I looked at my watch today and realized two weeks had gone by since i wrote my last update. Christmas is a week away but you would hardly know it here. There is the odd Christian shop with the plastic tree and tinsel, an advertisement or two with a funny Indian dressed up as Santa Claus, but absolutely none of the commercialism. I’m sure all of you must be sick of it and looking forward to spending time with your homies.

We’re in Allepey right now, home of Kerala’s famous backwaters. If you have the cash (we don’t) you can rent a house boat for a few nights and live on the canals and rivers that snake their way through rice fields. We took a cramped and loud local ferry yesterday (only 10 Rs!) and watched people dine in luxury replete with satellite TV.

The last I left off, we were in the heart of Tamil Nadu, Trichy to be exact. We decided to head off to Pondicherry on the east coast and it was definitely a good move. Pondy is an old French settlement with charm and we arrived to find a real bakery that made almond croissants, vegetable quiche, and real coffee. It was decided immediately that we would spend a few days here fattening up on wheat, butter and sugar. To accomodate the monster in our stomachs, we picked up a real dive of a room that turned out to be spacious enough for me to practice kungfu in my underwear and do my laundry.

The higlight of Pondy was our adventurous day out to Auroville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville). This place is like no other and needs to be explained a little before describing our trip there. Sri Aurobindo and a Frenchwoman named “The Mother” were spiritual collaborators who drew from Vedic philosophy and modern science to create a community focused on integral consciousness. In 1968 a whack of land was purchased by this community to start the experiment in human unity. Auroville would be a place for people of all religions, creeds, colours, and so on, to live and work together for the purpose of evolving human consciousness. Quite a compelling task isn’t it? Are you skeptical yet?

We rented two bicycles early in the morning and plied our way along the coastal highway. Our years of riding in traffic served us well and we merged with the street chaos beautifully. It felt awesome to ride a bicycle again. After getting lost we found our way into Auroville as my front tire decided to blow out. I found a mechanic who said he would replace the ailing wheel and put me back on the road in 3 hours. Laura rode the rest of the 5km to the visitor’s centre while I hitched a ride with an Indian man on his motorcycle. The visitors centre was only a snapshot into what Auroville is about and if you click on the link above you’ll get a glimpse of the massive golden golfball looking structure that houses the crystal meditation room. It was on the way out that things got interesting.

The plan would be the same as before. Laura would ride back to the mechanic and I would hitch a ride on someone’s motorcycle. The first person I came across was a Bulgarian woman living in Auroville. She came a few years back, expecting to use her expertise as an engineer, but instead worked almost exclusively on moving rocks and building various structures. She spoke about how the experience deconstructed her identity and how the community changed her life. She told her story as we whizzed past fields of vegetables and as I listened I realized that we were not headed towards anywhere I was familiar with. We stoppped and she explained to me that Auroville is full of little towns and that I could have come from any one of them. I got off and in that moment waved down another motorcycle and tried to explain the look of the town I had come from. The man was somewhat assured of where I needed to go and happily took me. Again, I ended up somewhere completely different but with hearing another story of how Auroville changed a persons life. He took me back to the visitors centre where I found another motorcycle. The Italian man I met told me about how he was a musician who travelled the world for an alternative to the fragmented, violent and consumerist values he was surrounded by. He found Auroville and was now an organic farmer with lots of ideas about how transform local farming practices. He waved down aonther motorcycle as we drove and I was handed off to another man who was headed towards a town matching my scant descpritions. I arrived to a fixed bicycle and a slightly worried Laura. Lost in Auroville.

From Pondy, we moved onto Mamallapuram where we spent the better part of two days at our hotel hiding out from the rain. I picked up an acupuncture text and started locating the points and meridians on my body. Laura and I wrote and read as much as we could in between dhal fry and thukpa soup. We made a quick trip into Chennai where we picked up a train headed to the west coast. On the train we met a newly wed Indian couple going on their honeymoon. Their wedding lasted five days and they were half way through a 24 hour bus/train/train/taxi trip into the hills of Munnar. He worked for GM in India and she was a software engineer. They gave us insight into everything from how marriage and relationships are changing in India to how GM’s trouble at home isn’t affecting India that significantly.

We arrived in Cochin, a small former Portugeuse colony on the Arabian Sea. Walking about the town one day, I saw some school children playing soccer in a field and had some sudden gall to walk into the school. I met the principal and asked if some students and teachers would be available for an hour the next day to talk about the Mumbai blasts and peace. I told them I was a teacher back in Canada and he told me to come back at 10AM the next day. I didn’t know what to expect and arrived the next morning to a very rudimentary classroom crammed with 50 students who were about 10-12 years old.

We practiced mindfull breathing with each other, did the famous paper tear, and some small group discussion about how they felt about the blasts and their ideas for peace. When they closed their eyes for mindful breathing, most took the task on with a relaxed determination and others found it exceedingly difficult to not laugh. The paper tear created a huge mess on the floor. They were saddened by the loss of life in the blasts and talked about corrupt government, human unity, awareness campaigns and the sensitive issue of Pakistan. The hour was quickly over and the teachers asked if I would take another class. A few minutes later, 50 more students replaced the first bunch and I did it all over again. As I was leaving, both a teacher and an admistrative office person asked me here I was staying and how I was going to the next town. The teacher ran a guest house and gave me her card and the office guy had a son with a taxi service. Everyone in India it seems has a job in tourism.

From Cochin, we headed to hills of Munnar and hung out for a few days in the tea plantations. As we arrived a massive 60 foot wooden cutout of Lenin stood next to a dwarfed but also impressive lit-up red hammer and sickle. Richshaws proudly drove around with the communist flag and we learned that members of the tea planters union from 9 states would be descending on the town for a conference. Kerala is a democratically-elected communist state and is the only place in India with almost 100% literacy. The hills were awesome as well on the way to Periyar where we spent a day in the national park hoping to see some tigers but all we got were some leaches on our pants that fell off when our guide poured tobacco powder on them. From Periyar, we arrived here in Allepey and must now sit down to the task of figuring out the perpetual question “Where next?”

I hope to get out a message to everyone on Christmas.

loving y’all lots and dreaming about fun things to do when we return.

peace out

sp