Preface
More than forty years have passed since this book began for us. In 1977 Richard Neville and I were journalists living and working in New York City, I as a correspondent for an Australian media company and Richard as a well-connected freelancer.
Our relationship was in its early days. We’d rented a loft in Chinatown, tucked between two methadone maintenance clinics and a kung-fu studio, furnished with only a double bed and a ping-pong table. The loft was always perfumed with the scent of ducks, rubbed with anise and roasting on spits, wafting up from the restaurant beneath us.
Then came the call that ambitious young writers dream of. Random House was asking if Richard could leave immediately for Delhi. A notorious and charming young criminal named Charles Sobhraj had just been arrested in India. Of Vietnamese-Indian heritage, he had been raised in France and had impersonated many nationalities as a con man and poisoner in the five-star hotels and casinos of the world. Now he was implicated in a string of gruesome murders and druggings of tourists in Asia. It had been a highly publicized manhunt. Currently jailed in Delhi awaiting trial, the enterprising Sobhraj had sold his story to a Thailand-based American entrepreneur. Random House had purchased the rights. Richard was offered a contract to write his life story, quickly.
We were the opposite of hard-nosed news-hounds. Having made a name for himself as the publisher and editor of a frisky but radical underground magazine called OZ (today it’s literally a museum piece in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), Richard was known as an articulate spokesperson for the counterculture. A natural maverick, with a dislike for authority that stemmed from being sent to boarding school too young, Richard loved to taunt the Establishment. He could talk his way into and out of any situation and was so funny and charming that some people became addicted to him. I suppose I was one of them.
In 1965, with his best friend, the psychedelic artist Martin Sharp, Richard had travelled from Sydney to London via a route that was only just opening up and was soon to become known as the ‘pot trail’, and later wrote of his experiences in his first book, Playpower.
By the early sixties, the young avant-garde had discovered that there was a big space on the map of the world between Australia and Europe: Asia. Nothing seemed to have changed there for hundreds of years, or since the British Raj. It was amazingly cheap, and thrillingly exotic, with cannabis and all sorts of drugs freely available. Time was different then too. Unlike the ‘weekends away’ and ‘city breaks’ of today, it was not uncommon, after finishing university and/or saving up for a year after high school, to take two or three years to float across the world, maybe doing some buying and selling along the way to keep the finances in shape.
From all quarters of the Earth students began flocking to Asia; it was the original magical mystery tour, like walking into history and geography books from other centuries on LSD, like trekking into the pages of National Geographic on ayahuasca. Unchanged cultures, the Himalayas, sensational cheap food, endless pristine beaches, $1-a-night hotels, crumbling Raj piles for $5 a night, and 50-cents-a-night guesthouses built of bamboo teetering beside green rivers. For shopaholics and budding traders there were exotic embroideries and costumes, gemstones and antiques, not to mention all sorts of drugs, sold for a fraction of the price in the West.
There were no guidebooks in 1965 when Richard left on that journey. In fact, he checked into a brothel (the Thai Son Kit) in Bangkok and stayed there for a week believing it was a hotel. Or so he claimed.
When I left on the same journey ten years later, the soon-to-be founders of Lonely Planet had printed a modest pamphlet called Across Asia On the Cheap.
I have a beautiful girlfriend whose mother, when she was seventeen, packed her suitcase for her across-Asia adventure; it contained ball gowns, Chanel type suits and kitten-heels. By the time she arrived at the other end, having, among many experiences, lived for three months with a family in Afghanistan, she had a Kalimantan basket containing antique sarongs, museum-quality lace blouses from India, and a heavily embroidered Afghani wedding dress. And not only had her wardrobe changed. She had taken LSD and had profound realizations that changed the course of her life – in a good way, I believe.
Not all the stories were so happy. I heard of another girl from my university who was skinny-dipping in a river in Afghanistan and was shot dead by an outraged Pathan tribesman who had seen her from a hilltop.
My own journey began at the start of 1975 in Bali, which was then close to how one could imagine Heaven. On our first night in Kuta Beach, a tiny village without electricity and at the end of a muddy track, a local teenager sold us LSD, which inspired us to go body-surfing in the giant waves at the beach until dawn, enjoying the light show and sound effects of the violent thunderstorms. Quite unaware of our good fortune in having survived, we then ordered magic mushroom omelettes at Poppies café. And so our aptly named ‘pot trail’ journey began.
By May, having already been robbed twice and with one travelling companion ill enough to go to hospital, we had checked into the Hotel Malaysia in Bangkok to recover in what seemed at the time to be luxury. The Malaysia had plumbing. It had sheets! And there was a swimming pool. It was the place for student travellers to stay in Bangkok. The lobby was a meeting place for everyone on the road, and travellers of all nationalities met and exchanged advice.
It was for this very reason that just three weeks after we had moved on, the Malaysia became one of the headquarters for Charles Sobhraj and his ‘befriend, drug and rob’ operations. Which quickly, and mysteriously, became ‘befriend, drug and murder’.
Unaware of what was about to unfold at our favourite luxury hotel, we all set off on the next stage of our trip: across India, into Pakistan, then Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, which we undertook with a Bedford van and a block of government-certified hash the size of a brick which had cost a few dollars at a market in, I think, Pakistan.
I cannot exaggerate our naivety and I mention this to cast light on the culture in which Sobhraj was able to operate. We had no idea what country came next. Most of us had only recently left homes where the toilet paper was decorated with floral motifs and our mothers daily vacuumed the wall-to-wall carpet. Now we were learning to squat in third-world lavatorial situations and pour water over our bottoms with teapots.
Oh, how we rejected the consumer society. Thanks to new translations of their sacred texts, Buddhism and Hinduism had recently become on-trend. Incense was inescapable. Meditation in caves with gurus at ashrams in India and retreats with Tibetan lamas in Nepal were à la mode. Kids were hunting down the meaning of life and the promise of enlightenment like American big-game hunters on the scent of a white rhino. Reality was a moveable feast as hash and marijuana were everywhere, and basically legal in most of Asia. There was heroin too, which was also everywhere. Heroin belonged in a dark underworld we found repugnant, but it played a role in the culture of the road, and nothing but tragedy ever came of it.
Five years later, when Richard and I began researching this story, privileged youngsters from a privileged country, the dark side was unknown territory. I had been a feature writer mainly for women’s magazines. To Richard, it seemed to me, ‘crime’ was something daring and romantic he imagined from reading Rimbaud and Verlaine.
The pot trail was risky, there were the inevitable minor problems of diarrhoea and petty thievery, but mainly (apart from avalanches) that was because of the ignorance and irresponsibility of we who undertook this initiation.
Now, it seemed, a hypnotically dangerous stranger, like a serpent in a garden, had entered the scene and betrayed the trust of travellers, a group we would always identify with.
It was because Richard and I were steeped in the enriching culture of the overland trail that we found the Charles Sobhraj story so shocking and fascinating, and made the irresponsible but adventurous decision to get the story.
Julie Clarke
2020