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.