Arguably, Kerouac was the father of the hippies— On the Road was the book that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and many others claimed most influential—and so it was no surprise when the same Neal Cassidy reappeared in 1964 as the driver of the painted bus that carried a group of novelist Ken Kesey’s friends the Merry Pranksters from California to the New York World’s Fair. The bus was called Intrepid and on the front there was a sign that warned three thousand miles of small towns, “We Have Come for Your Daughters!” In the refrigerator was a pitcher of LSD-spiked lemonade. The journey was documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, setting the tone for much of what followed throughout the western world.
In the 1970s, the hippies disappeared, at least in the media, elbowed aside by Saturday Night Fever and the Me Generation and then the Babyboomers, enfatuated first with raising their consciousness (becoming by their own boast “estholes”) and then with making a million bucks buying and selling futures and bonds, and blowing it all on cocaine. No wonder that Quaalude, a horse tranquilizer that tended to make you fall down, was another drug of choice.
In the 1980s came the X Generation and Heavy Metal and Techno and Rap, and the drugs of choice now were manifestations of cocaine in its vilest forms: ice and crack. And to come down, a taste of heroin.
Meanwhile, backpackers spread like crab grass. The old hippie trail to India, Nepal and Tibet was revived, providing new blood for the communes and beach parties along the way; orgies in Goa followed by a month cleaning up in a meditation class in Varanasi.
And then they discovered Thailand, led by the nose by the Wheelers, whose second book was a patchwork guide to Southeast Asia on the cheap. Finally, in 1996, the backpackers’ bible—their answer to On the Road —was published. This was The Beach, a first novel by British writer Alex Garland. As I write this, I’m looking at the back cover copy of the paperback edition: “Bangkok—the first stop on the backpacker trail. On Richard’s first night in a hostel a mysterious traveler slits his own wrists, leaving Richard a map to ‘the Beach.’ The Beach is a legend among young travelers in Thailand: a secret island Paradise where a select community lives in blissful isolation…”
It sounded like the hippies all over again, with the comforts that a quarter century brings. On the first page of his book, Garland called Khao San Road “backpacker land. Almost all the buildings had been converted into guest-houses”—he wrote— “there were long distance telephone booths with air-con, the cafes showed brand-new Hollywood films on video, and you couldn’t walk ten feet without passing a bootleg-tape stall. The main function of the street was a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand, a halfway house between East and West.”
Garland and his novel and the inevitable movie released in 2000—starring Leonardo DiCaprio, a yuppie wannabe pretending to be a backpacker; at first I thought the casting was wrong, but then I realized it was bang-on—did for the backpackers what the previous texts did for the beatniks and the hippies. Made them cliches in their own time. Except, this time around there was no substance to subvert.
Where the beats and their long-haired spawn staged a siege on society’s constraints, rebelling against conformity, protesting against Vietnam and for marijuana, against Lyndon Johnson and for dancing, against hypocrisy and for ecstasy (the emotion, not the drug), against police and for sex, expanding on the vocabulary of exploration, actually trying to put their heads (as they said) into a different space, the only questions backpackers seemed to ask concerned cheap train tickets and where they could find the best banana pancakes.
These cultural flotsam and jetsam are found in greatest number in Thailand not just in the three-dollar-a-night guest houses in Bangkok’s Banglampoo district (of which Khao San Road is the main drag), but during the full moon of every month in communion with their peers in ecstasy (the drug, not the emotion) on a beach on an island named Koh Pha-ngan, where, following directions found on the Internet, on the full moon of every month, an estimated eight thousand to ten thousand backpackers worship Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of partying.
(In fact, when someone pointed out that days when the moon is full are religious holidays for those who bow to the lunar calendar, the party was moved ahead one night.)
The old fishing huts on Pha-ngan are gone now, replaced by small cabins and rooms and restaurants that sell fried rice and burgers. Internet cafes, without which no backpacker could survive, sit next to shops selling black-light posters of psychedelic mushrooms and body-piercing parlors with photos on display showing all the intimate places a stud or ring can be affixed. (Bring your own anesthetic.)
Beachside bars crank up the volume and the resonant bass of techno muscles in on the natural rhythms of the heart, as the chemicals ingested go zooming to the brain, abetted by unlimited quantities of alcohol and caffeine-rich drinks called Red Bull and Caribao, the latter named for a popular local rock band. By midnight, the surf has become a toilet for partygoers disinclined to line up for the club lavatories or pay twenty-five cents for the private, beachside stalls. By two o’clock, most are drunk or stoned and those still on their feet are dancing in the sand. The last body is usually dragged away to one of the small clinics by noon.
Back in Bangkok, the veterans compare notes with new arrivals. “What was it like?” “I don’t remember, mate.” “Oh, man, that sounds way cool! What’s the best way to get there— train or bus?”
It wasn’t planned this way. Time magazine opined that when backpackers first hit the road in the 1970s, they were seen as “an antidote to sterile package tours, a return to travel as exploration and adventure,” where anyone could be Marco Polo, travel close to the ground and get to know the “locals” and their divergent cultures. Rather than give their money to international hotel chains, they’d give their money directly to guest house owners, mom-and-pop restaurants, and street vendors. As tourists, they insisted, they were “green.”
There was some truth to that. Contrast the average backpacker who remained in Thailand for the full month allowed on his or her entrance visa with the wealthy tourist who stayed at an international hotel.
This hippie redux dream was dashed quickly. Backpackers traveled like migrating herds on a predictable path, connecting beaches in India (Goa), the Philippines (Boracay), Bali (Kuta) and southern Thailand, and as true environmentalists discovered, the herds inevitably trampled the landscape flat. “They tend to be like sheep, all going to the same places,” Tony Wheeler told Time. “That is a negative.”
Bangkok Heart Attack
When I told my kids back in the United States that I’d decided to have open heart surgery in Bangkok, they thought I needed my head examined. Was I crazy?
I assured them I was not, said they had to trust their dear old dad, even if he was falling apart. I said my Thai cardiothoracic surgeon was London-trained and had participated in over a thousand such operations, while the cardiologist who’d been supervising my coronary health the past year, was schooled in the U.S. and practiced there for twenty years before returning to Thailand, and that Bumrungrad Hospital probably was the best in the region, including those in Singapore.