Sandberg Features Winter Sale - Enjoy!

Reflections on the 1970s Hippie Trail -- Two Perspectives on a Journey of a Lifetime

 

In September 2024, I published my book A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974). Six months later, Rick Steves released On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (2025). These are two of the latest in a growing crop of travel books and memoirs from the Hippie Trail, which attracted hundreds of thousands young travelers until it was closed by the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Read a comparison between the two books on my The Nordic Link substack.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Die - On the Book "I'm Adding Sunshine to My Paint"

Five years old, Harald Sandberg (1912-1983) came down with a double-sided pneumonia. Three doctors in Söderhamn, a city in northern Sweden, said that there was nothing they could do. (This was in the time when the Spanish flue killed tens of millions of people around the world.)

Harald survived, but the disease damaged his heart, and he was told that he was unlikely to see his tenth birthday. He looked forward to that day with trepidation, but it was his father who died on that day, 39 years old.

Early on, Harald wanted to become an artist, but a doctor said that his heart was too week for him to continue school and suggested that he should become a hairdresser. Which he did, and a successful one at that, but he never gave up on his dream.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” tells the story of the first four decades of Harald Sandberg’s life, from his birth on August 13, 1912, to the end of 1955, when he had accomplished his childhood’s dream of becoming an artist – a painter. He had had his first solo exhibits in Stockholm as well as a very successful exhibit in Paris. By then he had also brought three children into the world together with his wife Constance.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” includes a diary that Harald wrote in 1946 during a critical phase of his struggle to become an artist. It also contains two interviews made during the last two years of his life, as well as over 100 photos and illustrations.

The book was written by his son Hans Sandberg.

Over the coming months, I will post excerpts from the book - both texts and pictures - here and on my substack for the book. 

Scan the QR code below to find my book on Amazon.

En bussresa till Indien (1974) - Nu på Amazon.se

Femtio år har gått sedan vi stod och väntade på bussen som skulle ta oss på en 11 000 km lång resa från Stockholm till New Delhi. Det var den tredje september 1974 och jag var tre månader från 21. Med mig hade jag min flickvän Elisabeth och 39 andra resenärer, varav hälften var kvinnor. Runt oss stod föräldrar och vänner som kommit för att önska oss lycka till på vårt tre och en halv månader långa äventyr. Så småningom anlände Bill och Bull – två väderbitna blå Scaniabussar – och parkerade vid Centralens norra entré på bron över spårområdet.

Den svenska boken finns nu på Amazon som ebok, pocketbok och inbunden.  

Kolla in min sida på Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/hans_sandberg

On This Day, 50 Years Ago, I and 40 Swedes Stepped Onto Two Buses Heading for India

50 years ago -- September 3, 1974 -- I and 40 other young and naïve Swedes entered two old Scania buses who were to take us from Stockholm to New Delhi in six weeks. We were not hippies, just ordinary people, but we did travel on what was once called the Silk Road, and in the 1960s became known as the "Hippie Trail." I was 20, an atheist and politically radical, so I was definitively not looking to find a Guru or spiritual enlightenment in India. And I had no desire to end up on a rooftop in Kathmandu, smoking pot. I was interested in the world, and this was an opportunity that had opened, and didn't cost much, since we slept on the buses. You can read more about my 3 1/2-month journey in my new book - A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974) which is now globally available on Amazon. 

Find the book on Amazon at 

https://www.amazon.com/author/hans_sandberg

 

Heading Home From India and Left Behind on Mount Damavand

After five weeks crisscrossing southern India, we met up in New Delhi, and the long road back to Sweden could start. We drove through Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, and to Iran via Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. As we crossed Mount Damavand, Iran’s and Asia’s largest volcano, I was left behind in my long johns in the middle of the night. Read about it in “A Swede on the Hippie Trail.” 

 Sunset in Pakistan.

Towards the Khyber Pass.

Near Jalalabad.

The Darunta Dam on the Kabul River.

Afghanistan. Near Qalat in Zabur province.

Kids in eastern Turkey.

I don't have any photos from my adventure 

on Mount Damavand, but here is one 

from eastern Turkey. 

 

Kerala as a Prism of India

 After Hyderabad in Telangana, Hassan, Mysuru (Mysore), and Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka, Chennai (Madras) and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, we arrived in Cochin (Kochi) on the Malabar Coast in the state of Kerala. The first humans to settle Kerala followed the coastline according to the British historian Michael Wood. 

”A Swede on the Hippie Trail" -- an ebook, paperback and hard cover. Find it on Amazon.