A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974)

By Hans Sandberg

This is a story about an overland roundtrip by bus to India and a 4,000 miles train ride through central and southern India. he book tells the story of this journey in words and pictures. "There I was, waiting for the bus that was to take me on a 11,000 km (7,000 miles) ride from Stockholm to New Delhi. It was September 3rd, 1974, and I was three months shy of 21. With me was my friend Elisabeth and 39 other young travelers, half of which were women. Around us were parents and friends who were there to see us off on our three-and-a-half-month adventure. Eventually, Bill and Bull - two weathered blue Scania buses - arrived and parked on the railway overpass by the northern entrance of Stockholm's Central Station. We said our goodbyes, picked up our luggage, and stepped onto Bill. There were a dozen seats in the front of each bus since most had been removed and replaced with particle boards topped with thin foam mattresses. We had no air conditioning, so all we could do when it got hot outside was to open the ventilation windows. I brought a large, light-blue, and ultra-light Fjällräven backpack that had my red sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of the frame. I had strategically packed the bare minimum of clothes and personal items, a couple of books, notebooks, a thermos flask, a water bottle of metal, malaria pills and charcoal tablets for diarrhea. A burlap bag from an army surplus store held my two cameras, a Rollei 35 and a Nikon F with a flash and two lenses, 35 and 200 mm. I had stuffed 55 rolls of film - 30 Kodak Tri-X, 10 Kodak Plus-X and 15 Kodachrome II for slides in the side pockets of my backpack. My passport and $400 in American Express traveler's cheques rested in a thin nylon pouch under my shirt along with $100 dollars in cash. That was it. I didn't own a credit card, and we had no mobile phones, no email, no World Wide Web, no Wi-Fi, no Skype, and no Facebook. MP3s were not around yet, nor were portable Walkman cassette players, so we had to make do with the radio in the bus - if the reception was good. Back then, the world was analog."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DDJMQW5D
• ISBN13: 9798332182082
• Release Date: August 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 212 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"