Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Hooray, I am back in mellow Dali. What a brilliant idea to come here to write up my notes rather than slug it out in hot, sticky and expensive Shanghai. Much has happened since I was last here. For example, there was a rainbow invasion.

The so called rainbow people are all over Asia. They are uber hippies, wandering the earth, and they host regular rainbow gatherings, where they all get together and do hippy things.

The first rainbow people I met were in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, in the cheapest dormitory in town. These guys wanted to hitch hike to Tibet.

They were really very poor. They had come in on the bus from Pakistan where they had been living in a refugee camp.

They were okay, and good company, except when they decided to sing their dumb rainbow songs. I remember the songs in their entirety as each only had one line, repeated ad anuseum, with bongo accompaniment: ‘We all come from the goddess, into her we shall return,’ and ‘we are the rainbow people, stronger than before.’

One guy was Austrian, a prankster at heart, who didn’t seem that into any of the hippy shit, he just wanted a laugh. He dressed like an elf in green robes and a pointy green hat. He always carried a huge stick. He had a conch shell in his rucksack. He was still getting over the death of his monkey, in the refugee camp.

I went to the Kashgar bazaar with them, to buy provisions for this dangerous journey. I remember being bored and irritated, because they were only interested in the cheapest stuff, for which they bartered furiously. In the end, after a day walking around this enormous central Asian bazaar, they had each accumulated a bag of nuts. Largely on my advice, the bulk of this assortment was made up by stuff that I thought was almonds, only really cheap.

A couple of months later I bumped into them again, in Beijing, in, of course, the cheapest dormitory in town. Now the Austrian guy had Tibetan prayer flags tied to his stick. They had successfully hitch hiked round Tibet, with pilgrims and truckers, but it seems, nearly died of exposure on several occasions.

The almonds had been cheap for a reason – they weren’t almonds at all, just tasted a bit like them, and were toxic; eat more than a couple and you got stomach ache. And they had had to survive on these things for days and days, sat in the back of trucks that ground along unsurfaced roads.

They had got all the way to Mount Kailash, the holiest site in Tibet, and one of the world’s most remote travel destinations. You are supposed to walk round it clockwise, which takes three days, and it brings you good karma and improves your chance of a favourable reincarnation.

Walking clockwise is a big thing in Tibetan Buddhism. Nobody walks anywhere anti clockwise. It’s the first thing you learn. Anti clockwise is the way of Bon, the very weird pagan religion that predates quite weird Tibetan Buddhism.

I walked anti clockwise round a holy site once, for about an hour. I met, of course, all the pilgrims going clockwise, who reacted in horror – tutting, shaking their heads, barking at me to turn round quick. One guy drew a finger across his neck, poked out his tongue and made death rattle sounds. I don’t think he was threatening me, he was telling me I was accumulating bad karma and would die shortly. It was an uncomfortable hour.

Well anyway these mad hippies did the whole three day Kailash kora anti-clockwise, Bon style, backwards, and baffled and consternated thousands of pilgrims. It was a kind of knee jerk anti-conformism. I mean of course they conformed in other ways, but so far as they could they always did things differently. Mind, they said, it was shortly after the anti-clockwise kora that they had nearly died of exposure, so in retrospect they weren’t sure that they had done the right thing.

I started hanging out with the Austrian guy, who was good company. We heard that there was going to be a meteor shower visible over China and conceived a plan to sleep on the Great Wall and watch it. Only it was winter, so the temperature up there would be about minus twenty.

Me and him and this German girl took as much bedding as we could carry and got the last bus up to Mutianyu Great Wall. It was hard to get the Austrian’s stick, which was about two metres long, into a packed minibus, and when we did he was adamant that it not be laid down on the floor. So the stick went along the back of the seats, between the other passengers, who took this imposition rather stoically, I thought.

Having got to the wall the three of us hid on it until they had shut the ticket office and everyone had gone home. Then we made a camp in a guard tower and built a fire. As the temperature dropped we realised that without the fire we were going to get very cold indeed, so we spent hours stumbling around in complete darkness looking for anything that could burn. Still, we figured that this fantastic meteor shower, which would start any minute, would certainly be worth it.

Eventually, inevitably, the fire burned down and we had to huddle round the embers to sleep. And boy did we huddle, like kittens, as the temperature dropped and dropped. We wrapped a scarf round all our six feet to try and keep them warm.

I don’t think any of us slept at all. And we didn’t see a single meteor. Still, never mind, it was a good adventure.

I didn’t meet any more rainbow people until I was in India. They were a lot less interesting there than in China. Pragmatic, matter of fact China is such a non-rainbow country it was funny to see them trying to cope, and the place could frankly do with a bit of dippy weirdness and a bit less obsessive materialism.

But India already has too many western space cadets and new age wierdos for rainbow people to really add anything to the mix.

In Varanassi I had the chance to go to one of their rainbow gatherings. I didn’t bother but my mate C did.

He said that at the start, to kick things off with a suitably communal, anti-materialistic vibe, everyone was invited to put some object that was special to them into a pile and then they would all walk round the pile, hand in hand, and take it in turns to go in and pick something out from the pile. And that would be like, some kind of metaphor for giving up on who you are and accepting the power of chance and being all bonded and whatever.

So they did this ritual, but it did not quite turn out as intended.

Hippies who had contributed a flute and ended up with a shell started complaining that not everyone had taken communalism quite seriously enough. And people who had put in, say, a leaf, and were now the proud owners of a nice embroidered bag, were responding by saying that those other hippies should lighten up and accept their karma and why were they making such a big deal when everything belonged to the goddess anyway.

And the gathering grew so rancorous, and so many arguments started, that the whole thing was in danger of breaking up in a welter of ill feeling on this, its first day.

So it was decided that every object be returned to its original owner. And then they would do the ritual over again.

But now, all the hippies who had previously contributed bongos or jewellery or whatever and ended up with an acorn or an interesting shaped stone were buggered if they were going to be screwed over a second time.

So they put in sticks, stones, leafs or shells too.

And what they ended with was a renunciation-of-materialism ritual in which a bunch of hippies walked round in a big circle, hand in hand, and took it in turns to pick out stuff from a central pile of worthless crap.

Man, I so wish I had been there.

Anyway, Dali and the rainbow people. A bunch of French guys had shut down their bar, TOXIQUE, but there was still some time on the lease, so they said to some rainbow hippies who arrived in town in preparation for their gathering, ah, bien sur, stay here for free. You want to run it as a bakery? Why not.

And then more and hippies arrived, until the ‘rainbow bakery’ was housing around thirty people.

Down by the lake, the owner of the DRAGONFLY said that anyone who was living in a tepee could put it up and stay for free in his garden. Well, how many hippies fit in a teepee? Quite a lot, it turned out. Certainly enough to disconcert his paying customers.

The rainbow bakery did not turn out to be a going concern – the hippies weren’t washing, so perhaps it was the sight of filthy hands kneading dough that put off customers. As an alternative source of income the rainbow people started busking and begging.

Tensions between the hippies and the local community grew. But things came to a head when the media came down from Beijing to record what was going on.

The hippies had to go. A delegation of the resident foreigners was sent down to the bakery to ask them nicely to leave.

The hippies had something called a talking stick, and when they were all gathered as a group, only the person holding the stick was allowed to talk. So the residents sat with the hippies, and the stick was passed from one hippy to another, and a lot of crap was talked about vibes and energies until finally, one of the residents took possession of the stick and rather politely considering, told them please, just leave. Go, no, get out. If you don’t the police are coming.

And so the Dali rainbow gathering never happened, and the rainbow people made no friends or converts. The original hippy who had set it all up turned out to be charging rent at the bakery to all the other hippies. And when the owners of Toxique found out they got so annoyed they punched him and kicked him out of town.

And I suppose I would end there but yesterday I was reading a piece in the Guardian about the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The journalist who wrote it was saying, of course, nobody travels like that any more, the beat spirit is dead blah we’re all comfortable and middle class blah travel is just another form of consumption blah dreadlocks on the Koh San Road blah.

And it made me think about the rainbows. For all their faults – the bullshit and the cultiness – at least they’re in earnest. Some of them at least are truly out there, doing it, on the road, and they don’t give soundbites to Guardian journalists. And I felt a little fonder of them, the good ones anyway. I wished I could remember that Austrian’s name.