, spiritual fulfillment and good grass hitched onto the "Happy Hippie Trail" from Kabul to Kuta — via Katmandu.
With idealism in their heads, mantras on their lips and precious little moolah in their hip pouches, they often took the cheapest overland routes to the "mystic East," picking up friends, stories and visa stamps along the way.
Like the myriad caravan trails that made up the ancient Silk Route connecting Europe to China, these latter-day Marco Polos became hippie frontiersmen and women, making stops where the locals were welcoming, the food cheap and the pot flowed freely.
The Lost K's
But the times, they have a-changed.
Asian spirituality is available — for a price — at the local yoga center back home. Backpackers today tend to put their hotel bills on their credit cards, check their e-mail at cybercafés, avoid the marijuana and the concomitant risk of spending time in a nasty jail cell. Increasingly, they're bypassing the popular '60s destinations.
For the latter, few can fault them. The three K's on the hippie trail are rapidly turning into no-go zones.
Kabul, the Afghan capital, was once a hippie hot spot, where a weary traveler was assured of a steaming samovar and a kindly tribesman host. But it fell off the backpackers' itineraries when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and the mujahideen (Muslim religious warriors) proceeded to pulverize the country after the Soviets withdrew.
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