Rory MacLean is not a hippie. And he's too young to remember the Summer of Love. But he is a consummate wanderer who is fast becoming one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous travel writers. His new book, Magic Bus, takes him along the old "hippie trail", travelling some 6,000 miles from Istanbul to Kathmandu to find out what happened to the spiritual seekers who blazed it. In the end, did they find Nirvana?

Magic Bus is a rambling journey in the footsteps of these "Intrepids". It is filled with nostalgia for their ideals, but it is also an account of the counter-cultural debris they left behind. Brimming with heart and wit, it chronicles how travel changed the hippies, how they changed travel, and how the trail changed the countries it touched - for better or worse.

The characters MacLean tracks down are astonishing: the original flower child; the "Indiaman" who plied his battered coach for a decade from King's Cross to Calcutta; the Beatles' personal Indian physician (who still complains of Ringo's flatulence); and the first western child to become a Tibetan lama. These children of Aquarius travelled before the age of Lonely Planet (indeed, they created Lonely Planet). Revolutionaries in paisley waistcoats, strumming guitars and in search of large quantities of Class A drugs, they mapped out the globe for a new generation.

Their road map was, as MacLean puts it, simple: "eastwards towards mysticism, inwards to creative expression, and out of this world with the recreational use of drugs". He picks up the trail at Istanbul's "Pudding Shop", a Turkish pastry place that became the first hippie pit stop. To his amazement, he encounters Penny, the original flower child, who earned the moniker for handing out daisies to strangers in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Now in her seventies and alone, Penny, who once named her sexual positions after the cities of Asia - she was particularly fond of the "bam-bam Bamiyan" - has escaped a nursing home in Britain to relive her youthful memories.

In Cappadocia, Penny and MacLean camp out in a cave and eat at Flintstone's Bar, run by - who else? - a guy named Fred. They part company and MacLean heads to Iran, where the hippie trail goes cold. The guest houses, tearooms and hangouts were all shut down during Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution. MacLean finds the only echo of the Sixties at the Holy Shrine in Mashhad. He meets Nazzer, who spied on naked hippies as a young man and, inspired, ran off to a nudist commune in Yorkshire.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, MacLean finds two committed wanderers who have been true to the ideal of those who travelled "to be colonised rather than to colonise". Carla Grissman and John Butt found fulfilment by eschewing the easy lay and the easy life. Grissman has devoted her life to quietly and painstakingly cataloguing several millennia of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Butt, who started off as a "dope-smoking, rock'n'roll-loving Intrepid", converted to Islam and stayed in Pakistan, becoming a scholar and a farmer.

As the author falls "into the ferment of India", he reaches the main attraction on the hippie trail, a spiritual Disney World. Rama Tiwari, a jolly bookseller who made a fortune selling spiritual claptrap to hundreds of hippies, reveals why the majority failed to find happiness: "They didn't see we can only live in happiness if we conquer the restless dream that paradise is in a world other than our own," he says.

In Nepal, MacLean is reunited with Penny, who has returned there to die. Having spent a lifetime opting out, living on the fringes of any society that would indulge her whims, she hasn't found any real answers. But she and her kind have had a profound effect on the country. MacLean describes Nepal as "a vulnerable Himalayan theme park", overrun by seekers greedy for their own self-gratification.

One of MacLean's gifts is his ability to illuminate ordinary details that point to something more fundamental. In Mashhad, he writes of "hotel cleaners in full black chador and yellow Marigold rubber gloves". In the Indian city of Haridwar, he describes how "beggars ring their alms bowls with - depending on their age - the high rattle of youthful exuberance, a persistent, middle-aged tick-tick or a single, sombre death knell". In the end, he concludes that the generation which brought us some of the era's most iconic music, yoga and spirituality-on-demand also blazed a trail so well worn that its effect has been to cheapen travel. MacLean ponders this paradox, noting how "more and more, travel became entertainment not travail, a change of scene not life change".

And he deconstructs the myth perpetuated by well-meaning, ignorant travellers that people in the east want to remain poor spiritualists, sur viving on rice and prayers. "You - with your dollars - were content to bum around this 'desperate' place," a young Indian businessman says, confronting a hippie who never left. "Your lofty ideals were never much appreciated . . . we had survived long enough on curd and bananas." Geoff Crowther, author of the first traveller's guidebook to Asia, printed on a Gestetner at a squat in Notting Hill, agrees. MacLean tracks him down to a beach in Goa, at the end of his own psychedelic rainbow, washed up, broke and permanently sozzled. "Forty years ago, we put on kaftans and headed east," he says, bewildered by the changes he has helped bring about. "Now the east is coming back at us dressed in DKNY."

Tarquin Hall New Statesman, 17 July 2006




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.

James Delingpole  The Spectator, 22 July 2006


Magic Bus was was chosen as a Book of the Year by the New Statesman and a top summer read in The Sunday Times