India... I Fell in Love

After almost 5 wild and wacky months I have left India and will be starting my new adventure touring around SE Asia.  Leaving India wasn't easy.  The date approached quickly, without really giving me much of a chance to realize that I would soon my boarding a plane on my way out.  It didn't seem real that I would actually be leaving India, and it still almost doesn't. 

My last few days in India were spent in a French colonial town in south India called Pondicherry.  Here I met up with my easy going Kiwi friend, Jules, where we rode scooters out to visit an interesting society called Auroville, shopped for last minute items and ate chocolate croissants.  Just yesterday we boarded a local bus, hot and sweaty as always and took off to Chennai, a large city where I would be flying out of that night and Jules the next morning.  I had to get in one last yummy yummy Indian meal.  So of course I ordered a veg curry and garlic naan... mmmm.  But when Jules' iddly came out (fermented rice cakes served with various coconut chutneys and yummy soupy mixtures) I got jealous and ordered that as well.... so I had TWO last meals! 

Then it was time to figure out the train system to get to the airport.  After standing in line for about 15 minutes I was informed I was in the wrong line and was sent off to the other end of the tracks to get my local train ticket.  So there we are standing on the platform waiting for my train to arrive and me to be whisked away to the place that would take me entirely away from India.  As I started to have feelings of sadness about leaving India, I said to Jules, "I don't know what it is about this place", she agreed.  Neither one of us could quite put our fingers on what has made us love India SO much.  As we were pondering this, the train started to wizz by, so Jules and I gave our typical backpack to backpack hugs, wished each other well in our next adventures and hoped to see each other sometime in the future, whenever our paths may cross again.  Now I had been a little bit sad that up until this point I hadn't seen any trains completely overfilled with people to the point of them spilling outside the doors and just short of having people on the roof.  I realized I have not ridden enough local trains out of big cities!  I got pushed through the crowd of people and squeezed myself and my second person of a backpack onto the train settling in for the half hour trip to the airport.  As I sat down (I know... I got a seat!) I looked around the cart at the faces staring curiously and creepily at me and the ramshackle space called a train.  Then the rain started... not quite monsoon yet, even though it was suppose to have started... but i realized it's just simple times like these that I love India, it's just so India!

Some may hate it... the noise, the touts, the way you get ripped off and cheated.... And while that's not all that much fun, it's part of what makes India India.  Maybe it's the people, the culture, the food, the spirituality or the ability to feel completely free.  India allows you to be you, with no judgements, there are to many people for anyone to care what the person next to them is doing!  Maybe it's the endless opportunities that India gives to try something new, different, challenging and often outside your comfort zone.  Maybe it's those moments where you sit, people watch and see the most amusing/ confusing scenarios taking place.  Maybe it's those quick interactions between strangers that leave you smiling and wondering what exactly just took place.  Maybe it's the ability to look around you, realize that nothing you see seems typical to you, and then you remind yourself you're in India, and that's as good enough of an explanation.  I don't know what it is.  India is a feeling, a feeling you can't describe or create, it just happens.  When you visit India, and you get that feeling, you know.  I know I fell in love in India, with a massive country and about 1.3 billion people.

As my plane took off my eyes did well up with tears as I had expected they would, but not out of sadness surprisingly.  Instead, as I thought back to all the life changing experiences and lessons that I have had over the last 5 months, my eyes got watery out of happiness.  I'm so amazingly thankful to all the people and places that took me in along the way allowing me to grow and learn new aspects about myself.  It also made me realize how lucky I am to have been given this opportunity to experience the places I have been experiencing.  And for this I am thankful for all my friends back home who have been so supportive along the way, my siblings who I miss terribly, but have been there to offer words of encouragement to keep me from getting homesick, and above all my amazingly loving parents. They have raised me in a way to be curious, to question, to be independent and smart and without the attributes and morals they have instilled in me, there is no way I would have even begun this amazing journey 8 months ago.  So thanks.

Now looking forward to see what new experiences, challenges and "ahhhh" moments SE Asia will be offering.

10 Days with Just Me

Vipassana... an ancient Buddhist technique of meditation, but with no actual religious affiliation, making it a universally appealing form of meditation.  I have heard of Vipassana over the years from friends who have tried it at various centres around the world, and whenever someone had described what it entailed my reaction was, "My God! 10 days in silence?! Hours and hours of sitting still?! I could NEVER do that, but I don't know why I would want to anyway."  I'm not sure what it was... my quest to continuously find new challenges for myself on my adventure, the spirit of India gripping my curiosity or just plain naiveness, but here I am today having just completed something years ago I said I could NEVER do. This just encourages me more to believe in the power of yourself, knowing that you really can do anything you want to do, you just might have to work for it. My first week of India I met up with some great friends from back home.  Three of the four of them were getting ready to complete their first Vipassana course in a couple of weeks and they started to plant the seed in my head.  For once in my life, after hearing again about what it would entail I finally said, "I think I might like to try that."

After separating from them I applied and was accepted to participate in an April course in the beautiful and pleasantly climated Dharamasala up north.  Well when I got there I learnt that the Dalai Lama would be giving a public teaching at the same time.  I had a tough decision to make, but decided that seeing the Dalai Lama in person was a unique experience and decided to forgo my Vipassana challenge for the time being.  I decided that if I was meant to do it, I would find a way.  Thomas and Emile, my friends from home had already completed their course when I met up with them in Dharamasala to do some trekking.  They talked a lot about it, the good and the bad.  They made sure to warn me that I was in for some hard work, but the hard work would pay off.  I was starting to get a little nervous about this, I had already heard this from others as well. 

Since then I have made quite a tour around and I have found myself in the very deep, hot, premonsooning south of India.  I applied and was accepted to start a 10 day course in Chennai beginning June 6th and ending June 17th.  I arrived to Chennai at 6am after a series of buses and overnight trains from Munnar.  Tired, hot and likely stinky I waited it out in an Internet cafe until I began my bus journey to the centre around noon.  I had been warned that the auto rickshaw drivers in Chennai are the worst in all of India.  After hearing that I wasn't to keen to learn for myself so after a couple hours of transfers and nice people showing me the way I arrived at the centre via bus, walking up with a nice Indian gentleman who was getting ready to complete his second 10 day Vipassana course.  After checking in, being told the rules and having everything repeated to me twice (something I would find to become a trend in the Vipassana teachings) I settled into my room. 

Finally, a bathroom, a shower.  I'd been waiting hours for this!  First I try to flush the toilet... no go.  This is something I've gotten used to in India and have come to accept that pouring water down the toilet is the best form of flushing, no biggy.  I was boiling hot and wanted to turn on the fan, nothing happened (realized later there was a switch outside that needed to be turned on). Then realizing I've completely drenched my clothes in sweat from carrying my heavy backpack around in 39 degree heat, it was time for a shower.  I take my clothes off to hang them on the hook only to be greeted by a family of spiders hiding in the corner.  One of the first precepts of Vipassna : no killing anything.  Alright family of spiders, you enjoy your corner webs, spiders don't bother me to much anyway.  Longing to be cooled down by a cold shower I turn the knob only to be drizzled with three weak streams of boiling hot water.  No problem, looks like bucket showers are the way to go for me, something I'm not advert to.  Then, it must have been the little bits of water trickling into the drain, but all of the sudden about 8 or 9 MASSIVE cockroaches came spilling out of the drain.  Of course this is what gets me and I scream running out of the bathroom leaving the colony of cockroaches and family of spiders to have their fun.  So there I am, dripping wet (mostly sweat rather than the little bits of water dribbled on me) standing in the middle of my room covering myself from the beady eyed stare of the cockroaches.  Now I have dealt with cockroaches in India so far, but NONE that were ever that size and that many at once.  I throw my hands in the air, chuckle to myself and think, "ok Uninverse, so you're telling me this isn't going to be easy."  I gather the courage and sweep the cockroaches out of my room while my nearby lady neighbour laughs at me as I tell my unwanted friends they are not welcomed back.  I didn't have to many more problems with these pests; just a couple here and there and one strange looking mutant cockroach in the middle of the night one evening, I just pretended I didn't see it and went back to bed.  However one night the cockroaches did accidentally cause me to break my noble silence when I came back from a meditation period and there were two on my bedroom floor. "We had a deal!" I hissed quietly, the deal being that they were only allowed to be in the bathroom, but I soon realized these were outside cockroaches not toilet cockroaches, so I apologized for getting angry and swept them back outside.

Noble Silence, what's that you ask?   Well for the duration of 10 days we are to keep completely silent, with no form of communications or even eye contact with the other members participating in the course.  Oddly enough, I didn't find this to be very difficult.  I know, who would have thought that I would be able to keep quiet that long and actually enjoy it!  After spending 8 months travelling, and practically all that time with other people, it was nice to finally just be alone with myself.  Some good quality time with ones own mind is a good thing and I was well over due for some me time. Turns out I'm not so bad to hang out with. Some of the other rules we were to follow was no writing, no reading, no yoga or exercise, no meals after noon and zero communication unless it was with the teacher.  We also followed a strict schedule that began with the wakeup bell at 4am, consisted of 10.5 hours of meditation, 2 meals/day and lights out at 9:30.

All sounds like fun, right!  Well it was tough to say the least, the first few days dragging on the longest, leaving me to question "why am I here? What am I learning?"  The teachings of the course slowly began to unravel, revealing some pretty amazing lessons and lots of "ooooooh I get it" moments.  I don't want to spoil it all for those who have not completed a course and are thinking about it.  I believe the best way to go in is to know that it will be tough, but worth it and have no expectations.  Plus the teachings are far to complex for me to even try to explain, I am still trying to process it myself and figure out what I have learnt.  Some of the main points that are stressed are that we are to eradicate all misery from our minds and in order to do this we must purify our minds by seeking truth; easier said than done.

My greatest challenge was and is shutting my mind off.  Boy did I struggle with this one.  I would sit there for hours trying to force my brain one way and it would go the other.  I daydreamed like you wouldn't believe, imagining everything from what SE Asia will be like, how good it will feel to hug my family when I go home, who my roommate will be, what job will I get.... EVERYTHING!  This is clearly something I will still need to work on, but I am excited to see how I will be able to incorporate Vipassana meditation into my everyday life.  Not just through the actual meditation itself, but how I will bring the lessons learned into my life through out the day.  Time will only tell....

At the end of the course we have now finally been given the chance to talk to one another.  It's amazing, you spend all day, everyday with a room of 20 women and have not a clue about any part of their lives.  When silence was first broken I didn't really know what to do with myself.  I felt awkward and unsure of how to socialize again.  I retreated to my room to gather myself and my thoughts.  The ladies however, were curious to get to know me, where I was from and what I do.   I had left my door open to not totally shut myself away from the others.  A young woman named Ganga around my age walked by, we made eye contact and then the conversation carried on from there.  She's a recent law school grad and works in research at the Law school in Bangalore.  This was also her third Vipassana course and she does it often to keep up her practise.  Then my neighbour who laughed at me the first day came over saying "hello Rachel" and introducing herself.  It's amazing how we create these different perceptions about people by just looking at them, and then once we get to actually talk with them our ideas completely melt away and prove us wrong, very wrong.  The two girls that sat on either side of me for the entire course were both from Chennai.  One works in the Kindle department for Amazon.com and the other is a freelance children's book writer.  What cool jobs!!

I really enjoyed getting a chance to converse with Indian women throughout the last day over lunch and tea.  It's been hard to find a chance to sit down with a group of local women here and have such meaningful conversations.  I found that the women here were very well educated and had such great insights into so many things regarding Vipassana, as well as certain issues in India.  It was an amazing opportunity to get to sit down and ask them all the questions I had been wondering about.  And just hearing their conversations amongst each other was so delightful, just getting to understand the typical way of Indian living, a lot of it being not so different from the sort of female chatter we would find at home.

One woman at the end of the last meditation came up to talk to me and tell me that she had admired me." Me?! You admire me?!" was my reaction.  I had been sitting behind her the entire time and saw that she NEVER would move out of her cross legged position.  Over a two hour sitting I would change positions more than a handful of times, but she would not move even once.  I admired her strong will and determination as this had been one of her goals of the course, I know how incredibly difficult that must have been for her. But she said she had admired how I was able to come from Canada and adapt so easily to the food, the culture and the climate, especially while doing Vipassana.  She said she was observing me over the course and saw that I never showed any signs of discomfort.  She clearly had no idea what was going on in my head, there was definitely discomfort.  She understood the difficulties as she is from Chennai but has been living in the US for the last 5 years.  I took this as an extreme compliment and was humbled by her opinion of me.  It was also another lesson.  We know that people will obviously be observing us and passing judgements on us all the time.  We often assume that the judgements people are making about us are going to be negative judgements, our minds don't work in our favour.  But once again I was wrong, and should be more open to people actually thinking positive judgements rather than jumping to negative conclusions.  I tend to think of myself as a positive thinking person so this was a bit of a kick in the butt sort of moment where I realize I might not know myself as well as I think I do, learn something new everyday.

As we all left the center we said our good byes, exchanged emails and made plans to keep in touch with our new friends who we had been able to speak with for only one day, but had gotten to know in a different sense for 10 days. 

Vipassana was an amazing experience, something I wouldn't change and would definitely do again.  But it was tough, knocked me down a few times and than somehow I came back to my feet.  I look forward to the next time I will be able to complete another course.  This is a technique that I cannot master in just 10 days, I often felt overwhelmed with all the information coming at me.  Therefore I look forward to when I get the chance to complete a course when I get back to Canada in order to go deeper into the meditation, hopefully giving me a chance to grow further. If anyone wants to join me, feel free!

Heaven on Earth

(Around April 18th)
Throughout my journeys I kept hearing about Kashmir, "Heaven on Earth" as people from there would say.  They are so proud of where they're from.  So given all this fantastic publicity, we decided to check it out for ourselves to see what all the hype was about, I was interested to see what Heaven on Earth looks like.  As we were on our way into Kashmir, Anthony and I had to get out of the bus and fill out some paperwork because we were foreigners going into Kashmir.  You would expect the boarder guard of Kashmir to be rather ridged and intimidating, but this man was different.  He chatted us up, asked all about our countries, and then scolded Anthony when Anthony had said he was thinking about leaving Kashmir before I was going to.  "You cannot leave your friend alone, how will she travel alone just as a single female. No no no you cannot do that, you must stay with her."  It is common for Indians to be surprised and concerned when they hear I am travelling alone, because that is something that Indian women would just never do.  But it seemed an even greater shock to residents of Kashmir.  Anthony did stay with me the entire time, but NOT because I needed it, it just worked out that way.  On our way back out of Kashmir once again we had to stop to fill out paperwork and were greeted by the same guy, asking us all about our adventures of Kashmir with a big grin on his face as we told him how much we loved his home. 

We arrived in Srinagar, famous for Dal Lake and the houseboating it offered.  It was our plan to stay on a house boat but after looking at the prices we opted for the cheaper room just off the lake.  Kashmir was of course, full of Kashmir... Everywhere I walked, the only time a local would talk to me was when he was offering me " ma'am, scarf, shawl, carpet, come loooooooooooook. Ma'am come into my shooooooop, come looooooooook what I haaaaaave."  On principle, because I was getting so annoyed with all the shop owners I only went into the shops where they didn't ask me to come in.  Other than that, I mostly got ignored, especially when I walked around with Anthony, all I heard was "Sir where are you from, sir this, sir that." HELLO! I'm here too! But that's often the way it has been when I travel around this country with men.  It's just not in their culture to address a woman first, or at all if a man is present a lot of the time.

Early on our second morning we left the hotel at 5 am and boarded a shakara, a canoe like boat with a comfy bed and cushions and little canopy cover.  Our shakara driver took us to the floating vegetable market where smaller, less fancy shakaras were filled with piles of vegetables.  In an area of the lake, every morning you can hear the clunking and bumping of the boats as these men meet to exchange goods.  Anthony and I bought some fresh Saffron and then started on our way back while sipping chai and enjoying the absolutely breathtaking sunrise over the lake.  It was at this moment that I really understood what the locals meant by "Heaven on Earth".  The quiet of the lake, combined with the stunning view of mountains and fluffy clouds reflected in the calm glass like surface of the water put me entirely at peace.

We also opted on one of the days to be tourists! We hired a autorickshaw to take us around for the day, and take us around did he ever! We visited something like 5 or 6 gardens, my favourite being the tulip garden which had hundreds of tulips (go figure) in an area surrounded by the most beautiful mountains (next to the rockies of course).  I think if the driver said we were going to one more garden Anthony would have exploded, so luckily after that we took off the visit some mosques.  The first we saw was the Hazratbal, where a piece of hair from the prophet Muhammad is housed.  I stayed outside the main walls with the other women as Anthony went inside with the men.  It was interesting being on the outside with the women.  Some came up to me, tucked in the bits of my hair that were peaking out the bottom of my head scarf, held my hand, all while smiling and nodding to me.  Then they left me alone so that they could go pray themselves.  I sat, prayed and observed, at times confused.  Some women sat swaying, others sat weeping, and there were some who were at the wall leading into the Mosque wailing and pounding on the walls surface.  Anthony said it was a similar experience inside.  The next mosque we saw was they Jama Masjid of Srinagar.  Its an old and beautiful mosque, the first in Srinigar, with it's front and inside decorated with hand painted paper mache.  We weren't allowed in, but were able to look in from an outside window while a nice old man explained different things to us and answered any questions we had.  They also spotted my large turquoise ring which they loved, and after finding out what sort of great deal I had gotten on it they didn't believe it was real.  So I had to take it off for the men to examine my ring closely with their eyes, fingers and tongue... yes one of the men licked the gem stone... but they concluded that it was real and we were off again.

Another one of the days we took a day trip a couple hours away to Gulmarg, which is a ski resort.... in India.  Upon our arrival we were greeted by MANY workers asking us if we wanted to ride one of the hundreds of malnourished horses... no thanks.  We got into the massive line to the gondola, and to say there is a line in India.... well it's a bit of and overstatement.  But I did rather enjoy watching all the Indian tourists in their rented winter coats and boots (all circa 1980) all slipping and sliding in the snow! Likely the first times they've seen snow.  Up top it was the same story.  It was cold, windy and raining, but everyone there seemed so excited! I was excited to see snow too as I had missed it this year.  I had many offers to try sledding, skiing and snowboarding.  I politely refused and when one instructor said "what? you don't know how? I can show you." I responded with, "I know how, I'm Canadian, but would you snowboard in this slush?" he smiled, did a little Indian head wag and agreed that these were no conditions to be snowboarding in!

Srinagar was enjoyable and beautiful but it was time for us to head on a zig zagging bus ride back to Jammu for us both to catch planes to our next destinations.  It was a tearful good bye for Anthony and I at the Jammu airport, well Anthony cried, not infront of me, but I'm sure he shed tears once boarding the plane realizing he was leaving without his trusted flute playing travel companion.

I was off to Jaipur, Rajesthan where I would meet up with my good friend Ryan who is from Vancouver, but we met in Kenya. We're still yet to be together on our home continent.  Soon to come, the adventures of touring in 43 degree weather!