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Any time I travel to a new place for which there is no Rick Steves guidebook, I feel a little cheated. Steves, with his impeccable recommendations, sensible budgeting options, and gently corny prose style, has served as the benevolent fairy godfather on more than one trip for me. So it’s a treat to read his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail, and meet a Steves who is much younger and much more unsure — perhaps in need of a fairy godparent of his own.

In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher who already had the travel bug. Together with a school friend, he was determined to make his way across the so-called Hippie Trail: from Istanbul to Kathmandu, an overland trek by bus and train through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences, and it’s that which forms the basis of the new memoir — a young man’s story, with minimal intrusions from the old one.

Along the Hippie Trail, Steves got high for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned, it was “as innocent as wine with dinner is in America.” Today, he’s an advocate for legalized cannabis.) He rode an elephant in Jaipur and bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. The dreamy travel descriptions are fun, but what’s loveliest in this book is to watch Steves slowly open his mind to a world that was bigger and more complicated than he ever expected. “What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives?” he wonders.

Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your mind to the world, but one of the others is reading, which allows you to brush up against........

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