Hippies - Part 3

Goa

In the late 1960s, an increasing number of hippies saw India as a spiritual destination, especially after the Beatles' 1968 visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or a place to escape Western values, or a place to get drugs, or a combination of the above.  One popular route to India was the so-called "hippie trail" leading from Europe to India, which young people could travel inexpensively via some combination of trains, buses, and hitchhiking.  From Istanbul, it led across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan into India.  Once in India, there were multiple destinations.  One of them was Goa.

Goa was a former Portuguese colony, and after centuries of European influence, it felt more familiar to foreigners than some other parts of India.  Word got out that it had an inclusive culture, nice beaches, a relative lack of authority, and plenty of drugs.

Hippies also found that Goa was pretty casual about nudity.  The photo above is a Goa fisherman wearing the traditional Goa fishing costume, a very skimpy thong, which many hippies were happy to adopt.

The photo above shows some hippies in the early 1970s getting along nicely with the local Indians.

And, of course, some of the hippies felt no need to wear even a thong on the beach.  Above are two hippies with a local woman passing by.

Here's a group of naked hippies on Anjuna beach in 1977.  The village of Anjuna became the favorite spot in Goa for hippies because it had a nice beach and it did not have a police station at the time, so nobody was going to bother the hippies about drugs.

I've seen several versions of this photo, labeled the Hippy Tribe.  If you look closely, you will see that someone took the people from the previous photo, colorized them, and put them onto a more beautiful background.

One amusing note: although this background is beautiful, it does have one feature that's odd to Western eyes: a cow.  This is a normal sight in India, where cows can be found everywhere, including the beach.  Because cows are sacred to Hindus, they are not interfered with, and they can go where they please.

Hippies went without clothes in other places, too.  Here are some hippies in a Goa treehouse in the mid 1970s.  The guy at right is clearly naked, and several of the others may be, too.

The "hippie trail" closed down in 1979, after the Islamic Revolution in Iran and after the Russians invaded Afghanistan and closed the borders.  But the hippie culture in Goa persisted for decades.  This photo shows a new set of hippies under a banyan tree in Goa in 1993.