In 1977, a twenty-year-old naive American takes a break from his university studies to undertake an epic nine-thousand-mile overland journey from Munich to Kathmandu. With his camera and his journal, he records and recounts his journey, wanderings and musings with candor and humor through cities and countries that are now inaccessible and too dangerous for the modern backpacking tourist. Like a later-day, international doppelganger version of On the Road, the search for universal truth and the meaning of life tramps alongside the author while visiting places like Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and Kabul with a casual nonchalance, and revealing a seemingly lost era of more freedom, openness, tolerance, and promise.