Ah, India...

November 5, 2006

Manny and I left Auroville yesterday with great good-byes, good feelings, and with an amazingly full experience drawn inside of us – only seven days in the place, but in terms of new thoughts, faces and experience…. timeless.

I rose every morning at 5:30 for yoga, 6:00 for meditation, 7:00 for an hour reading Savitri,Sri Aurobindo’s epic of personal and human evolution; then breakfast, and a day free to explore the indescribable wealth of endeavor that is Auroville. I guess, if I am able to continue such practice when I return home, the days will be long and full as well, particularly with such good tilling of the soil prior to planting my self in the day.

So all of this openness and incorporation was quickly folded up, packed away, and stored for the next quiet place, while we took our bodies and spirits out into our next adventure of travel in India.

We picked up a sleeper bus in Pondicherry – I imagined airline seats that laid back full for a nice snooze, but we found ourselves in curtained berths with no room even to sit up. Let me rephrase: we found ourselves in curtained berth, very cozy for an intimate adventure from one day into the next, curling up with a companion. Neither Manny nor I found that particular prospect appealing, however, and gave thanks that neither of us snores.

The sleep was adequate, and I must say that lying down is truly better than the recliner approach to resting. I woke up a few times during the night, when for some inexplicable (and unexplained) reason, the bus found itself jammed into some tiny back streets of some tiny town, and had to back out several blocks to get itself going again. I considered that the location of the driver’s girlfriend may have had something to do with that detour… but again, a mystery it will remain.

We arrived back in Bangalore, to a city which did not feel as challenging as in our first time through. The bus dropped us at Majestic Bus Station, where we assumed we would have to traipse around looking for tickets on to Mysore… instead, we were met (somewhat blearily on our side of the meeting) by a man who said “Oh, you going to Mysore… come this way…!”

He is booking seats on a Mysore bus leaving in 30 minutes – not an A/C bus, but adequate, should arrive in Mysore in 3 hours time. Taken with a traveller’s grain of salt, we asked this and that, checked everything out, place reputable, etc. And booked passage. He said, “Ok, wash-wash, fresh-fresh? Only 200 Rupees…!” We are pretty grizzled from the night. He says it is a hotel room very close, 30 minutes easy to use the bathroom, wash up, off the street. “Wash-wash, fresh-fresh?” He starts walking away down the side street expecting to have us in tow… and in tow we went.

First sense of misgiving, when the side street gets grubbier and grubbier (remember that we are at the bus station!); second sense of misgiving when he turns into a narrower and grubbier alleyway; third misgiving when he turns into a gap in the wall that leads up a stair… hmmm.

But then the walls and steps within were actually clean (enough) and the faces friendly (enough) for a pay-by-the-hour hotel near the bus station of Bangalore. So while the room itself did not live up to anything more than one would expect, it did offer all of the aforementioned niceties, if in a rather un-nice package… space enough to brush teeth and wash faces and rest out of the din for a few minutes.

The bus did show up, we did stow our luggage, and off we rode.

Now, there was one small question we did not remember to ask, and that is “Is this a direct bus?” It was, in a manner of speaking, direct. But our friendly helper had actually booked two wasted seats in the back of a tour bus… we stopped for a bite to eat. Then we stopped to fill up with gas. An hour later, we were finally getting underway out of Bangalore.

But we stopped at this temple, and stopped at those ruins, and it would perhaps have been interesting if I had any interest whatsoever in a tour, or being shouted at, at the top of his ample lungs, by the tour guide, in both Tamil and English. Manny and I both hungry and ready to settle into our next space, had to keep adjusting our expectations (after a while to “none”) around our time of arrival. We were told that the helpful driver would drop us off not too far from our hotel; it was in fact another location…

So, surprise after surprise when you throw yourself into the ocean. The waves were somewhat large this time around… but having found our way to our hotel in Mysore, BREATHED, showered, and eaten, the waters are calming a bit once again. Tomorrow the City, the State Police Office (for a permit, if possible) and a little run-of-the-mill tourism

03-Travel