Happy Hippie Trail Is Now Off-Limits
Nov. 12, 2002 -- 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.
A year after the U.S.-led war on terrorism brought about the fall of the Taliban, Kabul is slowly limping back to normalcy. But the security situation is still precarious, and journalists and aid workers still make up the bulk of the city's foreign visitors.
Katmandu, the Nepali capital famed for its spectacular mountain views and quaint streets bustling with friendly natives, is no longer kind to foreign travelers.
In the past few years, a violent Maoist uprising has crippled Nepal and plunged the Himalayan nation into a vicious cycle of violence that has claimed more than 7,000 lives in the past seven years.
And Kuta — the popular, surfer-friendly bay on Indonesia's island of Bali that was, until recently, a haven of Southeast Asian tranquility in a world rapidly being engulfed by political unrest — is a ghost town today. Exactly a month after the attack, the bombing of the Sari club has shaken the confidence of even the most seasoned traveler.
‘My Life Changed Forever’
The morning after the Oct.12 Bali attack, Jason Gaspero, a longtime world traveler who now lives in Hawaii, turned on the television and was utterly devastated by the news reports.
"I spent two years in Kuta and they were the best years of my life," Gaspero says in a phone interview from Hawaii. "I met my girlfriend in Bali and it was at the Sari club that I really got to know her. Bali was so unique, so fun. I learned a new language there, I met people from all over the world there … when I turned on the TV and saw the fire, I felt like my life had changed forever."
After ensuring that two friends who were in Kuta at the time of the attack were safe, Gaspero found he needed to sit at his computer to put some order into the storm of emotions clouding his brains.
What emerged was a 1,000-odd word paean to a lost way of life and a commitment to the resilience of the traveling spirit, which was posted on the extensive Thorn Tree bulletin board at the Lonely Planet Web site, a popular site for backpackers from all over the world.
"They [terrorists] went after backpackers. Surfers, revelers. And all the local Indonesians that got caught in the blast," he wrote before solemnly pledging that the attack would not dampen his enthusiasm for the road.
‘A War on Tourism’
Indeed, seasoned backpackers insist that while the attack in Bali — an island otherwise known as "paradise on Earth" — shocked them, it did not dampen their appetite to leave home and see the world.
"I'm carefree about these things," says Australian Chris Pola, a 26-year-old native of Sydney, as he soaks up some late autumn sun outside a youth hostel in New York. "I don't think twice about traveling all over the world. I should think twice, but not at the moment. I'm just not going to be stopped."
Pola's assertions notwithstanding, the combined effect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in America and the Bali blasts have been devastating for many Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
At a two-day summit in Cambodia earlier this month, members of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, made a plea to the rest of the world to stop issuing warnings against travel to the region, which depends on tourism for large amounts of revenue. Some have even dubbed the flurry of recent travel warnings "a war on tourism."
Experts say that although it's still too early to calculate the economic impact of the Bali blasts, initial figures are not comforting. According to Indonesia's Ministry of Tourism, hotel occupancy, which was 70 percent before Oct. 12, dropped to less than 10 percent by the first week of November.
Too Volatile to Vacation In
By all accounts, the number of places perceived to be too volatile to vacation in seems to be steadily increasing.
Egypt, once a hot tourist destination, has been reeling under the combined assault of the 9/11 attacks, the Palestinian uprising and the lingering memory of a 1997 massacre, when 58 foreign tourists were killed by Islamic extremists in Luxor.
Although Southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have witnessed decades of simmering Islamic unrest, unlike the Middle East, the region had been largely perceived as a relatively safe tourist destination.
But experts say the Oct. 12 attacks in Hindu-dominated Bali have shattered the notion of a peaceful haven in Southeast Asia, and exacerbated steadily declining tourism figures.
According to a recent study by the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association, the number of U.S. tourists to Malaysia plummeted 36.7 percent in the first six months of 2002 compared to the same period last year. And the number of Americans visiting the Philippines dropped 17.2 percent for the same period.
While countries such as Thailand have protested that Western warnings of terrorist threats in some southern Thai resorts are baseless and unfair, on their part, Western authorities maintain their primary responsibility is to protect their citizens.
Lessons on the Road
But while there's little doubt that the world has shrunk for high- to middle-end tourists, some experts express an overall optimism for the future of backpacking.
"The backpacking tradition is a very resilient one," says Don George, global travel editor at Lonely Planet Publications. "The trail may change, but the mission of the trail — as a rite of passage and as an initial introduction to the wider world — won't change."
When it comes to lessons learned on the road, backpackers insist that no education in stuffy academic halls can beat the sheer depth and breadth of knowledge a person can achieve while traveling cheap.
Bill Collins — or "Asia Bill," as he is popularly known — still remembers the thorough grounding he received on the Sri Lankan political situation 23 years ago during a particularly enlightening conversation with a Tamil Catholic professor — months before an internecine civil war broke out between the South Asian island nation's Sinhalese and Tamil communities.
"You get to talk to the people, experience their lives, hear about their dreams and share their meals," says Collins, a 48-year-old Iowa native who currently owns and manages two hotels in the Philippines. "It's not like when former GIs tell you they 'did' Germany. That's when they step out of their military bases and take a look at the country like it was a zoo."
They’ve Got Their Problems, We’ve Got Ours
It's a sentiment McCleary echoes.
"It's basically a good education," says the California native, who proudly calls himself a hippie.
"I have three children — a daughter and two stepsons — and I have done everything to help them travel because the United States is a very insular culture," he says. "It's the strangest thing, that this is a country made up of immigrants from all over the world, and yet we're so shut off from other cultures and experiences."
His understanding of other cultures, McCleary says, enabled him to live through some very tough times in revolutionary Iran, when his female companion was sometimes physically attacked by incensed Islamic students. They even discovered that some local men had cut a hole in a wall of their cheap Tehran hotel room in order to ogle his traveling companion.
"I understood the situation even though I certainly didn't like it," McCleary says. "In some of those cultures, there are so many men who are so poor, they will never have a woman in their lives, so they get voyeuristic. I think they've got some problems — just like we've got some problems here."
In McCleary's book, the world today would be a much better place if it had simply stuck with the hippie spirit.
"Sept. 11 would not have happened if we continued with the ideals of the '70s," he laments. "Many talk about culture shock as a negative rather than a positive. But I think you have to travel to get your sensibilities shocked."