Overland Before the Hippie Trail: Kathmandu and Beyond with a Van a Man and No Plan

As they drove through the hot flat Iraqi desert, Patricia looked over at her husband. He was guzzling water; sweat was running down his neck; the outside temperature was way over 100; and their 1963 VW camper van had no air conditioning. "Yikes," she thought. "This is not how I pictured our honeymoon." It was August of 1966. They had gone to Europe the previous summer after their wedding, and that trip had stretched into a two-year adventure that took them around the world on a bare-bones budget.

In those days with no mobile phones, no Internet, and limited maps, they were out of contact with family for months at a time while dodging a cholera epidemic in Iraq, staying in a palace in Pakistan, meeting with a maharaja in his stately home in India, and floating on a barge down the Mekong River in Laos. The journey had become a way of life as they found themselves drawn into a culture of international overland travelers while exploring a world that was large, varied, and filled with people who were curious, welcoming, and generous.