If you prefer to see pink penguins waltzing in Antarctica, four-humped camels making sushi in India or Wayne Rooney speaking fluent Latin with the Pope, you can probably manage it. In fact, whatever sort of chemically altered cerebral journey you're after is usually cheap and easy to find. And if it doesn't land you in jail, slapped with a fine, robbed or half brain dead, it just may be worth the effort.
OK, that's overstating things a bit. Not everyone who samples a little herb beside a beach campfire ends up on the wrong end of a bar of soap in a Turkish prison. You've likely heard the anti-drug mantra already: the poor local medical care in case your brain has issues with whatever you're using to alter it (which may or may not be what you thought you were buying); the friendly local dealers who actually get kickbacks from the local police for telling them who their customers are; the 1,266 Brits currently rotting in foreign prisons on drug charges; the government that can do almost nothing to help; and as if that weren't enough, it's hard to even guarantee a lucrative book deal anymore, once released from prison.
What you may not have considered is the cultural impact. Head to Thailand or India for a full moon party and you'll find a gaggle of "enlightened" travellers with - beware, slight stereotype approaching - beaded necklaces, a psychedelic melange of mismatched local garments and piercings. They're organically minded, environmentally conscious, and as "alternative" as it's possible to be with nearly identical tribal tattoos. Essentially, these are people who read The Beach, but never found their own because it wasn't listed in Lonely Planet.
Goa Gil, an old-school hippie from San Francisco who went to India in 1969 and practised yoga with gurus in the Himalayas, started the Goa trance parties so that, according to his website, "people will become more sensitive and aware of themselves, their surroundings, the crossroads of humanity, and the needs of the planet". When I passed through Goa to catch a glimpse of the scene, I saw fluorescent-painted palm trees and spaced out bodies littering the beach in the morning. But most revealing, I witnessed locals regarding these travellers the same way the people in Gran Canaria look at lager louts in football shirts - as repugnant walking bags of money. Exchange the beer for bongs and the T-shirts for sarongs and you've got an oddly similar cultural invasion. Just what the planet needs.
Maybe if the rave party included a month living with gurus or Buddhist monks it would carry some of Gil's original ideals (he's now a DJ touring the planet, by the way), but as it stands, there's little difference from the charter tourists deep frying their backsides on the Mediterranean while competing for the disdain of the French, Spanish, and Greeks. OK, the travellers' hair is a bit longer, the budgets are lower, and cows, not their kids, are gobbling up their beach food.
Whether it's a drug bust or cultural bust you're hoping to avoid, the tactic is basically the same. Get away from the crowds and do your own thing.
Anyone who tells you different has a genuine journalist ID card to sell you for £3. I should know. I bought one.
· Doug Lansky spent nine years travelling the world. He is the author of First Time Around The World: A Rough Guide Special.
