Travelling offers great encounters: other travellers are part of it!
Don Det is an island in Laos, close to the Cambodian border. It is one island among thousands of others, on the Boloven plateau.
Tiny, there is only one main street here, and it is still made of clay. These islands are popular for the local fauna: the cool babas rastas who have made their home here. Here is their portrait, to be taken at the second degree of course.
At Don Det everything is happy and made for hippies. Happy guesthouse, happy bungalow, happy bar, happy shake and happy cigarettes
The inhabitants of this small territory consist of three categories: natives, tourists and rastas-cool travellers. The latter are the most interesting. They frequent bars where everyone sits on the floor on filthy cushions, smoking smelly joins while listening to Bob Marley all day long.
Tired when they wake up, they find that eleven o’clock in the morning is really too early, start breakfast with a few cigarettes and after breakfast with four or five joins and several beers (it makes you thirsty).
The main occupation of the day remains the rolling of happy cigarettes, the search for fresh beers and wandering around, cool, hilarious in the streets.
They are tattooed by HP or Epson but with an axe, pierced with a machine gun or bazooka and wear hairstyles that look like wigs or fishing nets so huge that I wonder how they don’t walk with the nose up in the air.
They often have black and/or crooked teeth, thick, braided, beaded beards; buckles, piercings, nails, screws, rivets, tyre levers and other curtain rods stuck in their tongue, eyebrows, back and I imagine also on their genitals but I have not gone to check.
They wear all kinds of jewellery with deep esoteric meanings and clothes… uh that look like hand-stitched but left-handed and so worn, perforated, deformed that they could be exhibited in the museum of the first war.
And dirty. Because we see them every day wearing the same things. So I deduce, and they don’t all smell like Marseille soap.
They wear their herds with an inimitable style that borders on arrogance, but arrogance too cool, which you will admit is too antinomic to be acquired quickly, they had to train, that’s for sure. It’s hackneyed, but it’s cool.
In Don Det, these cool rabid hippies are often shirtless. So you can see the tattoos
They are so huge, colourful, mysterious, terrifying and conspicuous that it becomes impossible not to ask questions about their meanings. They are a bit made for that, aren’t they? Well, they’re not! Don’t do that!
If you throw the subject, they look at you sideways, but from above (there too, they practice, it’s not easy! I’ve tried).
You can read in the bovine gaze that they give you infinite condescension: you really feel that your brain is not made like theirs. “You can’t understand! “The meaning of the mandala surrounding a crowned lion, a lizard jaguar, something that looks like an alien crying, a heart in its rib cage like a real one, placed in the right place, a green goldfish and even, even quotes and it’s not Shakespeare.
They’re right, I don’t understand how you can turn into a walking comic strip. Forever. Deep down, that’s their only wealth since it’s all that’s left when they’ve taken everything else away.
In the end, you pass for an old reagent (but a curious old reagent trying to understand) who doesn’t catch anything about the deep meaning of life, the real one
It’s the absolute paradox for me: they are so cool, so peace and love, so open, but they judge the non-hippies-rasta-cool very harshly. In fact, they simply consider them as old assholes.
I’m always happy to meet travellers, whoever they are. I love to listen, exchange and debate. And I love my fellow man, avoid judging in general, especially on appearance. What has challenged me in this community is precisely that I have been judged on my appearance, my age, my life. So aren’t these the very principles of segregation, discrimination and intolerance? To find oneself only among members of the same “tribe”, the same dress code, the same mentality and to despise those who are different and think differently?
I console myself with the affront of imagining them at seventy!
I can’t help but put it all into an equation. Admire the cogitation work that I am capable of when I am inspired, I who got five out of twenty in math in exams.
So : (holed and dirty large pant + tattoos everywhere)² x (dredlocks² + (camel’s gait + twinkle eye)) x enigmatic and limp smile²) = the future generation that’s going to stick us in the hospice!
However, beyond this inimitable style hides young, graduates studious students coming from quite standard families, quoting Stephen Hawking and Chomsky rather than Buddha or Lao Tseu.
As for lifestyle, the cool rastas hippies have a great way of solving all the existential problems of the planet!
Eureka! They will solve the crisis and put once and for all Lagerfeld in the mothballs, knock out the cosmetic firms and solve all the unemployment problems (since nobody will go to work anymore, QED).
No more problems of purchasing power and chronic frustration of humanity! No more cashmere or Egyptian cotton, long live the good old tee-shirt with holes! No more expensive Louboutins, long live the old slippers!
Complexed by wrinkles, belly or missing teeth? Smoke a few joins, eat an omelette with hallucinogenic mushrooms and you won’t give a damn!
No more strikes, no more tiring work, no more stress, no more burnout, no more pollution. They’ve got it all figured out.
Because they are real, pure people. They have nothing to do with hipsters with bounced biceps or girls sublimated by XXL tattoos moulded in sexy tops. They claim the filth, laziness and contempt they have for their parents’ generation and for this consumerist and high-tech world, which doesn’t stop them from using smartphones, of course.
I wonder where they will be in a year or ten. Will they stay in Don Det, on these quiet islands, or will they go and found other tribes in a country with soft laws and a mild climate.
To my 18 year old son who drinks, smokes and dreams in Rastacolor
Last (and not least) revelation: why should I worry about my younger son who dreams of this hippie-cool life: he’s way too good for the part! Besides, he loves clothes. His hair is too fine for dreadlocks and his eyes sparkle with intelligence. Phew! I’m not going to the hospice!
