Hippie Boy gets his comeuppance

Whew!

I just finished a very long, very disgusting bus ride from Vientiane to Bangkok. I had intended to take the very excellent sleeper train from the border town of Nong Khai, but had been scared off the idea by a travel agent who told me that all the tickets were sold out, and that if I wanted, I could go standby and hope that someone would cancel.

I decided to go the sure and easy way. It turned out not to be so easy. First, I discovered that my seat assignment was the very last seat on the bus, in the back corner. If you know anything about vehicles, you know that the most comfortable place to sit is over the wheels, where the suspension is, or , failing that, in between the two suspension systems (in the middle). This is doubly true if you are riding a double decker, since it seems to have a greater travel (distance it rides up and down on bumps) than regular buses.

Well, there I was, stuck in the corner head-banging seat. Things got worse, as I discovered it didn't recline all the way, owing to a projecting rear light box behind it. But none of this mattered to me because of the Dreadlocked Frenchman who was sitting next to me.

He plomped down beside me and right away I felt something was wrong. A sickly-sour smell (why can't we have that smell? We've got sickly-sweet, after all!) , the unmistakeable pang of dead-skin and bio-detritus of the homeless, came wafting my way. At first I thought I was just making some sort of prejudiced judgement; after all, he looked like a dirty hippy (largely the effect of the dreads and the two-months-plus beard).

Now people who know my history know that I used to have quite long hair and a beard, and I used to go around saying exactly the kind of things people associated with hippies- in fact, my speech is still full of hippy-isms. People who know me even better know that I purposely studied the history of the sixties according to the pundits of the time (who were known as 'freaks', by the way; hippy was a pejorative coined by media hypists)

So I think that, compared to most people, I look quite favorably on what people call 'hippies', and I'm quite tolerant of any particular anti-social aberrations they may display. But maybe it's a product of my living in Asia, and having been 'asianized', that I just cannot tolerate bad body hygiene.

To me the two things are quite separate; you can oppose the 'man', you can fight for human rights, for freedom and equality, you can even do anti-social things like wear funky clothing and funky hair, but none of these things gets you out of a daily bath.

If you are familiar with Macrobiotics you might know something about George Osawa's curious aversion to soap, and the underlying belief that it harms health. Still, I kind of doubt that serious macrobioticists fail to wash - Osawa, was, after all, still Japanese, and they are a race of people serious about scrubbing the outer layers of dead skin off using mildly abrasive sponges. So macrobiotic soaplessness is also not an invitation to body odors if taken in the original spirit.

Then there is the curious poll that was taken of the hygiene habits of French people, which revealed that a good number of them only bathed two times or less per week - paralleling not just the previous English stereotype of them, but also explaining what someone had told me once: that French people believed it unhealthy to bathe overmuch.

So it didn't help that the guy next to me, Le Pig-Pen, was French. I tried hard to find ways in which he could be excused; perhaps the stench was coming from the unwashed seat of the bus; perhaps he had been in a hurry or had no time between buses; perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But no; I could find no reasonable excuse for a failure to clean oneself; in a country where three dollars can get you a very, very nice room with a bathroom inside, where even where you share a bath with other guests, no one, owner included, minds you washing your clothing and hanging it on the family clothing line; to have your laundry done for you costs about fifty cents a kilo in Laos.

So this was a kind of revelation for me; finally I could understand why so many people around the world seemed so judgemental of hippies. They smell bad; or at least some of them do, as I now have the proof. Worse, they have the money and the means to not smell bad, but they do so anyways.

Interestingly enough, the Scot in the seat in front of me began talking about this, and apparently (possibly in all of Britain, but who knows?) the Scots distinguish between clean hippies (just 'hippy') and dirty ones (known as crusties). Nice word. Or then again, perhaps not, probably too graphic.