Read Nomad Codes for Free Online Page A

dreams of the East was entrancing this crowd, something these old-timers knew but would not say.

    As an Indian pothead I met in Mysore put it, “Goa isn’t India.” And Goa hasn’t really been India since the Portuguese first colonized the place in the 1600s, when “Golden Goa” became a place a European man could really go to seed. Interbreeding with the locals was encouraged, and some adulterous Indian wives took to dosing their husbands with datura weed, rendering the men, as one early account put it, “giddy and insensible.”
    Goa remained in Portuguese hands until India seized it back in 1961, and the region was still more European than Asian in flavor when beatniks discovered its beautiful beaches a few years later. By the end of the ’60s, hundreds of thousands of European and American freaks were streaming overland into South Asia, trying to find themselves in a country where it’s easy to get lost. Though Goan beaches like Calangute and Baga didn’t offer electricity, restaurants or much shelter, they did provide sweet relief from the overwhelming grind of travel in the East. Every winter a motley tribe of yoga freaks, hash-heads and art smugglers would gather, until the growing heat and the threat of the summer monsoon pushed them further on. Goa was like going home for the holidays, and the freaks celebrated: Christmas, New Year’s, and especially full moons.
    I asked one grey-haired French Canadian freak about these backwater bacchanals. He hadn’t been in Goa since the ’70s, but was passing through after returning his dead Tibetan lama’s ashes to Dharamsala. “They were very free” he said, raising a lascivious eyebrow. Free enough to have the local Catholic nuns up in arms, scandalized by orgies and nudity and rumors of hippy waifs breast-feeding monkeys. Less than a decade after the Portuguese finally left Goa, the land had been invaded by Christian Europe’s footloose pagan spawn.
    By the time I arrived, underground Goa was well on its way towards becoming a bohemian Club Med nestled amidst rice patties and palm trees. As any Lonely Planet guidebook will tell you, Anjuna is one of Goa’s last hippie holdouts, but most of Anjuna’s available housing had been rented out by regulars months before. After hours of wandering along cool sandy paths, I found a two-dollar room: a mat on a stone floor, no windows, a bare bulb. Hunkered down next door was a crew of vacationing Indian men, drawn like many middle-class Indians to purview Goa’s exotic (and frequently bare-chested) freak fauna. They sold Compaq computers to missile developers in Hyderabad, a full day’s drive to the east. “We like the hippies! They’re in their own world! Do you know where the party is?”
    With its bucket shower, scorpions, and outhouse (not much more than a chute into a pig trough), my abode was hardly plush. But like the saddle sores you might get at a dude ranch, such rough edges keep the straight tourists at bay and add an adventurous texture to the delicious lethargy that Anjuna otherwise affords: free parties, great drugs, jumbo prawns, cold beer, cool bikes for rent.
    Along with Xavier’s restaurant, where the beatnik pioneer Eight-Finger Eddie sits every night like some ancient mariner, Anjuna’s greatest tourist draw is its Wednesday flea market. What began decades earlier as a lazy venue for local vendors and destitute hippies has swollen into a glorious seaside mall. Wandering past acres of blankets and bangles, vests and singing bowls, spices and raw chunks of amber, I felt like some reincarnated Portuguese trader armed with American Express. The freaks have their own section, where travellers sell blank DAT tapes and Drum, Stussy tank-tops and original rave-ware. I wasn’t surprised when an expatriate American fashion photographer told me that some of the East’s traveling techno freak designers made up to a 1000 dollars a day on the streets of Tokyo, money they just poured back into their