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The Road East

Dear Rick Steves,
I’ve recently learned a bit of your history(The Hippie Trail) and thought you might be gratified by hearing a bit of my own.
Similar paths, I just got under way ten years earlier.

In 1968 I'd finished up at U.C. Berkeley and shortly found myself on an acquaintance’s recently-aquired red bus that used to take Londoners to the Whipsnide zoo.
For short money I climbed aboard in London—destination New Delhi.
I may have been educated but honestly I was very ignorant.

I knew we were heading east(I could see shadows cast ahead of me every afternoon) but I had no idea of the route, what countries I was to traverse, how long the trip would take, what to eat, where to sleep. I did not know. I avoided maps. I did not want to know. I think that was a good thing since the moment to moment experiences tended to make room for a new world view that has served me through the years. I have travelled ever since. I met my wife at mid-life and she too was a traveler.

Of course as the years go by my travel changes.
No longer might I awake in the garden of a temple, thanks to a hospitable monk, in southern Thailand staring into the eyes of a curious Siamese cat.
Wonderful as those moments were, they are the past.

Those realizations, moments of coming to my senses, could be jagged and distressing. I was no longer that young freak on the road and finally it occurred to me(and I came to accept) that the first person you meet when you get back on the road is yourself.

In 1968 one could safely traverse Iran and Afghanistan. I was just plain lucky. Hitchhiking south from Teheran, the Iranis dazzled me with their hospitality plus Isfahan opened my eyes to its brilliant classical Islamic architecture and to their fine rugs. To enter Afghanistan via Herat was to enter a previous century replete with sights, sounds and aromas. The residents carried themselves in a way I’d never seen.
The Khyber pass behind me I was suddenly on the chaotic roadways of Pakistan and India. It was the sort of experiences that, knowing me, I would not relish and yet I felt I had come home. I have no explanation except to say I have returned several times over the years and I was not wrong.
Oh, and I did catch that truck up the mountain to Kathmandu, which in those days was an undisturbed Hindu kingdom, its streets utterly medieval.

This is of course is an abbreviated account. I will not presume upon your time to read more. I was twenty-two years old and, as you guess, that nine month-long trip was transformative.

Years ago, as a young photographer, I had a chat with Lisette Model, known for the photographs she made in her New York apartment and through its windows.
“Do you ever find yourself disinterested and unable to photograph?”
“Yes, then I travel.”
“Where.”
“I take a walk around the block.”
All the best, Russ

Russell Windman
Cambridge MA

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Russell

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