The first one I remember having out East was on Unawatuna Beach, near Galle, in 1981, with Simon Le Bon. Unawatuna was ravishing then: a perfect crescent of golden sand, a few bamboo shacks, a house some rich junkies lived in, two members of Duran Duran seeking inspiration for their next video, and a palm-fringed restaurant, its deck facing the sunset. I was, of course, stoned; I had, of course, the munchies. And Simon... well, Simon was pouring maple syrup over a banana pancake. There it was: glistening, glutinous and the answer to any hippy's prayers. So I ordered, and I ate, and I was hooked. Ever since - from Sihanoukville to Sikkim, from Vagator to Varanasi - I've fallen ravenously on those banana pancakes and wept with joy.
To understand, you have to appreciate just how minimal were your chances of getting a pudding on the original hippy trail. (A friend claims she saw a lemon meringue pie in Kabul in 1970, but she's an unreliable source - thinking she was about to be busted, she dropped five tabs of windowpane acid outside Gloucester Road Tube station in 1969.) Certainly, when I gave up my plum job at the BBC and hit the trail in 1971, there were no such treats. Instead there was a mutton stew in Kandahar, a dubious kebab in Landi Kotal, bland pulses in Rishikesh and (later) dried cockroaches crumbled over sticky rice as I chugged down the Mekong from Luang Prabang. Essentially, you took what you got for the little money you had, and with it picked up hepatitis (that's what the maharajah of Jaipur caught, probably when he shared a roadside snack with me near Bikaner) or the runs (a travelling companion of mine had to be left, swaddled in soiled towels, in the Crescent Lodge, Peshawar. When he made it home, he thrilled students at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases for months after).
Actually, it was far better than that, if you were sensible, and vegetarian. But aloo gobi could be repetitive. So it was that in Kathmandu I and Duncan Campbell, now of the Guardian, used to stumble - or rather I stumbled, because of the mandrax I'd taken; he strolled - to the Cabin restaurant. According to the top of the menu, the Cabin was 'Where the Jet meets the Beat', but the menu wasn't very Jet: beef thukpa, lamb thukpa, buff (for buffalo) thukpa, chicken thukpa. Wikipedia says that thukpa is a clear, noodle soup; the Cabin's was a dark, mysterious broth, its meat sourced from God knows where. As Duncan remembers, 'They hadn't quite started catering for the hippies then - except for the drugs.' Perhaps that's a reference to bhang lassi, the hash-laden drink that rendered many of my afternoons immobile as I sat, surrounded by monkeys, by the temple of Swayambhu.
Lassis, yoghurt in little clay pots and milk shakes went some way to filling the hole where the dessert menu should have been - my friend Vicky Cruickshank remembers watching five mangoes being melded into one milk shake for her on a Delhi street. (Indian sweets were - still are - just too sickly-sweet for either her or me.) But lassis and milk shakes didn't have that sit-down-and-munch quality; café society wasn't what the road was about, man. Nepal, it's true, did have restaurants like the Cabin where you could sit, hear a tinny recording of 'Sister Morphine' and nod out over your lunch. In somewhere like Varanasi, though, a meal was a hit-and-run affair of, say, subji (vegetables) and chapati, eaten at a scrupulously clean but definitely non-lingerworthy stall. That was what made the invite from an American freak to Thanksgiving dinner so alluring. Turkey; pumpkin pie; the brittle jesting of the well-informed guests - it seemed impossibly sophisticated. It was; the feast lasted all of three minutes. It turned out that the guy's parents had mailed him an astronaut-food Thanksgiving dinner. You squeezed a tube and tasted a toothpaste-like turkey; you ripped open a bag, and some crystals had a hint of a tint of cranberry about them. And the conversation.... as ever, star signs, karma and how-much-did-you-pay-for-your-room-man-God-you-were-ripped-off. Oh, and dope.
I was in truth pretty happy with my simple veg 'n' chapati diet - and it had to be simple, given the risible budget most of us were travelling on. One 6ft 1in friend of mine arrived at an Indian chum's house weighing six-and-a-half stone. He had, he boasted, got from London to Kerala in five months and on £43. His pal's mother fed and nursed him back to health. (I tended to retain my svelte, Keith Richards-esque figure by dint of smoking opium in Varanasi and Vientiane. I'd dream those de Quinceyish dreams and then invariably be sick. It's a sure-fire way to shed those unwanted pounds.)
But even I found dal, dal, dal dull, dull, dull. Menus had yet to be Westernised; what was Western was either a hangover from the Raj - Windsor soup, for instance, on the trains - or breakfast.
Ah, breakfast: it's always interesting to see atavism at work, and breakfast is the meal at which best to observe it. I remember one cool, cool cat from La Jolla: he'd gone as native as all get-out, learning the sitar, wearing a dhoti, smearing himself with ash and embracing Kali. But he always, always needed eggs and toast for breakfast. And breakfast was when he always, always lost his spiritual cool. Because whatever happened, something would be missing (no salt, no bread) or wrong (fried rather than boiled). By the by, boiled eggs were what I ate with my lawyer on the platform of an Allahabad station after I'd spent the night in a cell, having been busted on the Varanasi-Delhi stopping train for possession. Very good they were too; four minutes to the second, I'll be bound.
That atavism is why, of course, there are 'Full English Breakfasts' available from Puerto Banus to Pattaya these days, and why, in time, the banana pancake started its march to universality. What you like to eat is drummed into you early, and you pine to replicate it - particularly if your senses are a little disarranged. Thus it was that three months ago I found myself on Asi Ghat, in Varanasi, at an outdoor restaurant (with tables! and fairy lights!), eating apple pie. Govinda, the Canadian holy man ('I first came to Varanasi in 1972 but I'd been on the way for many lives before') who recommended it, told me the story: an American girl had come to Varanasi to learn the tabla; she was a serious student, a proper chela (pupil) to her guru; she still lives in India. But she missed Mom's apple pie. So she had the recipe sent over and she taught Vijay, the chef. And now there's no savvy traveller who's not wolfing it down.
The same thing happened in Goa, in spades. When my old girlfriend Valeria first went there in 1972, she found fellow Italians moaning that they had no parmesan to zip up their linguini. Next time, she took some with her and became the most popular girl on Anjuna beach. One dealer offered her five kilos of Nepalese temple balls for her stash; another guy - the sex god of Calangute - was hers for the asking. Now there are even truffles in Goa. And there's not a pinprick on the Lonely Planet map that doesn't boast a German bakery.
And not a shop that doesn't sell bottled water. You certainly didn't get that when I was a youth. Even Coke was not to be trusted; there was a brisk trade in empty Coke bottles between Iran and the Afghan border town of Herat. These were then filled with prime Afghan product and sold to the neophyte traveller. Lavatories were jammed all over town. I shared a room with one such sufferer. The hotel manager led me to the bedroom door and opened it. On the bed was Olivier lying, glassy-eyed. Beside it, leaning against the wall, was a stack of framed pictures of Indian gods and goddesses. He picked one up and handed it to me. These were, he explained, his goldmine; he'd spent everything he had on them and he was taking them to Paris to sell. He leant the one he'd shown me back on the pile. It slid, they all slid and they crashed to the cement floor, glass shattering like a Poll Tax riot. 'Bad karma, man,' cried Olivier. 'Bad karma.' And there wasn't even a tarte tatin to cheer him up.
Which makes it all the more baffling that we early travellers didn't persuade someone, somewhere to come up with an amuse bouche to tickle our hash-addled fancies. I recall, for instance, a day in Mazar-i-Sharif when I desperately needed something to soothe my frazzled nerves. I'd spent hours in a darkened basement hash den just off the main square, the only thing visible the flashing eyes of Afghan tribesmen pulling hard on their chillums. I tottered out into the fierce sunlight and felt my eyes explode at the brilliant blue tiles of the mosque. I moved my head and saw... a No 11 bus, its destination board clearly announcing Liverpool Street. I had, I thought, lost my last remaining marbles. Thank God my travelling companion, Remy, a French junkie ('Today, David, I double the dose'), knew the score: the bus, he told me, was a second-hand purchase from the GLC. It now ran regularly to Balkh, where the best hash was grown; the Afghans just hadn't got round to changing the sign. Thanks, Remy, but what I needed right then was a knickerbocker glory and a Scotch. Fat chance of either: even in the late 70s, I had to get a certificate that declared me a registered alcoholic before I could be served a drink in Tamil Nadu.
Things were of course more relaxed in Thailand and Bali - there were still magic mushroom omelettes on the menu when I at last got to Bali in the early 1990s. In the late 1960s, I've been told, it was very heaven to eat one for breakfast and watch the surf crash onto the unsullied beach. But that was then... As for Thailand, it, like southern India, offered a wealth of pineapple and banana fritters. As it did whisky: in 1973 I used to ring room service at the Atlantic Hotel and order up a bottle of Mekhong whisky, five Thai sticks, a little powder and a banana fritter for, I think, two US dollars. And delicious fresh fruit was always available, though even that could be troublesome. Once, having nodded off (too much grass) in the back of a Thai princess's car (don't ask), I was woken to see the princess and her ladies-in-waiting fiercely flapping at the air and holding their noses; all around was the disgusting odour of what was clearly a fearsome fart. I blushed. They giggled - and showed me the foul-smelling durian fruit they'd broken open as a joke.
But banana pancakes? No. A little later, on Koh Samui - or so I've heard - in that rapturous time before the airport came, there was an old lady with a shack on a sandy beach. On her wooden counter sat a tray of hash cakes; at her table were banana pancakes, with fresh coconut grated over them, and honey to pour. It was, my informants assure me, magical, even transporting - so much so that when they walked, in the dark, back to their hut, one of them fell 10 feet into a hole. Happy days!
For me, that culinary bliss was yet to come. For that, I needed that chance rencontre beside the sea with Mr Le Bon. I'm grateful to him, but I've been a slave thereafter - even now, after 20 straight and sober years. And so it was that late last October I settled down by the Holy Lake at Pushkar, nodded serenely to the French freaks beside me at the Sunset Café, heard the tintinnabulation of a thousand devotional bells, and ordered... a banana pancake, please, with honey on the side.
