Safarnameh

Uses first-hand accounts to better understand the experience of those who traveled the popular overland trek from Turkey to India in the 1960s and 70s. Safarnameh--an Urdu word meaning "an account of a journey"--is the story of Trevor Harrison's overland trip from Turkey to India, a route taken by somewhere between two and six million young people from Western countries during the 1960s and 1970s until the Iranian Revolution and subsequent regional conflicts rendered the overland trek impossible. This first-person account amplifies, sometimes confirms, and occasionally challenges prevailing images of those who made the journey to India during that time. Based extensively on written observations made at the time, the book explores the physical, psychological, and emotional impact of the trek and its lingering echoes. Woven throughout the book are insights drawn from forty-eight in-depth interviews with people from several different countries who made the overland journey to India during roughly the same period. Though framed around a personal memoir, Safarnameh situates one individual's experience in the broader historical, cultural, and socio-political context of the time.