All Intensive Purposes

In 1974, Paul Theroux described hippies in Afghanistan:

The news was bad: the dollar was quoted at fifty Afghanis, but the first shock the hippies got was from a sleek robed man who beckoned to a chief and offered him forty-five Afghanis.

"So the black market rate is lower than the bank's. Right? Beautiful."

"I remember when you could get seventy to the dollar."

"Seventy! I remember when it was around ninety -- and a bed was fifteen. You figure it out."

They stood in groups, cawing like brokers faced with a plunging market, the worst in years. And the amazing thing was that these youths, whose own description of themselves was "freaks" -- the girl in the torn blouse, the bearded one with the cracked guitar, the boy who walked around in his bare feet during that very cold night in no-man's land, the ones in pajamas, pantaloons, dhotis; the men with ponytails, skullcaps, and sombreros, the girls with crew cuts and copies of Idries Shah, all of them fatigued after their flight across Turkey and Iran -- the amazing thing, as I say, was that they talked with impressive caution about money. They were carrying French and Swiss francs, German marks, sterling and dollars; their money was in greasy canvas pouches and gaily colored purses and sequined bags with drawstrings.

At times, when the topic was drugs or religion, they were impossible to talk to. They struggled with the debased language of drug psychosis to express abstract concepts they had got third-hand from drop-out philosophy majors. But when the subject was money, they never mocked: they were serious, cunning and shrewd by turns, because they knew -- even better than their detractors -- how much their life, so seemingly frivolous, was underpinned by cash.

Paul Theroux, "Memories of Old Afghanistan," Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984 115-16 (Houghton Mifflin, 1985).