When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over fifty years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, 'I never took drugs because I am drugs.' With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality-an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.“There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about seventeen hundred years ago. 'Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'' Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. 'The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life,' wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones.

Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. “Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a 'national beer' for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers.

Rolf potts