You might say it was an ordinary 2500 mile journey overland to see the Dalai Lama. In the sense that any number of young Americans were doing it. Some in search of hashish. Some in search of religion. Some to fashion some sort of trade of their own, jeans from the west, jewels, carpets and exotic products from the east...
Americans, particularly from the East Coast, swarmed Europe every summer, for the price of a stand-by airline ticket, a youth hostel card and a Eurail Pass, Europe on $5 a day was more than achievable. We ate little and bathed less, reserving what cash we had for beer and breakfast and an occasional polser in a railway tincan. Got to sleep on rocking overnight trains, hung around banhofs and village squares, exercised terrible grade school French and mumbling out garbled bits of incomprehensible German. We could say ‘I love you’ in five languages and ‘Ou es la biblioteque’ in a couple more...
...But now it was the dawn of a new world, the days of the hippy were coming to an end, as the bitter struggles against Nixon and the Vietnam War, for women’s liberation and civil rights, gave way to a new reality. The first salvos were being fired, there was economic malaise in America, PhDs were driving taxis, OPEC and the Oil Embargo were around the corner...
...Asking me to write a memoir explaining my trip to India is something like asking a domino to explain why it fell.
George Wallace
fr intro to Incident on the Orient Express
Americans, particularly from the East Coast, swarmed Europe every summer, for the price of a stand-by airline ticket, a youth hostel card and a Eurail Pass, Europe on $5 a day was more than achievable. We ate little and bathed less, reserving what cash we had for beer and breakfast and an occasional polser in a railway tincan. Got to sleep on rocking overnight trains, hung around banhofs and village squares, exercised terrible grade school French and mumbling out garbled bits of incomprehensible German. We could say ‘I love you’ in five languages and ‘Ou es la biblioteque’ in a couple more...
...But now it was the dawn of a new world, the days of the hippy were coming to an end, as the bitter struggles against Nixon and the Vietnam War, for women’s liberation and civil rights, gave way to a new reality. The first salvos were being fired, there was economic malaise in America, PhDs were driving taxis, OPEC and the Oil Embargo were around the corner...
...Asking me to write a memoir explaining my trip to India is something like asking a domino to explain why it fell.
George Wallace
fr intro to Incident on the Orient Express
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