This should have gone at the beginning, but I’ll put it at the end….

The real story.

I arrived in Laos on a visa run from Thailand in March 1970. Escaping from Hong Kong, I had wound up in Bangkok at the legendary Thai Song Greet Hotel where, like many travellers in those days, I looked for survival job opportunities. This entailed visits to various English schools, and much hanging around in the open-fronted restaurant of the TSG amid asphyxiating fumes from the stir-fried chillies, awaiting offers of employment. After a short tour of rural Thailand in the company of two kubkai root medicine salesmen I landed a legitimate job with the Nature Method Institute, run by an amiable Scandinavian.

The NMI has a fascinating history (see https://caligula.org/Nature_Method_Institute.html). I had by this time met and fallen in love with a hippie Angel from Maui. We went up to Laos to renew our Thai visas, and found instant bliss. Propelled by various organic substances, we revelled in the calm spirituality of the place. The people were wonderful, butterflies were everywhere. I met up with two Johns, De Gallier and Cornell, and they invited us to stay at their place, which was a haunted house, residence to a mischievous phi (spirit). It had a huge garden. We dropped some mescalin and thought we were in the Garden of Eden. I decided Laos was my spiritual home, and Thailand was not. The next month, we returned to Vientiane and stayed. The Angel was a belly dancer. She was beautiful, though rather pale for the part, had long flowing hippie hair and wore long flowing cotton dresses. She reminded me of Isadora Duncan, on whom I had a longstanding crush.

However, the Angel soon ditched me, answering the spiritual call of an old friend in Taiwan who was on a bad trip. She said she would be back, but I never saw her again. I was heartbroken, but Vientiane took me in her gentle embrace and kept me comfortably stoned. For the next six months, in fact. I found a job at the LAA (Lao-American Association) school. One of the Johns, John Cornell, was the assistant director of courses.