In the Sixties and Seventies hundreds of thousands of young Westerners took off for India, blazing the 'hippie trail' from Istanbul to Kathmandu. These intrepid pioneers left behind their parents' world of postponed pleasure, the guilt of Empire and the spectre of war. Aboard the weirdest procession of unroadworthy vehicles ever to rattle across the face of the earth, they reached for a new kind of life, and became the first movement of people who travelled to be colonised rather than to colonise.

In Magic Bus I retrace on foot and by bus their wide-eyed adventures along the route reopened for the first time in a generation. I cross a region swept through extraordinary and turbulent changes since the Summer of Love. In Istanbul I meet the original Flower Child. In Tehran, capital of revolution, I encounter two Iranian boys whose dream of wealth in the West ends in tragedy. At Bagram airbase I sing  Aquarius with US Special Forces commandos in paisley shirts and granny glasses. In Kabul I pick through the smashed statues which are now Afghanistan's history. Along the way I try to reveal how profoundly the trail transformed travellers' lives and the countries they traversed, unleashing forces which changed forever the way we travel the world.

'Magic Bus' was chosen as a World Hum travel book of the year.

Now click below for the YouTube video to get a taste of the trail, then follow the hippie trail link above to more Sixties videos, my trail photo gallery, route map and blog.