Hippies being edged out of Himalayan haven

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33665, 15 October 1974, Page 29

Hippies being edged out of Himalayan haven

(By

CHARLES LAMBELIN,

through N.Z.P.A.)

KATMANDU (Nepal). Hippies, those longhaired heralds of a new life-style in the 19605, are being edged out of this Himalayan kingdom’s capital, once one of their favourite havens. Fewer hippies than ever are to be seen in the busy pagoda-studded streets of Katmandu, their numbers thinned by the steep price rises and steps taken by the Nepalese Government two years ago to control undesirable elements. A few have been asked to leave the country and sent back in trucks to the Indian border. Visa extensions are more difficult to obtain than before. Most of the hippies who do come spend their winter on the sandy beaches of tropical Goa, on India’s west coast. When the weather in Goa gets too hot, they move up to mountainous Nepal where the living is still com-

partively cheap despite inflation.

In the narrow streets of the old city a room can be rented for as little as $3.50 a month. Accommodation is basic: a bare room with a wooden board for a bed (mattresses can be bought cheaply) and a rudimentary toilet outside. Food in Nepalese restaurants is also very cheap. Thirty cents will buy some lentils, a dish with a little meat and a pancake, a sweet and coffee or tea. Most of the hippies in Katmandu — wearing local garb or ragged clothes, with bead collars and ornaments — are people who gave up their jobs or interrupted their studies to travel for a few years. Karl is typical. He is 26 and gave up his well-paid job as salesman in Duesseldorf, West Germany, after saving enough to live cheaply for about 18 months. With his wife and baby daughter he spent six months in Goa beore moving to a room on a small farm near Katmandu.

He spends part of his time i in a local coffee shop where !pop music blares. “I just

live,” he said when asked what he did all day. “It’s far better than a routine job.”

A Frenchman from Neveres has been travelling continuously for the last six years. At the Indira, a popular restaurant where customers’ shoes are left at the entrance next to a statue of Buddha, he recalled the good old days. He said that a few years ago one could move around practically without money. In Afghanistan and Pakistan people were so hospitable that money was not necessary, but too many would-be hippies had killed the goose that laid the golden egg, he lamented. A great attraction for many of the early hippies was hashish. Cannabis — from which hashish is made — grown on the mountain slopes of Nepal was said to be the best in the world. Now the growing of plants for making hashish is being discouraged. The growing has not yet been forbidden, nor has its sale, but all Katmandu retail outlets’ licences have been cancelled, though it can still be bought without great difficulty.