Rick Steves on the "Hippie Trail" Trip That Changed Him

06.02.2025 - 02:19 / cntraveler.com / Rick Steves

“I wasn't sophisticated—I was just a knucklehead out there on the road, taking notes and enjoying the fact that people had rearranged my cultural furniture and I was tripping around on things, and I liked that. I liked that a lot.”

Rick Steves has a nostalgic twinkle in his eye as he tells me about a 1978 adventure through Asia, during which he backpacked through six countries with his friend Gene and scribbled about every eye-opening moment along the way. We're sitting across from each other in a New York City conference room more than 40 years after the journey, and he's holding his latest book, a hardcover titled On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (out February 4 from Avalon Travel). The tome, essentially a glowed-up version of his tattered travel diary from that trip, also includes photographs of a 23-year-old Steves riding atop VW buses, standing still on busy streets, and chatting with strangers in Istanbul and Tehran. It captures a young American man experiencing world expansion and culture shock—while loving every minute of it.

As a travel writer, it's easy to relate to the idea of being a “knucklehead” with a notebook, but the suggestion that Rick Steves, perhaps the best known of us knuckleheads, was ever anything but a beloved travel personality—who inspires others through his stories, universe of guide books, and TV program—takes a moment to wrap your head around. Believe it, though: When Steves embarked on this trip in the '70s, he was a piano teacher in Washington taking a short respite from daily life. By the time he returned home, he knew that travel needed to play a more central role in his future.

“I like the last sentence of the book,” Steves says to me on this frigid February morning, flipping through pages of his own chicken-scratch handwriting. His finger jabs on the second-to-last page, at the postscript. “I think, in the wake of this adventure, having stoked my travel spirit, I made a decision that changed the trajectory of my life. I let my piano students go. I turned my recital hall into a lecture hall and began a small travel business.”

Though the book tells the vivid tales of his trip in his own words, I wanted to hear more about the reflection brought on by compiling these notes, and sharing them with a wider audience. What stood out from that life-changing adventure—and what does he think other travelers can learn from it? Below, Steves shares the moments big and small (and smoky) that effectively turned him into a travel writer—plus, the quests on his horizon.

In Rick Steves' travel journal, now a hardcover book, he details eye-opening moments—and even his daily expenses, an effective time capsule to 1978.

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