'Kathmandu ... man'
"In the Sixties....
... the magic buses used to park along Basantapur Square. Their drivers – Chattanooga Bob, Jon Benyon and Blossom – drank Guinness on the upper decks. Rudy and Speedy Eddie smoked Mustang and Manali downstairs at the Eden Hash Centre, lighting their pipes with Flying Horse matches which exploded and burnt holes in their trousers. Their passengers let go of time at the Dupo Dope ('Your Old and Favourite Joint'). Cat Stevens wrote songs in a chai shop in Asantol. Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who had introduced Timothy Leary to LSD, swept along Freak Street pontificating on the aspirations of the great psychedelic revolution. In the Cabin, Roddy Finnegan -- Nepal's most musical foreign resident -- tuned his guitar and sang about the first social movement in history propelled by students. Rama Tiwari -- founder of the Pilgrims bookshop -- arrived in town with his trunk to build a 'Himalaya' of books."
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"Kids checked into the Inn Eden, the Hotchpotch and the Matchbox, dirty warrens of cell-like rooms with low, ornamental, head-cracking doorways, and debated how best to heal the world. At the Bakery (with its sacred dhuni fire, mosaics of the zodiac and I Ching hexagrams as well as the best record player in Nepal), many newcomers sold their jeans for strings of amber and red-felt boots embroidered with flowers. On their first night in town Tony and Maureen Wheeler splurged on a two-dollar hotel. Their second night was in a budget one-dollar room next door. Newari snake charmers played their flutes outside the central post office from where travellers sent home traditional wooden statues, hollowed out and filled with 'temple balls' of hash. Crows squabbled in the old palace trees, their black wings sweeping over the terracotta rooftops, Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and hand-drawn 'Katmandu or Bust' signs. Beneath them the Intrepids tripped out of smoky black rooms, popped into the mud-floored market to buy bananas, paused to meet friends at a curd shop to hear the news from home, then returned to the Tibetan Blue to refill their pipes and ask, 'Where to now, man? Where to now?'"
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Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India is published by Penguin.