Home sweet home

I am now a week into my second stay in Patnem and it’s beginning to feel like I live here!

This time I’ve upgraded myself from the little hut up the road to a little room at Home on the beach (it's the place to go for chocolate brownies and apricot cream crumble tarts).

It's a fair bit nicer than where I stayed before (there’s fairy lights and everything!) and I figured a little ‘luxury’ was deserved after all my hard work travelling. The novelty of bugs and dirt has worn a bit thin now.




I’ve spent the last week working on my secret project with Clare. Hopefully it will be a secret no longer from the 1s April. Watch this space.

I plan to spend the next week working on my tan, reading, drinking mint tea in Tantra (my favourite bar on the beach) and stealing wifi in Mamoos (the only place that sells Chana Masala in Patnam). That’s pretty much it really. I am seriously getting very good at doing nothing. How am I ever going to fit in a job when I get home?

Me and the Tantra Boys.










The plan is to travel to Delhi by train on Wednesday. But as the trains are booked up for weeks and weeks (every man and his dog is attempting to escape the Goan heat), I am currently on the waiting list for a ticket. I just need 15 people to cancel... Could be a long walk otherwise.

Friends, f*ck ups, and floating lights

Having waved a fond farewell to Peter (aka James Bond/Indiana Jones/My Austrian), I spent my last day on Ashvem beach working. Yep, really. Copy completed for the Queen of Digital’s website (coming soon!), I took a walk to the nearest bar with wifi to send it – where I met Ji, the Bar Manager.

An hour later, we had successfully crippled my laptop between us by attempting to fix the T button. Another hour on, I had given up re-fixing it and glued a bit of screwed up paper in the gap so that I can still type Ts. No button anymore though.


Poor Ji felt sufficiently guilty to feed me free drinks for the rest of the evening, so by bed time I really didn’t mind anymore. We swapped emails and I staggered back to my hut to sleep before my early morning start and trip south the next day.

Waking up a little groggy, I packed, paid and ran. Only to have to wait two hours at the station for the train to turn up. But delays aside, I made is safely to Agonda (via taxi, train, motorbike, another taxi...nothing is ever simple here). All good, I thought. I found somewhere to stay, reached into my bag to hand over my passport...and bought out nothing. Gulp. Deep breathing, panic hunting (i.e. emptying content of entire bag onto the floor), internet searching for phone number of Sea Creek (where I’d been staying) all quickly followed. Nothing. No passport. No phone number. Just a hazy memory of handing it over when I checked in, and no memory at all of being given it back.

Thank god for my broken T button. I emailed Ji and he came to my rescue. Passport was confirmed safe...now all I had to do was get it back. Enter Clare. My friend from Varkala was sunning herself in north Goa and went on a passport rescue trip for me. So me, my passport and Clare arranged a reunion in Patnem.

Back to Agonda beach first though. Books, sunset walks and late night swims filled a lovely few days. The night swimming there is incredible. Something in the water lights up on movement. As the waves break they glow and shimmer. And as you swim, bright sparks of light dance on your skin. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Truly magical.

A surprisingly lovely interlude. (now with pics)

The best thing about the ashram was the people. And I was a bit sad to say goodbye to them. Buda and Maja (my company in Hampi) had escaped the day before me, as had Regina my fellow satsang skiver. And there were lots of others who stayed the course.

I need not have worried. By the end of my time in Varkala, pretty much everyone had turned up. Ok, I exaggerate. Not everyone. But there were a lot of familiar faces!

On the first day in Varkala I bumped into my first ashram face. Clare. She’s...well she’s all sorts of things. She’s a chef, a menu designer, a corporate caterer, a food journalist, a tailor addict and truly hilarious company. All summed up by the job title ‘Food Consultant’, I believe. Although I’m not sure if the last two are part of her official remit.

Anyway, we proceeded to spend the next week together. We set the world to rights and concocted a brilliant (even if I do say so myself) plan that combines both our talents. But it’s a secret, so I can’t tell you yet.

To cut a long story short, despite only going to Varkala on a whim, and despite the rather grotty beach, I had an amazing time there. 6 days mostly spent in cafes! It was with a good handful of reservations (and I don’t mean the train variety) that I left and subjected myself to 18 hours in sleeper class. Oh, and 5 hours at the train station beforehand.
Good thing I like trains.

A last minute decision (yep, I still specialise in those) saw me sailing past my booked destination of Cancona and staying on until Thivum instead. So I am now in Ashvem (south of Arambol) catching up with Peter (the Austrian) before he flies home.

I’ll let you know the next destination once I pick it.

Noisy peace (now with pics)

Two weeks in an ashram. How hard can that be? I asked myself. After all, I survived ten days’ worth of silent meditation. This should be easy in comparison.

Hmmm.

The first day started pretty well. I arrived at about 2pm, checked in, chatted to people, did some yoga and got fed. So far so good. Admittedly the food was a little dull, but not inedible. The dorm was clean, the people nice and the yoga good. I began to think that I might stay longer than just two little weeks. Foolish girl.

Things can change very quickly. One word: satsang. Twenty minutes of meditation followed by at least forty minutes of Hindu chanting. It started to go wrong for me about one minute into the meditation. Find peace, they said. Find inner stillness and calm. Peace? Perhaps if they provided industrial strength ear defenders I might be in with a chance. I’m not kidding. The music being pumped out of the nearby temple was at nightclub level. Someone suggested that they have to keep it that loud...after all, with 1.1 billion people competing for their Gods’ attention, they need to try hard to stand out.

So, inner peace having failed to be achieved, me and my increasingly bad mood moved into chanting. Now, anyone who knows me well can probably imagine how much I enjoyed this. Religion, ritual and group singing. I may have succumbed to the odd noribang in Korea and a night or three of drunken karaoke in Malaysia but rest assured, public singing is never going to be high up my to do list. Especially when sober.

I can honestly say I hated it. Ritual of any kind sets my teeth on edge. It’s a bit like nails down a blackboard to me. So by the time it ended I was seriously re-considering my earlier enthusiasm and trying to find out when the next train out would be.

To be fair, not everyone hated it. This was my issue. For some people it was a very spiritual experience, for some a minor irritation and only for the vast minority was it a form of slow torture.

Day 2 began at 5.30am with the early morning wake-up bell. We all gathered for Satsang at 6am and repeated the previous evening’s meditation to ear-ringing music and chanting to my gritted teeth.

Things picked up after that with tea, yoga and (still a little dull) food. Karma yoga duties were assigned (mine was cleaning the dining hall after dinner) and there was the day’s second yoga class. All followed up by dinner (now approaching the realms of very dull) and more satsang.

Repeat for 8 days.

Day 9. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t stand, I couldn't sit and I couldn’t bend - at least not without a little whimper. Now I know that I’m a wuss, but I’m also pretty sure that yoga isn’t mean to cripple you. So that afternoon I gave in and went to the gently yoga class (rather than the scary intermediate one). At the end I spoke to the lovely yoga therapy lady...it turns out that Sivananda yoga is especially bad for my kind of back issue. Oh good. (Don’t worry; I won’t bore you with the details. But I promise this complaint is not in my head, I have x-rays to prove it!). Trust me to pick the one style of yoga that will do me more harm than good.

Day 10. I escaped. I would have been crazy to stay. The satsang was turning me into a crazy person and the yoga was turning me into an OAP. Plus there’s only so much hatha yoga and breathing exercises I can take, even without the spine crunching backbends. Give me ashtanga any day.

The only question now was where to escape to. All the trains seemed to be booked for weeks in advance. But with a little persuasion (and I do mean a very little), a talked someone else into sharing the cost of a rickshaw to Varkala. It turns out the even yoga teachers can get backbended out.

Sore behinds and stare-filled beaches.

After an incredibly relaxing afternoon messing about on the river, the following day proved to be a bit of a culture shock. Up at the crack of dawn. Chasing rickshaws down the road. Arriving late for the train. Buying an extra expensive last-minute ticket. Spending four hours sitting on the hard train floor dodging stamping feet and swinging bags.

Eventually Peter and I arrived in Trivandrum. And then decided to leave. We headed out to Kovalam to the beach. I’m not sure it was our best decision – it’s a little like being in Margate (no offense to anyone from Margate...). Still, after spending an afternoon feeling terribly self-conscious on the beach (the locals can be a bit, erm, stare-y), we found a quiet place to eat and spent a lovely evening talking politics, religion and environmental activism with two Italian ladies and a Spanish one. It was made extra entertaining by the fact that this was all conducted in three languages. The Austrian and Italians being able to speak Italian, English and Spanish. The Spanish lady, only Spanish. And me, only English. It all made for a very entertaining Valentine’s evening.

The best things in life are (nearly) free

Alleppey was amazing. My Austrian friend and I took the early train down the coast (through some spectacular scenery – tranquil backwaters, tiny hamlets, bustling villages) and arrived just in time for the afternoon ferry ride through the backwaters to Kottayam. It’s the best 20 rupees I’ve ever spent. Alongside the locals, we sailed past the hundreds of private (and expensive) houseboats, coasting across Vembanad Lake and arriving in time for chai by the river in Kottayam – all before catching the last return trip back into the setting sun. It was breathtaking.