“She wished they could see her for her beauty, but all anyone ever saw was the hurricane, and they never sought shelter from it.

The two are eventually let go and reunite, but the couple ends up parting ways as Paulo’s girlfriend finds that she no longer loves him. Imprisoned and in the unknown, Paulo recounts his terror on being held without a just cause and the torture he has to bear at the hands of the cops who believe Paulo and his girlfriend are some sorts of rebels or resistance activists. They then get to Brazil where they are kidnapped and get separated. They take the famous ‘death train’ to Bolivia, then go on to explore Peru, Chile, and Argentina. On the path to finding himself, he travels with his girlfriend, a Yugoslavian woman, 11 years his senior. He has set out on a journey to find freedom and discover if there is a deeper meaning to his life. Paulo introduces himself as a young 23-year old Brazilian, already sporting long flowing hair and a goatee, aspiring to become a writer someday. Hippies swapped ideas and created a culture based on personal connections. You could find information on where to eat, where to sleep, where to catch some live music, all of this without having to spend a fortune in Europe. Most hippies, in their thirst for travel, relied on a big book called ‘Europe on 5 dollars a day’. It existed so that people could discover ideas on where to meet next, how to explore the world (and not in a touristy sort of a way) and how to find the next great trail to be followed. Hippies had a novel way of communicating with each other - via the ‘invisible post’. They were on a spiritual journey, seeking the meaning of life and get deeply in touch with themselves. Hippies were beyond using labels to attach to themselves and define who they should be or how they should act. Hippies challenged the established ways everything from conservative behavior to excessive consumerism to unbalanced concentration of wealth was detested by them. They lived in harmony with nature, experimented with communal living, sex and recreational drugs.

These long-long-haired youngsters who wore vibrant clothes, tucked flowers in their hair, danced, sang and meditated were unconventional for their times. The Woodstock Music Festival, for instance, one of the monumental events in the history of hippie culture, attracted more than 400,000 people. The hippie movement started in the 1960s in the United States and attracted youngsters by the tens of thousands. This book is considered to be the most autobiographical of his works - one that gives a brief glimpse into his life as he nostalgically relives the days when he was in search for the meaning of his existence.

Welcome to the days of the 1970s, when the hippie counterculture was gathering quite a reputation and Paulo Coelho was a hippie.

Paulo coelho the hippie