I read Rick's book over the weekend. It's an absolute delight, really engaging. As a travel blogger, I was so impressed by the writing of 23-year-old Rick Steves. It read more like a memoir than a journal written on the fly. As I read, I kept wondering how this young man wrote so well when he was journaling for himself with no intention of publishing it.
In the Preface it says it was "lightly edited" by Gene Openshaw. I compared a few random pages from the book with the original journal at https://www.ricksteves.com/about-rick/original-hippie-trail-journal just to see how lightly it was edited.
My conclusion: "lightly edited" does not accurately describe the changes from the journal to the published book. I would describe it as a book adapted from the original source material, which is more like what I would expect of a young man's travel journal.
Someone else mentioned that the order of travel was adjusted in the book. In the Preface, he says he and Gene "rearranged a few itinerary details for better flow and readability." But my sense is that the romantic in Rick wanted to end the book in Kathmandu, the mystical, mythical, "ultimate mecca of freakdom." So all the places he and Gene went in India (Jaipur, Agra, and Varanasi) got moved before heading to Nepal. And that means he fictionalized a journey from Varanasi to the Nepal border.
That doesn't make it any less enjoyable, but I wish I had a better sense of this beforehand.
I was just in India and Nepal in November/December, and it was remarkable to read about how many things are the same and how so much has changed so drastically, particularly Pokhara and Kathmandu. Tourism has completely transformed those two cities. I hardly recognized them from Rick's descriptions.