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This article places David Larcher’s avant-garde travelogue Monkey’s Birthday (1975) in the wider context of alternative budget travel on an epic overland route commonly known as ‘the hippie trail’. I argue that the film’s digressionary tactics reflect some of the perspectives implicit in this kind of travel, which valorized ecstatic experience, financial precarity, spiritual questing and nomadism. While the film’s pluralist point of view attests to Larcher’s profound engagement with diverse spiritual practices and belief systems – this thread runs through much of his cinema and was embedded in his peripatetic, bohemian lifestyle – it also reveals a countercultural orientalism through its alignment with and romanticization of the Other. The film’s colonial gaze is implicit (and at times explicit) in how it engages in psychedelic self-othering, portraying the Other as magical, timeless and ‘authentic’, while also transforming sites of religious significance into shimmering special effects.