“Hippies were the fireworks of freedom,” an Istanbul journalist declares at the beginning of “Magic Bus,” Rory MacLean’s retracing of the eastward path traveled by enlightenment-hungry pilgrims in the 1960s and ’70s. With a spiritual craving kindled by a pantheon of idiosyncratic gurus that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, these so-called Intrepids had little money but plenty of time — and a yen to sip tea and smoke dope with the locals. Their goal wasn’t to observe other cultures but to absorb them and be transformed.
That Istanbul journalist credits hippies with nothing less than the rebirth of humanity, but MacLean’s travelogue conveys a measure of cynicism about the consequences of their intrusion. In many places, the antimaterialist hippies’ arrival stimulated a crass tourist trade and an attendant defilement of native culture. Another Turkish acquaintance refers to their path as the “hash-and-hepatitis trail,” and MacLean even suggests that their hedonistic ways might have been partly responsible for the rise of Islamic militancy, strengthening traditionalists’ anti-Western resolve.
That Istanbul journalist credits hippies with nothing less than the rebirth of humanity, but MacLean’s travelogue conveys a measure of cynicism about the consequences of their intrusion. In many places, the antimaterialist hippies’ arrival stimulated a crass tourist trade and an attendant defilement of native culture. Another Turkish acquaintance refers to their path as the “hash-and-hepatitis trail,” and MacLean even suggests that their hedonistic ways might have been partly responsible for the rise of Islamic militancy, strengthening traditionalists’ anti-Western resolve.
Good or bad, were they really so significant? MacLean thinks so. He lectures a group of young travelers that the beats and hippies “brought minority rights, ecology and alternative medicine into the mainstream” and “for a few short years tied together the world.” Whether such grandiose claims are true or just an expression of the baby-boomers’ self-importance, there’s no denying that the stoned rovers were present at the beginning of a cataclysmic period in history, whose legacy “Magic Bus” describes in exquisite detail, most of it sorrowful.
As he travels from the Bosporus to the notorious trance-dance beach at Goa, MacLean goes from areas of commercial desecration to brutal police states and ghastly combat zones. The decimation of Kabul reminds him of Dresden or Hiroshima after World War II. Tehran, “an urban disease fed by anger, despair and pollution,” is a “sprawling cemetery to tolerance.” A fight between Nepalese troops and Maoist rebels leaves 15 dead and several secondary-school students shot. “Bullets have not been removed from their bodies,” The Katmandu Times reports, “due to lack of money.”
Traveling along this horrendous path, ironic considering its erstwhile symbolism as the road to Shangri-La, MacLean balances apocalyptic bereavement with engaging cameos of individuals who manage to persevere. Carla Grissmann, the “Grandmother Intrepid” whose wanderlust “predates the Beatles and Beats,” is met at the sandy ruin that is Kabul’s once-grand museum. She’s trying to piece together shards of precious pottery gleefully sledgehammered by a delegation led by the Taliban’s minister of culture, who deemed the world’s greatest collection of Central Asian artifacts un-Islamic. “I weep for the Kabul I knew and loved,” she says. Ahmed, a British comedian whose parents emigrated from Pakistan to the Midlands in the 1960s, delivers an invidious set of terrorism jokes when MacLean meets him on a railway platform in Rawalpindi. “Hey,” he asks, holding his hands under his stomach, miming a bulky explosive belt, “does my bomb look big in this?”
MacLean also crosses paths with an original flower child called Penny, who rode the magic bus with Ken Kesey, survived Woodstock, traversed the Asia trail when she was young and has now returned for a last swim in the Himalayan lake where she found serenity 40 years earlier.
The most memorable character, and the man MacLean jokes that he wants to adopt as his guru, is Rama Tiwari, an enormously charming bookseller and publisher “who touched — and enlightened — more Intrepids than any other Indian.” Rama succinctly summarizes the hippies’ big mistake: “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.”
MAGIC BUS
On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India
By Rory MacLean
280 pp. Ig Publishing. Paper, $14.95
