Before Lonely Planet

The hitching stopped at Istanbul. As did the only guidebook, a few pages torn from Ken Walsh's Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Europe. Ken warned that Sultanahmet Square "makes Soho look like a Sunday school" and advised readers heading east to check out the scene at Yener's or the Pudding Shop.

Yener's, in 1975, turned out to be a dingy cafe selling Efes beer and lukewarm aubergine stew at ridiculously low prices. The other attractions were a scratchy Joni Mitchell's Carey playing on a record player, and a library consisting of a Harold Robbins paperback, a visitor's book scrawled with plaintive complaints about this or that rip-off, and a tatty little typescript volume called Across Asia on the Cheap - the first work by Lonely Planet founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler.

I don't remember much about what Across Asia looked like, though like all books on the trail, the front and back covers would have been systematically reduced by half-inch strips torn off for roaches. But its contents had the voice of someone who had been there. Painstakingly, I copied out advice for the next eastward stages - rail or bus to Ankara, Van and Tehran, bus to Mashad, Kandahar, Quetta and India, where the trail forked to Goa or Kathmandu. Fares. Places to cross borders and where to stay. Warnings of hassles and rip-offs.

I never got to Goa that year. When Istanbul began to pall and the money was short (even sleeping on the Otel Akin roof at 15p a night) I walked over the Bosphorus bridge and caught a series of buses east. A couple of weeks later, in another dawn, I rode into Tehran, where, down to my last $10, I decided to turn back. In the Amir Kabir hotel - just down the road from the post office where desperate hippies begged rials - I traded my notes copied from Across Asia with an eastward bound Dutchman who had come up overland from Egypt. He bought me a chocolate milk and taught me Arabic numbers.

Buying a guidebook wouldn't have occurred to us - even Europe on $5 a Day was for straights. Some headed east with nothing more than a handwritten list of cities; I at least had a map, and the obligatory Kerouac.

There was no shame about following the beaten track, though we'd never have called it the hippy trail. By the mid 1970s, of course, the trail was pretty worn. But, even with our middle-class sensibilities about "rip offs" (the reality was enormous generosity from genuinely hard-up local people), we still fancied ourselves as authentic Dharma bums.

We needed information though, especially about price rises (this was the time of crazy inflation) and border crossings. We needed to know the place to stay - there was one at every staging point - where we wouldn't get beaten up for having long hair, and which police forces turned a blind eye to rough sleepers. I don't remember much about tourist activities and sightseeing.