A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu [Paperback]

David Tomory (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998 | Series: Lonely Planet Journeys (Travel Literature)

"A Season in Heaven" presents the true stories of travelers who hit the hippie trail in the late sixties. David Tomory, himself a veteran of the road to Kathmandu, interviewed a group of travelers who went looking for enlightenment and discovered a world that changed their lives.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0864426291
• ISBN-13: 978-0864426291
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,268,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The hardships, the highs, the attitudes...., July 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Paperback)

Although uneven, this book is nevertheless a good accounting of the great adventure of the 60s and early 70s, the trek to India. If you made this trip, as I did in 1972, it will flashback the hardships, the highs, and the attitudes. If you didn't, this book will let you taste what you missed.

Travelling through Asia and the Middle East was for the hippies what road travel was for the beatniks. And just as there is a masterpiece of that experience of the beats, Kerouac's "On The Road," there is a masterpiece of the hippie experience, Cleo Odzer's "Goa Freaks." Read Cleo's book now!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great read for anyone who made the overland trail, May 8, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Dharamsala, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Paperback)

I made the overland trip to Kathmandu in 1974 when I was 16. This book is the closest I've ever read to explaining what was going on and some of the crazy trips we got into in India and elsewhere,getting there through Afghanistan and other wild places. Tomory writes with his usual wit and insight. This book should also appeal to the younger generation of travellers now hanging out in the sub-continent.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Travelers of light revisited, November 8, 2006

By 

mitra (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Paperback)

Sometimes I think it was all a dream - is it possible we once lived so free? I loved this book because it allowed me to relive that era, but I also found it an exercise in frustration because it could have been so much better. This book captures the history in bits and pieces, and left me longing for a more cohesive, comprehensive account. Among the interviews I found masterpieces of insight that brought me to tears, mixed in with trivial nonsequiturs.

I joined the sub-culture of travelers (as opposed to tourists) in 1969, towed along by my restless, unconventional mother. When I was fifteen we reached Istanbul and there encountered the freaks returning from India. After having a vision of myself in a white robe I stole $50 from my mother and caught a ride east in VW bus with a dead battery to Kandahar, where we left the broken-down bus with a note on the windshield gifting it to the "people of Afghanistan. (The following week we saw it as a taxi in Kabul). My mother caught up with me in Kabul and on we went eastwards to Kathmandu and India, where I broke free of family ties for good and joined an ashram. It would be seven years before I returned to my native California, shattered and disillusioned, and yet I will always hold those crazy years close to my heart.

Mr Tomory, I urge to revisit this project with a new publisher and editor. This was a unique time in history, one deserving of documentation for the benefit of future generations. Instead of just names and initials give us a better idea of who these people were, and what became of them. Please consider the possibility of a well edited, fleshed out version of this book, including photographs, although I know there aren't many from that time because it was so uncool, so not in the moment, to have a camera.

This book is recommended reading for anyone who was there or wished they had been, though I'm still waiting for THE book about the Hippie Trail.