XMAS IN XANADU is a cycle of ten poems written from Sept 1966 through January 1968) as I traveled overland from N. Africa through East and Central Asia to Nepal and thence back to India.

As the poems will show, it was as much a spiritual journey as a physical one. From the beginning, I thought of this journey as both a pilgrimmage and an adventure. Nepal was the destination.  It was as close to Tibet as one could get in those dark days of Cold War.

The title comes from an expression frequently heard among the young people that we met while heading East: We would say on parting: "Christmas in Kathmandu!" Some said that we'd be joined by Allen Ginsburg and other outlaw artists though no one really believed it – nor did it matter.

THE ADVENTURE

After a few days in the medina in Tangier,  the rest of our first  four months were spent in and around Marrakech.  After Ramadan, we then, often in the company of pilgrims making their hadj, traveled across N. Africa, dipping a thousand miles into the Sahara to the last oasis before the Niger border yet another 1000 miles away... then back to the Mediterranean which we followed to Egypt. 

Thence via Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to Afghanistan, stopping here and there for a day or two or even longer. What I wrote during that period, if anything, I did not save. In Herat we stayed in an ancient caravansary whose courtyard no longer housed camels and horses, but autobuses, and were befriended by the son of what I now assume to be a Northern warlord who told the chai-wallah (I use the Indian term because I don't recall the Farsi one) that we would like some hashish. This chai-wallah was a tall, bald man who, minus the earring, looked like Mr. Clean.

On to Kandahar and Kabul where we waited two months for the monsoon to cool the Gangetic plain enough for us to traverse India comfortably. We spent those two months sitting at tables set up in the interior courtyard of the Noor Hotel, owned and run by a member of the royal family who had enough clout to bring the royal prince to visit us one time to play his sitar.  We sat there and watched the mostly young people, though there was an occasional grownup, even an 80 plus year old actor who was the image of Ezra Pound, come and go to and from India. 

Finally, a little before we had planned to leave we intended to extend our visa so we could go to see the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan but it seemed that, since we had only known the numbers in Arabic script and not the meaning of the words around those numbers,  the number 45 that we had thought to have been the number of days we could remain in Kabul  actually was  the number of days the visa was good for.  Oops!  There was a bit of bureaucratic outrage.  However, thanks to the good offices of the kind and elegant Prince, we were not punished but allowed to leave Afghanistan at our earliest convenience. We then sped across Pakistan which, at that moment in time, was more antagonistic to foreign women than Kabul, and into India.  The heat was fierce and we went to the Himalayan foothills to wander from town to town eventually reaching Manali where we rested for a few days.

Back to India and eventually to Kathmandu where we found friends from along the way who were gathering to spend Christmas in Kathmandu. Jane and Peter knew that the fellow who lived upstairs from them had used up whatever money he had been able to acquire and had to give up his $13 a month apartment in a small temple compound on the hillside of Swayambhunath.  He, then, ceded it to us.  The fellow told us he had found a rich guy who might give him a ride back to India.  The fellow whose former apartment was now ours was named Michael and the "rich guy" was Richard Alpert who had been represented to us as some American guy who was traveling around handing out LSD.

As it turned out, during our four month stay in Kathmandu, which included Christmas, miracles were commonplace.  Though much of it took place outside of our sight or ken, Michael became Bhagwan Das and Richard Alpert was transformed into Baba Ram Das on that trip to India. The story of that trip can be found in Be Here Now. I never saw either of them again.  

Eight-finger Eddy, one of the more unlikely gurus, taught one person after another how easy it was to be high without drugs as he strummed his "air bass violin" in the Blue Tibetan Restaurant using all eight fingers.

The term "Hippie" had just been re-invented at that time, sanctified by Time Magazine, being transformed from a pejorative applied to much too laid back Californicators by truly hip New Yawkers and the young folk who previously had simply called themselves "travellers" began adding flowers and beads  to the tribal or national costumes they had acquired en route to Kathmandu and began talking of going to the Summer of Love in San Francisco.  In just a few weeks, Hippieland bloomed, wilted, and turned to dust on the hillside of Dhulikel, from which place you could, if you left the big tent that covered Hippieland's real estate, contemplate distant Mt. Everest in the fading sunlight.  The last glint of light had to be Everest -- the top of the world. It mattered not a whit if that last gleam belonged to a peak known by any other name. It was Everest to me and still is.

Lee, whose last name I cannot remember for certain, founder and high priest of Hippieland was last seen being escorted out of the country and was on his way to the Vatican to turn on the Pope. His vision of uniting Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism into  Hippieism was buried beneath the reality that in Nepal Bhuddism and Hinduism were as much political parties as religions. You might could sorta mess a little with the religion but you were in deep trouble when you worried the politicians.

Through the adventure, and the pilgrimmage, our bodies had been tested severely, wracked at times with amoebae and parasites such as giardiasis: dysenteries of all kinds.  Physical discomfort  was not only something we were never unaware of, it, perhaps, was a "hair shirt" worn proudly for sake of the pilgrimmage.

But, we had made it to Christmas in Kathmandu. And, once Christmas was passed, a new decision had to be made.

And on January 13, 1968 we went to Bodh Gaya. It was my 34th Birthday and it was there I would sit beneath the Bo tree (or its successor) to become enlightened. When I arrived, the silliness of that purpose was evident.No longer did I have to seek. I had spent Christmas in Kathmandu. There was no turning back.

One day while in Periyar National Park in Southern India, while standing next to some huge elephant turds and in rather large footprints in the mud and tired of carrying the dribs and drabs of cannabis around anymore and hardly, if ever, using it,  I threw the plastic bag in which I had been carrying them into a canal and watched the bag which I, for no good reason, had expected to sink to the bottom, float on down the creek.  I could only imagine the little shrine that would be erected when the downstream farmer  found the bag in his irrigation ditch.  When miracles are commonplace, are they still miracles?  I think so.

Click on each thumbnail to see each poem at full size.  Then when you close the page you will return to the Mandala thence to click on the next thumbnail... conveniently numbered for your listening pleasure.

If you haven't already, go see the poems now... You can read the rest of this another time. I hope to add more before I croak... though I am getting old enough to make that happenstance not a very good bet.


You may consider all the contents, image and text, of this cycle to be copyrighted though you may use any of it as you wish... but please be gentle.  So, if you do anything with it, let me know and if, however, you ever figure out a way to make any money off of this work, I want some of it...  oh, yes... I do.  If you want more travel stories, write and ask... I may have time and will to relate some.  In the meantime, be good.... be well... and be happy... and may you and all creatures be free from suffering.