This is a fun book from the moment you pick it up. It’s heavy like a VW bus, with thick paper suitable for reproducing color illustrations — photos that Steves took in 1978 when, as a post-college 23 year old traveling for the summer with a friend, he left Europe in Istanbul, Turkey to travel across the Middle East and Asia all the way to Nepal. There are illustrations of their route, their old passports, faces of people they met, and photos of Steves’ handwritten journal from the time. There’s even a spread of two pages in the book that fold outward, doubling their size (called “gatefold pages” in a book) to create a 20” color map full of detail of this intriguing 3,000 mile journey.
Accounts of what they saw and experienced — on buses, trains, plane, and backpacking the “Hippie Trail,” as it was called, are fresh, funny, and enlightening.
Millions of people know Rick Steves from his award-winning travel shows on television as well as his hundreds of travel-guide books which have sold in the millions. Many readers will also know that Steves is a lifelong committed progressive Lutheran and active in his church.
When this journey began for him in 1973, he believed he would probably be a piano teacher for the rest of his life.
Here, we meet Steves the spiritual seeker, intrigued to learn about Islam and Hinduism, making friends with people along the way, walking with pilgrims to sacred sites that Steves is discovering for the first time. He writes in his journal at the beginning: “I feel like I am doing something big. Having finally finished what seems like a lifetime of going to school. I’m so ready to move on. But I can’t imagine what will follow. It just feels right to pause … and to take a trip — a long one.”
The power of this book will come from how it opens new ways of thinking and feeling about others, as readers take in the words and images of Steves’ constant seeking and curiosity. His journey has indeed been a long one, and now we get to see where it began.
