![]() “Bullets have not been removed from their bodies,” The Katmandu Times reports, “due to lack of money.” 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. The decimation of Kabul reminds him of Dresden or Hiroshima after World War II. 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.Īs 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. Good or bad, were they really so significant? MacLean thinks so. 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. In many places, the antimaterialist hippies’ arrival stimulated a crass tourist trade and an attendant defilement of native culture. ![]() 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. Their goal wasn’t to observe other cultures but to absorb them and be transformed. 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. “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.
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