"I met my girlfriend in Bali and it was at the Sari club that I really got to know her. "I spent two years in Kuta and they were the best years of my life," Gaspero says in a phone interview from Hawaii. The morning after the Oct.12 Bali attack, Jason Gaspero, a longtime world traveler who now lives in Hawaii, turned on the television and was utterly devastated by the news reports. Exactly a month after the attack, the bombing of the Sari club has shaken the confidence of even the most seasoned traveler. In the past few years, a violent Maoist uprising has crippled Nepal and plunged the Himalayan nation into a vicious cycle of violence that has claimed more than 7,000 lives in the past seven years.Īnd Kuta - the popular, surfer-friendly bay on Indonesia's island of Bali that was, until recently, a haven of Southeast Asian tranquility in a world rapidly being engulfed by political unrest - is a ghost town today. Katmandu, the Nepali capital famed for its spectacular mountain views and quaint streets bustling with friendly natives, is no longer kind to foreign travelers. But the security situation is still precarious, and journalists and aid workers still make up the bulk of the city's foreign visitors. But it fell off the backpackers' itineraries when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and the mujahideen (Muslim religious warriors) proceeded to pulverize the country after the Soviets withdrew.Ī year after the U.S.-led war on terrorism brought about the fall of the Taliban, Kabul is slowly limping back to normalcy. Kabul, the Afghan capital, was once a hippie hot spot, where a weary traveler was assured of a steaming samovar and a kindly tribesman host. The three K's on the hippie trail are rapidly turning into no-go zones. Increasingly, they're bypassing the popular '60s destinations.įor the latter, few can fault them. Backpackers today tend to put their hotel bills on their credit cards, check their e-mail at cybercafés, avoid the marijuana and the concomitant risk of spending time in a nasty jail cell. Like the myriad caravan trails that made up the ancient Silk Route connecting Europe to China, these latter-day Marco Polos became hippie frontiersmen and women, making stops where the locals were welcoming, the food cheap and the pot flowed freely.Īsian spirituality is available - for a price - at the local yoga center back home. With idealism in their heads, mantras on their lips and precious little moolah in their hip pouches, they often took the cheapest overland routes to the "mystic East," picking up friends, stories and visa stamps along the way.
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In the Swinging '60s, when peace and love seemed imminently possible, free spirits in search of adventure, spiritual fulfillment and good grass hitched onto the "Happy Hippie Trail" from Kabul to Kuta - via Katmandu. "There are less and less places that are safe." "It's cutting down on the number of countries you can go to," says McCleary. In his heyday, the 59-year-old McCleary - author of The Hippie Dictionary, a 670-page cultural encyclopedia of the '60s and '70s - had been to some pretty hairy places, and he says the prospect of a trip to Bali doesn't really bother him.īut he concedes that terrorist attacks such as the bomb blasts that ripped through the Sari nightclub on Bali's Kuta beach last month do change things a bit these days. She was fearful after last month's devastating bomb attack at a Bali nightclub, which killed nearly 200 people, most of them tourists. in the tumultuous '60s, who talked her son out of the visit. It was his wife, Joan Jeffers McCleary, a former activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
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