Travelling in a fried-out Kombi, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie

Rory Stewart

There are people in this room who will have contemporaries who would have been able to take a bus from Victoria station to Delhi in the 1970s. They would have been able to drive across Syria, Iraq and Iran. They could have gone across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. They would have been able to travel to the north-west frontier province of Pakistan. None of that is possible today for a British citizen. In fact, nearly 50 countries in the world are in a fragile or conflict-affected state. It has never been so dangerous.

The decline of the Hippie Trail is a remarkable illustration of how the world has changed, but at the same time gives us hope it can bounce back I suppose.