Sex, Afghanistan without the risk of death, Nepalese temple bells; more sex, India when it wasn’t deforested and covered in a cloud of smog; yet more sex and a lot more drugs: yes, I can quite see why travel-writer Rory MacLean wishes that he’d been old enough to have done the Hippie Trail in its late Sixties/early Seventies heyday. I wish I’d been there, too — either that or a door gunner in Nam, anyway — and the only consolation is that I know damned well that it can’t have been nearly as much fun as the hippies cracked it up to be.
How do I know? Because hippies are a bunch of mendacious, self-deluding, intellectually dishonest scuzzballs, mainly. It’s an opinion which hardened for me when I met Ken Kesey once and asked him why it was that at his hippie ranch in La Honda they insisted on wiring speakers to the trees to freak themselves with weird noises. Wasn’t the acid doing their heads in enough already? Kesey treated me to the sort of frosty response you might be given by the Pope if you said, ‘Yeah, but He wasn’t really the Son of God, was he?’ And I thought, ‘You arrogant tosser. This is exactly the sort of fascistic closed-mindedness to which your lot claimed you were putting an end.’
In fact there’s a case to be made that the hippie generation was responsible for every ill of the modern age, from dumbing down to al-Qa’eda. MacLean — a romantic, but no fool — tentatively puts this case quite often on his journey in the footsteps of the hippies (who he nicknames ‘the Intrepids’) from Turkey, through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to Kathmandu. Sure, they helped to reintroduce the West to the mysteries of the East, and opened the once-closed societies they passed through to the possibilities of emancipation; but wasn’t their decadence and naive liberalism responsible for the backlash that destroyed these Shangri-las and made the world such a dangerous place today?
Possibly the most depressing story in the book comes from Afghanistan, where MacLean hears from the American author and scholar Carla Grissmann about the events leading up to the destruction by the Taleban of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Grissmann had spent years piecing together the antiquities in Kabul museum damaged during the civil war, and in 2000 was persuaded by a moderate mullah to hold an exhibition to celebrate her achievement. Fifty rural mullahs trooped in, stared sceptically at their nation’s ancient treasures, until one, on glimpsing the semi-naked figure on a priceless fourth- century clay Bodhisattva, spat on it furiously, egging on the others to beat it with their fists. Six months later a delegation led by the Minister of Culture arrived with sledgehammers and axes, returning day after day for two months to destroy every single item in the museum. Today, all that remains are thousands of shards.
Whether through astounding luck or quite ingenious planning, MacLean always seems to end up having the most extraordinary encounters. In Istanbul he meets the original flower child, in eastern Turkey a man whose brother was the suicide bomber who destroyed the British consulate, in Rishikesh the Beatles’ doctor during their stay with the Maharishi, in Tehran one of the original hippie bus drivers (‘The secret for a successful trip was to get the passengers smoking chillum dope pipes before breakfast. In the early days, the buses almost levitated across border posts’).
MacLean writes with a lyricism which takes his writing beyond conventional travelogue into something which, for the reader, can be akin to experiencing a dream. Sometimes the detail can get a bit overwhelming — I wish he wouldn’t interpolate what his characters are saying with asides on how they were holding their coffee cups; and too many of his roads are ‘arrow-straight’. But when it works, which is most of the time, the magical beauty of MacLean’s prose and the vividness of his descriptions are quite as mind-blowing as anything the Intrepids might have enjoyed back in ’68.
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