Nomad Codes

feeling I was in some spiritual Jane Fonda gymnasium,” he says. “Boom, boom, boom, and everyone going into trance. It was quite alienating, actually.”
    “I just get a feeling of conspiracies, mass conspiracies, huge conspiracies,” Steve counters, passing me the spliff. “We’re under some bigger control at this point, and there’s a lot more going on than we know.” When the smoke hits my brain, I can almost see the plots thicken. I ask him how Goa differs from the raves in England. “Here people know about the history of freakdom, of free-form living. That vibe is carried forward with the music. In England it’s not really freaky anymore. It’s too organized. People are wearing the right kind of T-shirts, whereas here people will rip their T-shirts apart and run down the beach.”
    As the early sunlight streaks the sky, I leave the duo and head back to the dance floor. Dawn is Goa’s sweetest moment. The bpm slows, and the night’s bracing attack gives way to a smoother, narcotic trance. According to Goa’s more shamanic DJs, the change of pace has a ritual function: after “destroying the ego” with the night’s hardcore sounds, “morning music” fills the void with light.
    The dawn light floats through the clearing like incense, and a deep resonating chant emerges on top of the lush, succulent beats: “Om Namah Shivaya.” It’s a mantra devoted to Shiva, the Hindu god of tantric transformation and hence something of a freak favorite. Slowly, a global rainbow emerges from the gloom: Australians, Italians, Indians; Africans in designer sweatshirts, Japanese in kimonos, Israelis in polkadot overalls. A crowd of old-time Goan hippies ring the clearing, grey-haired and beaded creatures who dragged themselves out of bed just to taste this moment. As the dust fills my nostrils, I wonder whether Goa’s raves were anything more than digitally remastered Be-Ins. Maybe something far more strange and ancient than beatnik 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