Updates and Tiruvannamalai

After two weekends in a row of traveling I am enjoying taking it easy around the house this weekend. We finally have air-conditioning in our rooms! Very exciting times over here since it hot 39 degrees C today which is somewhere around 100 F. Maybe now that we have AC I won’t wake up looking like I have the chicken pox every morning due to mosquito bites but we shall see. Reportedly there may be a chance the internet will return to our dorm this week but as it has been almost a month now without it I’m not planning on getting my hopes up. So for now I’m hanging around here and battling an epic cold which I picked up over the weekend. Luckily my roommate is traveling this weekend so I can sleep a lot and not bother her with my sniffling and sneezing.

Traveling has been amazing though. This past weekend was such a treat. A friend of the family offered to show me around the ashram and town he has visited a number of times. Five of us took up Martin’s and his traveling companion Peter’s offer and took the trip down to Trivuvannamalai ( go ahead and try and pronounce it) which is in the state of Tamil Nadu. It is a long trip down there because it is farther then Chennai which is itself a good distance. We took many modes of transportation on this adventure: A rickshaw from campus to the local trainstation at lingampally, a train to the larger train station in the city and then an overnight 12ish hour train to Chennai. From Chennai we caught a cab to the bus station and at the bus station a 4ish hour bus to Tiruvannamalai. This was my first train ride ( we were in Sleeper class non-AC) and I liked it although it was cold at night. Transportation in India is a whole other issue which I intend to devote an entry to at some point because there is so much to say about it.

We arrived Friday afternoon and found that our hotel was extremely close to the ashram which worked out very well. We had some difficultly with the arrangement of rooms and the fact that we couldn’t never got the cot we were supposed to get for our fifth person but the rooms were clean enough ( despite the lack of a shower head) and we only planned to sleep in the rooms anyhow. We ate at a very interesting and hippie kind of café next to our hotel.

We met up with Martin and Peter and they showed us around the ashram and explained a little bit about its founder Shri Ramana Maharshi. He was a boy who left home and basically meditated until he became enlightened at age 16 by asking the question who am I?

The ashram was full of wildlife particularly monkeys and peacocks and the usual resident dogs. The main building of the ashram had a meditation hall and a room with a shrine. In the large meditation room, which was also used for chanting in Sanskrit and Tamil ( the state language) was another type of alter with deity. People come and show their devotion before it but another very common practice is to walk around it in a circle. The whole shrine itself is a rectangle and so people do pradakshana around it. The manner of devotion is entirely personal and some people walk quickly and others slowly, some for a long time and others just a few times. No matter when we were in the ashram there was always someone walking.

We were invited to eat dinner at the ashram which was a really neat experience. Everyone eats in a large room and sits on the floor with either a banana leaf or a sewn together mat of leaves as their plate. People come around and spoon food onto your plate. I don’t really know all the things we ate but it was fairly standard Indian food. There was rice and some type of dhal and ghee and then other accompaniments as well as ‘buttermilk’ which turned out to be yogurt with water and salt.

Saturday was the only full day we had so we packed a lot in to the day. In the morning we went to visit the largest temple around. The location of the town is at the base of a large mountain ( possibly an extinct volcano) called Arunachala, literally translated as Red Mountain ( Aruna + Achala). The mountain is sacred because it is where Shiva is supposed to have appeared of a lingam of fire ( basically a pillar of fire) to show his power and masculinity etc.. In many temples you will find lingams being worshiped because of Shiva. This first temple we visited was a massive complex of smaller temples and also housed the small underground room where Ramana spent his years meditating. It was absolutely beautiful there and so peaceful (as was everything there). We also had the opportunity to be blessed by an elephant at the temple. To receive the blessing you put a coin in the elephant’s trunk and then he taps you on the head. Laura actually took a video of me getting blessed which I will have to try and get from her at some point.

After lunch and a bit of rest a few of us moved on to another temple while the rest kept out of the heat. This was a much smaller temple and more secluded but with very interesting sculpture. The outside was guarded by 12 large and colorful statues. Unfortunately power had gone out in the area and so it was hard to see some of the things inside the temple. There were cows being cared for at the temple and a whole huge bunch of monkeys which came out and climbed over all the statues. We walked back from the temple by going through a kind of village. The walk was one segment of the inner mountain path walk which Peter did every morning. People walk either the inner or outer ring around the base of the mountain as another kind of pradakshana. The whole trek is between 6-8 miles.

Peter handed us pens to give out to the children we passed in the village since they love to get pens. Children swarmed us and it was a bit like being back at the labor rescue school. Everywhere we went people waved and smiled and children followed us around. When we ran out of pens I tried entertaining them with my camera. They enjoyed having their pictures taken and kept asking us to take more. The village had amazing views of the mountain and it was incredible to think of people living there.

When we got back I spent a little time around the ashram waiting for us all to meet up for tea. The meditation room was so calm. I walked around a bit, sat for a while, followed some peacocks around and enjoyed watching people. There is a very interesting crowd down there and a lot of westerners. There was something very moving about that place and I could really feel the stillness there. After chai we hiked up the mountain to skandashram which was the ashram up near the top of the mountain. The views were absolutely flooring and from a spot near the top we could see the temple we had been in earlier. We walked up with an Indian fellow who was traveling around to different ashrams after having lived in one for a long time. He didn’t speak Tamil either and I think he was glad to have some company of English speakers as he spoke Hindi and English.

At the ashram at the top the monk who tends the place was singing a devotional song which we were able to listen to for a while. It was beautiful up there. There was a path which would go up higher but it was a very serious and ambitious hike and it was already late afternoon. Another path would go down into caves as well. We talked to some of the people who we met there was well which was interesting. We hiked back down and most of us decided to take dinner at the nearby restaurant where we had gotten coffee and breakfast. And yes, I have to say it was amazing to have coffee!

Since we had to leave so early on Sunday in order to make it back to our train on time we had decided to save our part of the mountain base walk for Sunday morning. We met up at 7:30 and started the long walk. There were some very lovely views of the mountain along the way and some little shrines along the side of the road. Many other people were walking and out and about as is usually the case in India. It is hardly ever empty anywhere. We stopped at one nice little temple set back a way from the road which we stayed at for a while. It was just off the inner mountain path but could get lost behind the trees if you didn’t know it was there. From there we walked back the way we had came. Martin and Peter gave us some little books on Ramana Maharshi so that we would have a better sense of the philosophy and then we parted ways so we could get ready for our trip home.

The trip was a very nice change and a very different side of India javascript:void(0)than what I’ve seen so far, but exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see in India. What’s next? I have no idea! Well, actually there is a CIEE planned trip to Mysore next weekend and then it’s Holi, the festival of colors, which I am hoping we get to celebrate. After that I don’t know. I need to figure out where to go when. There is some talk of traveling to the islands off the coast but who knows? It is getting so hot and I still need to get to the Taj Mahal!