Ev Star

So here we are in Kolkata.  Actually, it wasnt as easy as all that.  Our flight left bright and early yesterday morning and we had no electricity in our room!  Made for interesting (read: somewhat stressful) packing.  Anyway, we made it!

 So last I left off we were in Cochin.  After our evening there, the owner brought us to the bus station and we journeyed down to Alleppey.  Our accomodation in Alleppey was on an island.  We went  to the dock and got picked up in a long wooden canoe.  It was pretty funny to travel along with all our bags in this big old canoe.  The giant canoe had a motor and so with that we travelled to the island.  The place we were staying at was built kind of like a tree house.  We had decided to economize by staying in an 8 person dorm.  It didnt end up mattering at all as we were the ONLY guests in the entire resort.  It was kind of weird.  The place was pretty nice though.  One of our windows looked out at a lake and the other to giant rice fields. 

The next day we got on a boat (it was called a ferry but it was more like a big boat with a canopy with garden chairs set up underneath) and headed toward Kollam.  It is an 8 hour journey by boat and our guide book had said that you could get off half way and stay at an ashram for a night and then get back on and finish the journey the next day.  We decided to do that.  We both found the ashram experience interesting but also pretty weird.  The ashram was set up by this woman called Amma and her thing is all about loving everyone and she’s supposed to have healing hugs.  Anyway, there are huge apartment buildings at the ashram and a lot of the rooms are used by people or families who have moved to the ashram.  Everyday they gather several times for chanting, meditating and singing of songs written by Amma.  A few hours of the day are reserved for doing “seva” (volunteer work) and the rest of the time i think they just hang out around the ashram (it is designed to be it’s own community and you are not encouraged to leave the gates unless you are actually leaving).  It was mostly weird because these people seem to have deifyied Amma.  There are HUGE pictures of her everywhere (our apartment room was absolutely plastered with images of her), when they do the chanting and what not they do it in front of a throne like chair with a big portrait of her seated on it, and when they talk, most of their sentences start with “Amma says…”.  Actually the group has done a lot of good humanitarian work, so that is good, but the deification thing is still pretty weird to me.  Oh and also everything is sex segregated and you are not supposed to show any outward affection to other people, which seems a little strange as Amma’s whole thing is about love.  In any case, it was an interesting experience, but I think one night was enough for me!

After our night at the ashram, we took the boat down to Kollam and from there we took the bus to Varkala.  Varkala was gorgeous!  I wish we could have stayed longer.  We stayed in a little guest house really close to the beach.  When we woke up the next morning (we actually get up pretty early here…i guess because it starts to get hot pretty early) we walked to the beach.  There are huge cliffs leading down to the water.  We walked down a set of stairs to the water and went for a swim.  It was great!  Warm water, nice waves, beautiful sand leading up to the fantastic cliffs and not too many people (i think only because it was early in the morning)!

That afternoon we took the train down to Trivandrum.  The administrator, Shanti, at Shanti Bhavan school has a son who has an apartment in Trivandrum that he was not using and she had said that we could probably stay in it.  When we arrived in Trivandrum, we gave her son, Rajeev, a call and he kindly came and picked us up and drove us to his apartment.  What Shanti had not told us was that it was a two storey penthouse suite in an apartment building in downtown Trivandrum!  It was pretty awesome.  There was even a swimming pool!  Anyway, he showed us around the apartment and gave his friend a call and asked him to drive us down to Kanyakumari (the tip of India where 3 seas meet) the next day.  Altogether we had a pretty great time there!  Well, minus the power outage the next morning!

xoxoEv