Advertisement
Published: November 11th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Wow, what a crazy week I have had. The very fact that it has been a week is ridiculous. I am starting to feel as though I should start travelling more than hanging out places, but the speed is ok for me I think now. I left Mysore so that I could spend more time by myself and also to be nearer nature. Getting to the coast was another matter altogether. It is Divali in India and trying to travel and get a train proved to be a real nightmare! The trains in India are (apparently) good, but in this over populated country getting a seat is another matter. I discovered the ‘waiting list’ which in my naiveté I considered to be a mere formality. As a tourist I thought I could buy my way into at least sleeper class. Not during Divali!!
I really don’t like what I have seen of Bangalore. I find it hard to breathe and every guest house I have been in has either been insanely expensive or ridiculously dirty. It is loud and the traffic is terrible. My first attempt to get on a wait list train, I was exhausted, had bruises on my shoulder
from lugging about 15Kg of crap that I don’t actually need on my back (including this stupid 2Kg pink laptop!!!), I was at least 5 hrs early having got a local bus for 3 hrs from Mysore. I tried to get to grips with what a wait list ticket meant, how long I would have to wait until the charting was done to see whether I could board. I sat on a piss smelling platform for hrs speaking to people, trying to understand how I would recognise the TT, what I should say etc etc. Anyway, to cut a long story short….I failed to get on any train for 3 days, two nights and ended up eating Masala dosa and chai for this period AGAIN. Feeling sick, tired and stressed I finally managed to get the last bus down to Trivandrum which is near to my final destination Varkala. My plan in Varkala is to continue learning about Ayurveda, do panchakarma and keep up the yoga!!.
The bus journey was good and I made friends with a lovely Indian girl (23) who had done her degree and was now in a flat share in Bangalore with her friend, working in the IT sector. She was telling me about her future arranged marriage and the important factors in picking a man. Her mother has showed her 5 pictures of men that are possibilities, but she is trying to put off the marriage for the time being so she can further her career. As a higher caste Hindu, she is a good position to find a husband and will have a large 3 day wedding. There will be about 2000 people at her wedding!! He needs to have a masters and a good job.
Arriving an Varkala was starkly different to what I had imagined. It is almost like a Spanish resort. There are so many British people, many French and Israelis. No one is covered and there is a stark separation between the locals and the tourists. Everything is 10x the price of Mysore. There is insanely good food, Indian, Thai, Nepalese, Italian, fish, meat and so on. The shopping is great! Alcohol flows freely here. But I feel the place is shrouded in disrespect and separation. The integration is poor and I have been struggling to find my feet as neither a tourist or a local.
I find the Scientific School of yoga and Naturopathy and meet Dr Chandra, the guy who helps me find accommodation in a nice room for 300Rps. He also does a good(ish) job of selling me panchakarma treatments. The accommodation I was in was at Oceanic guest house. I knew quite quickly I would have a problem here as the Muslim boy who manages the place took a shining to me and me being British I do not know how not to be friendly and what the boundaries are. Do you speak to Muslim Indian boys or not? Who knows? The way women are treated here is so absurd that I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone allows this, condones it or actually listens to any man who tries to enforce this bullshit. Why are women in India treated the way they are? Why can’t they think for themselves? Why the hell have women been treated like this globally…forever! It’s just insane.
I spoke to this man (Saraj) a few times, his father died in a motor accident when he was 15 and he has had to drop out of school to work to pay his two sisters dowries. It is clear he works hard and is intelligent, but there is something not quite right! Anyway…. Needless to say, the shit with this man continued and after making the dire mistake of bringing my friends who happened to be an Aussie and British guy back to hang out, it was made quite clear to me that he was going to attack any man I brought to the guest house and was going to follow me everywhere. I received very inappropriate messages from him and became afraid. He also expressed quite clearly that he thought I was a prostitute. This makes me feel sick and ashamed of the male, Muslim race….again. So I left and am now sea front for the same price. Bad experience.
Anyway…… my panchakarma is amazing. A woman called Lathika does it, she has a 1 yr old baby son who she brought to meet me. Very cute, she talks about him non stop. She is paid 2500Rps a month for daily hard massages (I pay 9000Rps for 7 treatments) and was working until she was more then 8 months pregnant. She lives in a shack above the scientific school and they will give her no security such as a contract despite the good work she does or how much her Western clients like her (which is a lot). Her husband is a rickshaw driver and earns 500Rps a day 300Rps of which goes to fuel. I can feel my body getting more flexible from the heat and she has paid much attention to my ankle and hip issues. The massages are very oily and warm and she rubs my body with bags of leaves and herbs for the first 4 days. There is no issue with nakedness here, she says ‘you are woman I am woman’ by at which point you are supposed to strip naked and have your boobs rubbed for about 20 mins, which although logically makes full sense to me, I still find awkward through socialisation.
I have found many hatha yoga classes and also a deck where I can practise daily by myself… which is fantastic! Hips are opening!! STILL!
As for friends… which is basically what this place is about…. I have met many friends, a few Bikram teachers from the UK… which is great news. A crazy funny aussie guy called Anthony, a gorgeous Scotsman called Ross, a teacher from Manchester who lives in Kerala. Eva a girl I randomly met at the station in Bangalore has turned up and the lovely Quinn and Jason are on their way down. Needless to say there are a lot of cocktails being drunk, many late nights and the general naughty stuff that comes with beach hols. I am def going to an Ashram after this!!! But hey, lying on the beach, getting henna, eating great food etc etc is ok for now ;-)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0383s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb