ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a current discourse of reporting on and writing about pilgrimage, taken as a term of self-identification used by travellers to Santiago and on the Hippie Trail. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, travel reports often served mainly as inspiration, information and a guide book for later pilgrims. Inspired by a century-long history of the reception of Indian religious ideas in America and by the poets of the beat generation, a huge number of American and European youths started travelling the world as Hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. The Hippie Trail was open through the 1960s into the early 1970s. After that time, regional conflicts shut some countries for shorter or longer periods of time, and travelling became harder. In Ian Readers attempt to explain the recent popularity of pilgrimage in 2007, he accounted for technical development in transportation as one of the major reasons.
