"Accompany "The India Traveler" Marjorie Kircher on a unique journey through time and place, as she braves the old Hippie Trail through Afghanistan's dangers and finds a long-lasting love for India and its people. This is a book of countless delights and insights." --Edith Mirante, author of "The Wind in the Bamboo" In January 1973, Marjorie Kircher left Kansas, headed to India. She eventually got there three months and some 8,000 miles later, following a circuitous route that took her through the museums of Paris, the evil showers at Dachau, donkey trails on the Greek Island of Hydra, and to Istanbul where she boarded a rickety purple and orange bus driven by British expats headed for Delhi with their unsuspecting passengers and hidden cargo. The old bus ferried its riders into unforeseen adventures along parts of the old Silk Road, over dirt roads in eastern Turkey, Iran and the deep gorges of Afghanistan; on through Pakistan to northern India and the Himalayan region of Nepal, on the route that has come to be known in recent history as "The Hippie Trail." Fascinated by India and its people, Kircher returned to India in later years, staying with families in villages and making lifelong friendships, in an effort to comprehend the elusive Indian culture that survived 350 years of British occupation. The India Traveler, a memoir, spans three journeys to India in three different decades, 1973, 1983 and 1997. It reflects the idealism of a young woman coming of age in the turbulent Sixties and Seventies who matured with a curiosity and tolerance of other cultures and religions that would serve us all well in a time of globalization with increasing Indian and Asian influences. Kircher's stories of the people she met and lived with on her three trips illuminate a central reason to travel, to make a human connection.
About the Author: MARJORIE KIRCHER is an avid traveler far and near, a searcher for the underpinnings and missing details. She is an occupational therapist working with children and adults and has been awarded the Cornelia Myers Writer's Award for her article on perceived exertion, appearing in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy. Kircher also enjoys pastimes of painting and photography. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband Mitch, and almost-literate dog. The India Traveler is her first book.