Between the late 1960s and the late 1970s Pakistan became an important stop-over on what came to be known as the ‘Hippie Trail.’

As a new generation of young middle-class Europeans and Americans began rebelling against things like the Vietnam War, the so-called ‘American Military-Industrial Complex,’ orthodox religions and against what they thought was the ‘tyranny of middle-class morality,’ many of them also decided to travel to lands they thought were still untouched by the soulless ways of industrialisation and capitalism-driven modernity.

The post-World War II economic boom in (Western) Europe and the United States, plus the fact that enrolment in universities and colleges in these countries saw an unprecedented increase during this period, saw the youth (perhaps for the first time) become more vocal and influential in impacting the politics and culture of their countries.

The flourishing post-War economics and subsequent lower costs of living allowed huge numbers of young middle-class Americans and Europeans to demonstrate their revulsion against the ‘straight society’ dominated by their parents, and live outside the confines of such a society.

This was done in various ways, such as through forming and living in leaderless communes in deserts and in abandoned buildings in the cities; or by getting involved in radical civil rights and far-left causes and politics that were not only furnished and expressed through political rallies and action on campuses, but also through experimental and more socially-conscious arts (especially music), and mind-altering drugs like LSD and cannabis that were believed to have given the users a unique insight into the workings of the mind, the body and society.

Student/youth radicalism soon became a universal phenomenon. But whereas, for example, in countries like Pakistan, this phenomenon’s political aspects rapidly developed in the late 1960s, its social, cultural and aesthetical dimensions did not fully arrive till the early 1970s.

Apart from the universal proliferation of the products emerging from the arts of the phenomenon — such as music, films and the flamboyant fashions that reflected its ‘freewheeling spirit’ — another major way the social and aesthetic dynamics of what was taking place in the West made their way in Asian countries through the Hippie Trail. Some of the most prominent characters in this regard were the hippies. These were young college/university-educated Westerners who had decided to abandon the religions, politics and economics of ‘the straight society’.

One of the ways they did this was to physically move out from their countries and head for places they believed were unsoiled by the ‘soulless’ fall-out of things like materialism, organised religion and capitalism.

Some headed for countries in Africa, but most headed out for South Asian countries like India and Nepal. And they did so not by using air travel and then staying in established hotels (like conventional tourists). Instead they used a curvy overland route first charted in the mid-1960s by some proto-hippies. On this route (the Hippie Trail) they travelled in large groups in rickety buses, cheap cars and on motorbikes.

The route began in the Turkish city of Istanbul where the hippies from various West European countries and the United States would gather. From Istanbul they would drive down to the Iranian capital, Tehran. From Tehran the route would curve into Afghanistan. From Kabul it would then stretch to Jalalabad from where it would straighten and enter Peshawar. From Pakistan the hippies would then enter India and from India into Nepal.

The traffic on the Hippie Trail peaked in the mid-1970s, and along the way numerous cheap hotels and restaurants sprang up, creating a bustling economy across the route, tightly tied to the lifestyle of the hippies.

When the Trail entered Pakistan from Afghanistan (through the Khyber Pass) the travellers would stay a day or two in the city of Peshawar.

They would then travel down to Rawalpindi and from there head down to Lahore. After staying for few days in Lahore, some would cross into India through the Wagah Border, while many would head up to places like Swat and Chitral. A large number of the bohemian travellers would also make their way down to the sprawling metropolis, Karachi, before heading back to Lahore to enter India.

That’s why cities like Peshawar, Lahore, Swat, Chitral and Karachi saw the rapid emergence of numerous cheap hotels in the early and mid-1970s. In Karachi most of these hotels came in the Saddar area. Also, the many shops selling snacks and colas in the small shanty settlements that one drives through on the way to three of the city’s most famous beaches, Hawks Bay, Sandspit and Paradise Point, first began to emerge in the 1970s.

They mostly catered to the hippies and their eventual Pakistani contemporaries, selling them crates of soft drinks, Pakistani beer, snacks and (more discreetly) hashish, which the visitors took with them to the beaches.

According to the 1975 statistics of the Pakistan Ministry of Tourism (that was formed during the Z.A. Bhutto regime), in the first three months of 1974 alone, over a million hippie tourists passed through Pakistan. This was most beneficial to certain sectors of the economy that included second and third tire hotels, roadside restaurants, outlets offering tour guides and shops dealing in Pakistani ‘folk clothing’ and artefacts.

For example, Karachi’s famous Zainab Market first began to take shape during the said period. And even though for almost two decades one has struggled to spot a foreigner in this market, yet, in the 1970s, more Westerners were seen here than the locals.

Also interesting to note is the fact that young European and American visitors in their colourful hippie attire were a common sight even in the tribal areas of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Balochistan towns, such as Sibi, Quetta and Ziarat. Many of these places today have become ‘no-go areas’ even for Pakistanis.

The traffic on the Trail began to recede in 1979. After that year’s Islamic Revolution in Iran, Tehran stopped being a stop-over on the Trail. Then, in December 1979, when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan and triggered a civil war there, Afghanistan too fell off the famous overland route.

But Pakistan remained on the Trail despite a military coup here by a reactionary military general in July 1977. However, with Iran and Afghanistan gradually falling off the Trail and then Pakistan entering the civil war in Afghanistan, it too fell off the route.

The Trail changed course and now stretched from Istanbul to India and Nepal through Iraq. But it disintegrated and finally vanished after Iraq went to war with Iran in 1980. Another reason was also the gradual receding of the hippie culture in the West and the United States that saw its politics move to the right.

The famous Lonely Planet series of travel books that have been hugely popular and one of the best-selling travel guides across the world ever since the mid-1980s, were first started on a small scale by a young American couple travelling on the Hippie Trail in the 1970s.

Travel books on Pakistan authored and published by Westerners were common in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, one has to struggle to find such a book today. The last Lonely Planet guide fully dedicated to Pakistan was published in the 1980s. The most recent one just has info on the Karakoram Highway.