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-Andrée 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 name at United Nations Headquarters where she held various senior positions) launched a personal but obstinate investigation which led to Sobhraj’s arrest and incarceration.

The series brought a rush of memories.  In the early 1970s, I worked in Canberra, Australia and coincidentally, a Dutch third secretary played a role in my pseudo hippie adventure.  In 1971, the two of us embarked on an Indonesian islands journey to Bali and the Lesser Sunda islands of Indonesia.  Born during the Second World War, members of the so-called Silent Generation, we were too old and too involved in our budding careers to join the baby boomers on the hippie trail.  We did not travel with backpacks, but with suitcases and stayed in quaint hotels, which would now qualify as “boutique”.  We were not on a spiritual pilgrimage, like the eat pray love types, but were looking for a bit of exotic freedom to make up for our staid routine in the Australian capital. 

                                                    I was not invited to this party

In Bali, we rented two motorcycles to visit places off the beaten track and keep away from the hordes of mainly British and Australian hippies.  Aussie hippies were rarely on a spiritual journey for enlightenment, their aim was cheap fun and game, a rare commodity in dull and uptight DownUnder.  After spending all their money cavorting in Kota beach and Ubud, many British hippies stretched their trip to Darwin in Australia.  They took farm jobs to earn a bit of money for the trip back home. 

Zigzagging on our motorbikes through the rice paddies to avoid snakes, chickens and pigs was exhilarating enough until my boyfriend fell off and badly hurt his arm.  For a day or two, he became a “ride pillion.”  His male ego was as bruised as his arm, so we decided to take taxis to continue our exploration.  From faux hippies, overnight we became ersatz bourgeois.  The prime of the Balinese service economy was at our disposal.  Taxi drivers and tour guides were jockeying for attention, and less appropriate services were also proposed.  A father offered his teen daughter to keep company with my boyfriend.  Since they were neatly dressed the proposal came as a shock.  It seems that business was good because our rejection did not bother him too much.

Sadly, my boyfriend’s arm became infected and he decided to fly back to Canberra.  I still had one week of vacation and was not going to waste it in Canberra, so I decided to stay on.  At the Denpasar airport, I bid my boyfriend goodbye and I hopped on the flight to East Timor.  Our relationship cooled and upon my return to Canberra, we decided to go on our separate ways.

My 48 hour-flight to Portuguese East Timor was the kind of flight no one ever forgets.  The pilot and I were the only two westerners on board.  The co-pilot and the passengers were all Indonesians.  Many passengers travelled with live chickens, which were lying on the floor, their legs tied up.  Soon after takeoff, I became nauseated: the air of the cabin was stale and fuggy with the smoke of clove-favored cigarettes.  The co-pilot was happy to give me his seat so he could chat with a sweet Balinese girl.  I sat next to the pilot and its was the beginning of an inspirational relationship.  Both the plane, a workhorse DC-3 and the pilot, an Anglo-Singaporean, were Vietnam veterans.  He had chosen the laid-back Balinese life over the authoritarian routine of the city-state. 

Because I was now alone, I was not planning to stop anywhere except in East Timor where I had a contact.  Our flight was an island-hopping Pony Express.  We successively stopped in the islands of Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores and West Timor before ending our journey in Dili, the capital of Portuguese East Timor.  The flight was smooth and the scenery was magnificent: turquoise blue sea, sandy beaches, lush mountains and volcanoes of all kinds and shapes.  In the 1970s, these islands were backwaters and very poor.  

Flores was our scheduled overnight.  As its name indicates, Flores had been colonized by the Portuguese during the 16^th century.  Although, the pilot praised his accommodations in a local hotel, I followed the co-pilot’s advice and spent the night in a Catholic convent which provided lodging to travelers for a small contribution.  However, I joined the pilot for dinner with his local buddies in a restaurant near the Labuan airport.  They were middle-aged men who enjoyed sharing their experiences with assorted English accents.  Gallons of beer were washed down and I was happy to sleep in my quiet nunnery. 

During the leg between Flores Island and Kupang in West Timor, I was relieved to find out that the co-pilot was in charge in the cockpit. The pilot came to visit me in the cabin to give me some arrival advice.  The Kupang immigration personnel were known to be inquisitive and often intrusive.  He suggested that I play the dumb hippie on a shoestring journey to Darwin. The divided island of Timor had become a political volcano and the relationship between the two parts was strained. 

Fortunately, the airport police paid little attention to me and I reboarded with relief for the last leg of my flight.  The chickens were gone but a group of Australian hippies joined.  My memory is failing me, as I no longer recall how I reach my contact in Portuguese Dili.  I was met at the airport by a uniformed chauffeur and taken to a faded pousada, a small hotel hidden in a little dirt street. The streets of Dili were quiet and there was a sad end of reign atmosphere with shabbily dressed Portuguese soldiers loitering around.  

My contact was a Portuguese Indian from Gao who was the director of the local bank.  I remember the interior decoration of his house: 19^th century Indian style, like those seen in British Raj films.  His wife was wearing an old-fashioned Western dress.  A delicious Goanese dinner was served by a white-gloved butler.  My host was planning to leave his post as Portugal was losing control over the restless colony.  He believed that the Indonesian neighbor planned to invade the territory to prevent the local Communist insurgency from succeeding.  He was prescient, Indonesia brutally occupied East Timor in 1975.

My last stop was Darwin where the atmosphere was rowdy with thousands of former hippies drinking pints of beer on their way to jackaroo or jillaroo jobs in the local cattle stations.  I felt despondent and envied the hippies’ quick existential conversion.

Photo: I was not invited to the party....