Blowing your mind on the road

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.