Revisiting My Hippie Adventure
I can only report one hippie adventure and fortunately my path did not cross that of Frenchman Georges Sobhraj! I just finished watching the BBC/Netflix miniseries The Serpent which is inspired by Sobhraj’s killing spree in the mid-1970s. Also known as the Serpent, he targeted naïve backpackers on their nirvana quests in South Asia. Sobhraj’s modus operandi was straightforward: after befriending and drugging his victims, he murdered them. He and his lover, Quebec-born Marie-Andr é e Leclerc, cashed their victims’ traveller’s checks and forged their passports to travel around the region indulging in their debonaire lifestyle. The 1970s were the heyday of traveller’s checks and switching passport photos was a kid’s game. The suspenseful thriller focuses on Sobhraj and his nemesis, Herman Knippenberg, the young third secretary of the Dutch embassy in Bangkok. Knippenberg and his wife Angela (in the late 1990s, I had met Angela Kane, her maiden n...