nilonilonilo

After spending nearly two months in gritty southern India, what I experienced in Bangkok was a truly severe reverse culture shock. The airports were a good indicator: the one in Chennai was a ramshackle affair, barely worthy of the name ‘international’, whereas Suvarnabhumi airport was a ritzy modern airport with all the necessary trimmings, including very Thai (?) fixtures such as Dunking Donuts and a 7-Eleven. I wandered around for a while until the sun got up before taking the skytrain into the city. I couldn’t believe my eyes; if I didn’t know better, I would have thought I was in Japan or something: a superbly clean, sleek, efficient and fast elevated railway system, whizzing past multi-lane motorways and dozens and dozens of skyscrapers. I got off the train and walked straight into my hostel, a flashy modern building nestled amidst a couple of truly ginormous shopping malls. The size of those things was just ridiculous, and there were not just two or three of them but dozens all over the city, each one bigger and brasher than the one before.

I crammed in as much as I could in two days: saw some temples (they are impressive enough but one quickly gets templed-out), went river hopping from one stop the next on the Chao Praya river and used the water taxis on some of the smaller canals, and after that I used one of the free rental bicycles to get around the old town. I visited the world famous backpacker ghetto of Khao San road, looking for cheap travel guides, but decided it sucked and was really happy I didn’t stay there. Throughout all that, I tried to come to terms with the high level of urban sophistication that had been totally absent for the past eight weeks in India. I’m sure in reality Bangkok is just one of many modern mega cities, but somehow I just felt like a kid in a candy store, marvelling about how proper everything looked, how everything seemed to work well, about how shockingly clean it was. No cows on the streets for one thing, and drivers seemed to acknowledge the existence of pedestrians and used their horns with restraint. It was really refreshing.

Southeast Asian food would be another exciting thing to explore. It was not without challenges in Bangkok, trying to determine what to eat or how to order it. I love street food, but there are no menus with street food. It also seemed quite hard to be vegetarian, as everything seemed to have pork in it. On the day of my arrival though there was a “thai cooking” couchsurfing meeting and this Thai girl made an a amazing curry. Furthermore it was fun to pop into a 7-Eleven (they are everywhere) and try all kinds of foods and drinks in bright, comical looking Asian packagings.

So yeah, Bangkok was fun, an intense two days in a hot metropolis, and a gigantic contrast with India (if I had come straight from Europe, it probably wouldn’t have made that much of an impression on me). But already I was flying out to Hanoi, to continue my Indochinese explorations. I don’t know if I would like to spend a week in Bangkok, but either way I’ll be back there mid March to catch a plane to New Zealand.

Hannah and I took two weeks off city and temple hopping in Tamil Nadu to volunteer at Sadhana Forest. It’s a community near Auroville and Pondicherry aiming to restore some of the dry evergreen forest, the original vegetation of the area which has now all but disappeared. To do this, they welcome up to more than a hundred volunteers.

The logistics of this place are mind boggling. Just cooking a meal for so many people takes about three hours, and the place goes through tons of fruit and vegetables a day. The food was OK at best, but sometimes it just made me want to cry, especially that gruel they liked to call porridge, which tasted like a mixture of sawdust and glue. But fair enough, it’s not easy to cook up a gourmet meal for so many people, three times a day, and the kitchen manager really worked her ass off - respect to that. There’s a strictly vegan diet, which fits in their philosophy of non-violence. However, outside the forest, one was free to eat or drink what they wanted (and so on many occasions there would be visits to the nearby villages for chai, pizza, ice cream … bit extravagant to take a 25 minute taxi ride just for ice cream, but hey…). They didn’t allow coffee, tea or hot spices either, because they alter your state of mind. Obviously, alcohol and drugs were prohibited too. Another weird rule: no competitive games, such as card games. We played Scrabble without counting the points, which, honestly, was pretty lame.

Accommodation was pretty basic: we slept in simple dorms with a dirt floor and sheets for walls. The bed was pretty much the worst I ever slept on in my whole life. The main hut was an amazing building though. There was limited electricity (none in the dorms) thanks to a solar panel system, but oddly enough WiFi was available all day (got to keep those modern day travellers happy!) To take a shower or wash clothes, you had to fill a bucket at the pump in the kitchen. This makes perfect sense, as it makes you realise what a precious thing water actually is and how wasteful we often are at home. (For information, even half a bucket can be enough for a shower!) After the initial surprise about the rather rudimentary infrastructure (“Just how does that dry toilet work exactly?”), I really enjoyed living in this truly sustainable, peaceful environment. Too bad that every morning at 4.30 AM (!), there would be horribly distorted music blasting out the speakers at not one but three nearby temples, at a volume that made it sound as if it was played in the room right next to you. Not really helpful for silent meditation sessions in the morning either…

We worked from Monday to Friday, two hours before breakfast and two hours after. The first shift was usually forest work, mostly working on the water conservation management. After breakfast, you could do gardening, cooking lunch, clean the toilets and showers, or any other task (rat catching anyone?). In the afternoons you were free to just chill out, participate in one of the workshops, or do some extra work.

Normally one should stay for at least for four weeks, but for all kinds of reasons I could only stay two. I can see how it makes perfect sense to stay for at least four weeks, because I think that’s what it takes to get something valuable out of the project. The first week you’re just getting used to the new environment, learning how things work etc. After the second week, you’re pretty much settled in, and then you have to go. If you stay longer, you can start your own little projects and contribute more in depth to the community.

So only two weeks for me. Personally, I think there could be a bigger focus on the forest work. I was really looking forward to working with my hands, in a green environment, have a go at gardening too…  I thought, especially at first, that there was too much focus on the community life. It was all a bit hippie-ish, with lots of hugging, chanting, “positive energy” flowing around, djembes … (Oh, the djembes, all day every day … Vegan djembes actually, they replaced the animal skins with x-ray sheets!) As the amazing Johanna from Iceland put it, it felt at times like a “long-term summer camp for grown-ups”. It was a bit hard to stomach sometimes for the rational, down-to-earth (not to say skeptical) person that I consider myself to be. However, as time progressed, it dawned on me what it really was that I got out of Sadhana Forest.

In the course of those two weeks, I have had (or overheard) so many enriching and interesting conversations, and none of them were even about travelling or indie bands. There is such a wealth of knowledge and information that is shared amongst everybody living there, through the workshops they organise or simply while chatting after dinner. I found so many insights, and yet when I left I was still craving for more, for more information, for more talks, for more answers and knowledge.

Most crucially though, I think that my stay in Sadhana Forest changed some of my preconceived ideas and prejudices about idealism, escapism, or, to put it more bluntly: hippies (though not everyone at Sadhana was a hippie, far from it). I always thought that people like those who stay for a long period in Sadhana (from a couple of months up to 3 years) were somehow deluding themselves, living in their own bubble, in a better world they pretended to create because they couldn’t handle the “real world”. But actually, their world is very real, and on their scale, it probably is a better world than the big one out there. They won’t ever succeed to change the world, but they can change their world, and it that way, I think it is really valuable what they do and achieve there. And I really hope that when I get back home after this trip, I can apply some of the insights I gathered in Sadhana in my daily life. Or to apply a forest-related metaphor: I hope I can sow some of the seeds I took with me from Sadhana and see them grow into a big tree.

betelnut:

They just blocked Facebook in Egypt, which is how all the protests were organized in the first place. Although cell phones are operable today, Twitter remains blocked and now this bullshit on top of it. The local state papers were acting like nothing happened yesterday. This is getting out of control.

Update: It’s back up again for now. But a realtime Google search has a lot of people still being blocked from the site.

I have WiFi and TV for the first time ages, and I’m watching CNN right now, with live coverage of the riots in Cairo. Weird to think that a friend of mine is right there right now, and how, despite we’re thousands of miles away from each other, we’re all connected.

And so, after seven and a half weeks, my second trip to India is about to end. Tonight I’ll be heading to Chennai airport, flying out to Bangkok just after midnight, trying to survive there, a hectic city of nearly 10 million, after a sleepless night, a daunting yet exciting prospect.

I’ll be alone though, as Hannah is staying in India. It’s harsh, really harsh. Things are open, but either way, we won’t be seeing each other for months. Often I don’t know why I’m doing this. Maybe it’s a big mistake. I guess I’ll find out soon.

There’s so much to blog about right now, seriously lagging behind, will try to resolve it, even though I’m not sure when.

For those who have a map and want to know where we went, our route, since my last “dear diary”-style post was the following (sorry for the poor writing, but otherwise I’ll never get this done):

- Rameshwaram (temple town on the coast)

- Harrowing 9 hour bus journey back to the greenery of Kerala

- Kumily: pleasant town in the hills, home to the Periyar Tiger Reserve. I did a jungle trek/bamboo rafting trip there. We didn’t see tigers or elephants, but a relatively fresh tiger footprint, and deer, bison, big lizard, lots of leeches… Kumily is also an important centre for the cardamom trade. This spice grows here on a bush that doesn’t look like anything special, but the pods yield the cardamom seeds, the second most expensive spice in the world. The town has dozens and dozens of spice shops, which makes it smell really nice. Paradoxically, we had quite a lot of overpriced, mediocre food here.

- A chilled-out taxi ride to Munnar because we missed the bus…

- Munnar is a small hillside town, surrounded by acres and acres of tea plantations; someone told us 85,000 acres (i don’t know how much an acre is, but it sure seems a lot), all owned by the Tata Corporation, the biggest in India, property of the richest family of the country. Tata makes cars, steel, tea, salt, has a mobile phone service, pretty much everything you can think of. Munnar town is nothing special but the scenery around is truly stunning, as we found out during a short trek. We stayed in the nicest place of the trip (also by far the most expensive, 5 times our usual budget, a little early Christmas treat), with a nice family, who showed us around all the stuff that grows around their house: tea, cardamom, banana, papaya, nutmeg, coffee, pepper, tamarind … It’s so nice to see where your food actually comes from.

- Another harrowing 8 hour journey, 4 buses in total, to Kodaikanal…

- Kodaikanal is another hill station, really beautiful, nicely located (though it takes forever to get there and out again), but I think we came at the wrong time of the year. It was pretty cold, misty and horribly humid/wet/damp/insert other synonym here. The rooms, even in our brand new hotel, were just super damp, on the verge of moldy, and my backpack got some moldy spots too. We were gonna do a trek there, but the bad weather chased us away.

- Trichy: full name Tirucchirappalli (spelling varies). Quite big, industrial, typical Tamil Nadu city but with some impressive temples. Unfortunately, someone stole my sandals while we were visiting the main temple (it’s huge, a city within a city with seven concentric walls. There was a big festival on, people were queuing for hours, for over a kilometer, to get in).

- Thanjore (aka Thanjavur): So glad to take a train again to get here, instead of endless bus journeys. Small town, but with a really nice big temple (maybe my favourite of this trip). Cycling around was pretty fun too.

On a side note: we usually had a TV in our room, so whenever it was on, we would the Ashes (for you non-cricket fans: a long-standing rivalry in cricket between Australia and England, played out in a series of multi-day games. England won this time! Go England!). I also saw 65,481,245,744,512 adverts.

From Thanjore we went to Pondicherry for a night and then we volunteered for two weeks in Sadhana Forest. I will write a separate post for this, as our stay there was quite different from everything else we did in India and it had quite a big impact on me.

Now, we’ve spent the past few days chilling in Mamallapuram, another slice of Backpackistan two hours south of Chennai on the coast, though not as developed as Varkala. It’s tiny, you can get nice coffee/pancakes/smoothies, but also proper Indian food. Never saw so many people smoke and drink beer as here. On the beach, the brown cows and the white cows don’t hang out together. It’s not star quality, swimming is not advised here, but I’m always happy to be somewhere near the sea. It feels energising somehow. Then the energy is wasted again while reading a book in a hammock …