Lost in the Himalayas

OK, I know it's been a very, very long time since I updated this blog, but I've been lost in the Himalayas. Really.

Interesting to note: the Indians put the stress on the second syllable of Himalaya and hardly pronounce the second "a," so it sounds more like "Hi-mal-ya". I'm not sure how I feel about that. It does make it sound a little less, well, Spanish.

So, where to begin? We set off for Darjeeling on a warm day in October. We flew on Air Deccan, which is striving to revolutionize air travel in India by making it accessible to everyone. They offer ridiculously low-priced fares to the first few people who call in - these customers can fly from Chennai to Delhi for $5 or so. The rest of us still get low fares, but they've really taken the last frills out of no-frills. They don't even give you water for free. I wouldn't mind so much except that the food they sell on board is somewhat disgusting.

We arrived in Calcutta late at night, and felt the first hints of urban hostility while still at the airport. We waited in line for about 20 minutes for train tickets, only to find that as foreigners we weren't allowed to use that ticket window. We were told we had to go downtown for train tickets. We then ran into a white guy who also seemed lost and arranged to share a cab with him to the center of town. During the ride he regaled us with his stories of all the Cambodian women he has slept with and adopted (not sure which order that goes in), including some rather tragic incidents involving suicide on the beach and HIV. I don't think he even got our names.

The next day, we set out to explore Calcutta but found that it really wasn't worth it. The place is twice as crowded as Bangalore and half as charming, and that is saying a lot, considering that Bangalore is very crowded and not very charming. We did manage to get our train tickets after waiting in line some more, and we tried to visit a few parks, but we were soon exhausted and frustrated. Calcutta is the first place on earth where I have been afraid of being run over by pedestrians.

We decided to leave as soon as possible, and caught a train to Darjeeling that night. Well, actually we caught a train to the city nearest to Darjeeling on the rail line, and then grabbed a "share jeep" with some very innocent-looking blond English youngsters. They turned out to be 18 and straight out of high school. They were volunteering at a music school near Calcutta, and this was their first trip out into the world. We enjoyed the two-hour trip up the winding road and even got to eat some excellent momos (Tibetan dumplings) on the way. The little girl in the seat in front of us only threw up once, and her sister didn't throw up at all. I should add that this was not the fault of the dumplings. Every time you take a vehicle up a mountain in India and there are children in the car, they throw up. It all makes sense once you've hit your head against the ceiling of the vehicle a few times.

Darjeeling is a pleasant English city with lots of teashops and a few pubs. We found a clean, sunny guesthouse with a view of the Himalayas, and drank some Darjeeling tea at an overpriced tea shop. Then we started to plan our escape from the city into the mountains. We had hoped to go to Sikkim, but that required a permit, and we don't have much luck with permits in India. In fact, we did try to get the permit only to be thwarted by a sign that said the permit office would not be open until Monday afternoon. Since our time in the mountains was limited, we decided to head to the Nepalese border instead. It turned out that Sophie, our young English friend, was also planning on heading this way with a new-found friend, a South African doctor named John. The other English boy, Andy, had not quite decided whether he wanted to go or not. Somehow, the night before we were set to leave he decided he did want to come and quickly geared up with gloves and sweaters sold by the Tibetan women along the pedestrian mall.

The next morning, we all piled into a share-jeep for the 90-minute drive to the trailhead. There, we stopped at a border checkpost and Andy realized that he didn't have his passport. We tried to talk the guard into letting him through, and even to bribe him, but to no avail. Andy got a ride back, saying he would join us later that day, but ultimately he decided to stay in Darjeeling. When we got back we heard that he had headed to Sikkim with some American girls, so we hope that turned out well.

The beginning of the hike was quite difficult. Basically, you get to the border with Nepal and there's a set of staircases going straight up. It was a bit disconcerting to have old ladies, men carrying firewood on their heads, and little kids racing past us, but we did finally make it. I thought the trail was going to be far from civilization, but in fact there's a chai stand every ten kilometers or so. It was a big holiday weekend, so tons of people from Calcutta were hiking. The men were walking with cellphones, the women were carrying handbags, and it did not seem remote at all. Some of the city people seemed to be skipping the difficult part of the trail by riding up in a jeep.
The first night we stayed at a guesthouse run by a Tibetan matriarch. She ran a tight ship, with a dozen women working in the kitchen and men who seemed rather scared of her creeping around on tiptoe. The lodge was very comfortable, with four beds to a room. I am not sure if it was because eight hours of walking in the mountains had made us hungry and cold, but the food was absolutely delicious. We had the best vegetable soup I have ever tasted for dinner and tasty Tibetan pancakes for lunch.

The next morning, we woke up early in order to make it up to the high point of our trek before dark. We stopped at a guesthouse for lunch, and said goodbye to Sophie and John, who were staying there for the night, as they were on a longer trek and could take their time. Then we headed out. The clouds were very low on the mountain, and the visibility was poor. We climbed up the first part of the path on the jeep road, and then found a small path that seemed to cut across the mountain. We started out on the path, which was increasingly green and pleasant. After an hour of walking, however, we realized that the path was going down. We tried to convince ourselves that the path would climb up again, but it just kept going. There were no other tourists on the path, just a young boy and his cows.

We continued on the path for another hour, until at long last we heard voices on the road. There were two voices calling out, either to us or to each other. Further ahead we caught sight of a middle-aged man and a teenaged boy. "Is this the path to Sundakhpu?" we asked.

The man smiled broadly. He was missing a few teeth. "Sundakhpu? Noooo," the he answered. "Rimbik."

Our hearts sank. We had only an hour before dark, and we were headed the wrong way.

"How far is it to Rimbik?" we asked.

"Fifteen kilometers."

We knew we were sunk. There was no way we could walk fifteen kilometers before nightfall. The man and his son pointed out the way back to the last guesthouse and headed off at breakneck speed. We decided to follow them. However, they were moving at roughly three times our pace, literally running along the tiny footpath, so we soon lost sight of them.

Half an hour later, we saw the man and his son again. They were sitting at a fork in the road, chewing on blades of grass like a speedy rabbit in a children's cartoon. 'This way, short," the man said, pointing into some deep vegetation. He offered to take us back along that route. We agreed, and followed the two men. They shouted and whistled constantly, one in front of us and one in back, as though reassuring each other that they were both still there.

We could tell that they were trying to move slowly for our benefit, but it was still an effort to keep up. We ran through bushes, jumped across streams, and scrambled across rocks. Finally, the older man told us he was leaving us in the care of his son and going on ahead. We guessed he was going to tell his wife that they would be late.

Just as dusk approached, we saw the dark silhouette of a cow against the red sky, the lodge we had left at lunchtime in the distance behind it. We entered the restaurant. Our new friend sat at the fireplace, drinking tea with a group of other men. He seemed quite amused at having saved a pair of foreigners from the wilds of Nepal. We were a bit disappointed to have abandoned our trek to the top, but we were happy to be in a warm place.

You Can Check Out, But You Can Never Leave

So, after our little adventure, in which we were saved by two Nepalis cattleherders (who, as a reward, asked for some cup o' noodles), we spent a quiet night at the lodge. In the morning we played with some friendly children who kept shouting "aiyaaa!" I'm not sure if this meant the same thing that it means in Chinese. Come to think of it, does it really mean anything in Chinese? Aiyaa! I suspect they learned it from a kungfu movie.

We headed back on the same road we had mistakenly taken the day before. We decided to forego the peak, Sundakhpu, and just go to Rimbick. it was a little disappointing, because it's always nice to reach the top of a trail, but we were feeling rather Buddhist about the whole thing. It's about the journey and not the destination, right? Plus we had train tickets for Varanasi and to Delhi, where we were catching our flight back to Bangalore.

We were told that there were no jeeps leaving from Rimbick after noon, but we figured that there would be some sort of vehicle on the road, and at any rate we had to go to Rimbick sometime. We reached Rimbick at around 5 in the afternoon, tired from three days of hiking and getting lost. It occurred to us that our Nepali cattleherding friends must have walked to Rimbick and back the day before for some shopping. They were certainly capable of moving twice as fast as us, if not faster.

We entered the Rimbick town square at around 5 pm and started asking around for jeeps, but soon realized it was a futile exercise. The last jeep had pulled out hours ago. We were prepared to spend the night, so when a young girl told us there was a hotel down the road we resigned ourselves to taking a room there. It turned out that she was the daughter of the owner, of course. We asked the owner if we could get a jeep in the morning, and he said yes, starting at 7 am. So we had dinner, watched an action movie, and went up to our room. Before heading upstairs, Gilles asked again if we could get a jeep, and the man at the counter said yes, downstairs at 7.

What we didn't realize is that all the jeeps leave on the dot, at 7, and you need a ticket for them. We thought there were jeeps on the road from 7 to noon. In fact, one set leaves at 7, and another set leaves at noon. We don't quite understand the logic behind this, but who are we to argue with local tradition? So when we went downstairs at 7:05. we were told that the jeeps were already gone. We searched up and down for another vehicle, but the only thing we found were several SUVs belonging to a British tour group. Gilles tried to charm them into letting us ride in the back of one of their SUVs with their luggage, but he was met with quizzical stares.

We gave up on the tour group, ordered some porridge, and explained our situation to the young restaurant manager. When we showed him our train ticket and he realized that there were $60 at stake - our ticket was refundable if we reached the train station in Darjeeling by 1 PM, and worth 50% if we reached it by 2, but after that we were out of luck - he sprung into action. He started making some calls, and with five minutes he had dug up a car. He told us we would pay $30 to the driver, which was a ripoff, of course, but as they seemed to own the only vehicle in Rimbick we had few options.

When we saw the van we had some doubts as to whether it would make it to Darjeeling, but after all it was downhill all the way, so the engine didn't have to be that good. The wheels did seem mildly important, but having chartered the last vehicle in town we were not picky. There were four of them, after all. Not including the steering wheel.

The drivers were two young men with smiles ear to ear. The younger man, who must have been about 16, took the wheel. He started the car and let go of the clutch. The car lunged forward, slamming Gilles and me into the front seats. (Needless to say there were no seatbelts.) He started again and we rolled out of town. We rejoiced to be leaving the town square. Then, at the top of the hill heading out of Rimbick, the car lunged forward again, this time sending the seats about two feet forward. An animated discussion ensued, and the two young men switched places. The second driver seemed more skilled than the first - he didn't cause anything to move in unexpected ways, at any rate. The young two men were quite excited, laughing and shouting "Darjeeling!" out the windows at everyone they passed. We were obviously providing some entertainment to the village. They tuned the radio to an Indian pop station and ploughed down the cobbled road.

About halfway down the road the van finally stopped working. We should have known it was inevitable - after all, was it really possible to escape the Rimbick vortex? Gilles had a look at the back wheel and told the drivers there was no way we were getting back into the car. Apparently something holding one of the back wheels had broken. The boys searched vigorously for some scotch tape, and we started looking out for another car. A driver offered to take us to the next village, and we tried to pay the young men a portion of what we had promised, but they wanted more. Finally, after some negotiation, the new driver agreed to take us to Darjeeling, and the three of them negotiated the division of funds amongst themselves.

We set off on the road again, our new driver shouting "Darjeeling!" out the window at anyone he passed.

We've decided that "Rimbick" will be the name of our first dog.

Notoriety

Indian people like to tell us that when other Indian people see us, they also see a huge dollar sign stamped to our faces. We don't notice this phenomenon too much in Bangalore, where it would not be unlikely for an Indian person selected at random to make more money than we do, but we sure do notice it when we travel.

This weekend we set off for Madurai, which as I mentioned before is older than my country. Perhaps you remember the story I told a few months ago about the drunken man on a railway platform who told us that the temple in Madurai was older than my country (not difficult) and older than Gilles' country too (slightly more difficult). He went on to tell us how he was selecting a nice boy for his daughter to marry and to ask me the age at which I first had sex.

At any rate...

We traveled by 3rd class AC train, which we have discovered is a much more social experience than 2nd class AC. People actually talk to us in 3rd AC. They ask us where we're from, they make jokes. The train was quite nice except that I somehow lost my cell phone on it. Ah well. I seem to have a penchant for losing things in improbable ways.

The temple in Madurai was extremely large and contained a shopping mall. The funniest thing about it is that visitors are no longer allowed to climb its highest tower because someone once committed suicide from it, so now the souvenir shops outside it have built roof terraces from which once can enjoy the lovely view. They sometimes have elevators going up, but they only have staircases going down. These staircases conveniently lead to elephant statues, silk carpets, and all the other things that foreigners like to buy, apparently.

While the temple in Madurai had a nice atmosphere, we preferred nearby Thanjavur, where a smaller but more attractive temple is situated. The only problem with this small town was its rickshaw mafia. When we were leaving the bus station, no rickshaw would take us for less than 50 rupees, even though we knew that this was far too much for the distance. They held fast to their price, so there was no choice but to go with them and pay the 50 rupees. The next day, we walked to the train station, which was less than 300 yards from our hotel, and took a rickshaw from there to the temple. We were charged 25 rupees, which seemed slightly high but acceptable. On the way back, however, we tried to get another rickshaw. The driver said 30 rupees. We told him we had just paid 25 to come to the temple. "No," he replied, "you paid 25 to come to the train station. That's a kilometer difference." Our guide at the temple had explained the ancient Tamilian numbering and measuring systems to us. They seem to have been fascinated by the number 9 because of its "magical qualities" (if you add up the digits from 0 to 9 starting with the smallest and largest and moving inward, each pair adds up to 9, the digits of numbers divisible by 9 add up to 9, etc). Apparently the human body has 9 "holes." Our guide, incidentally, seemed to have just 9 teeth. At any rate, the rickshaw drivers seem to have their own math system.

We noticed it again on our third stop, Trichy, where we saw a woman rickshaw driver for the first time. Unfortunately, she also wantd to rip us off. When a different driver broke away from the crowd and offered to take us for 20 rupees instead of 30, he was chided by the other drivers. Of course, they thought it was okay to do this in front of us since they were speaking Tamil; they seemed not to mind that we could understand them saying "foreigner" several times in their sentence.

We were not happy to have to take our shoes off to visit the temples in Trichy, because the ground was so hot that we had to race across it in order to keep our feet from burning. We acquired a few schoolgirl friends inside one temple; they followed us around and kept speaking to us very slowly in Tamil in the hopes that we would understand. I figured out "you" and "me," but I was stumped as to what the rest of the sentence was about.

Anyway, I'll upload the pictures before too long...

Madurai

If anyone comes looking for us, we will be away in Madurai (the city that's older than my country!) until Monday morning. Have a good weekend!

India or Death?

The new French teacher Cécile made an interesting comment the other day: "When you tell people you're going to India," she said, "you might as well be telling them you're going to commit suicide." There's definitely some truth to that - some people are highly enthusiastic by the idea of visiting India, or knowing people who are about to visit India, while others think it's a pretty crazy place to go.

There's a funny commercial on television right now, for a shampoo that adds body to hair. A sweet-looking Indian girl gets harrassed by an East Asian customs official saying "Not your picture!" in a strong Chinese accent. When they search the Indian girl they find her shampoo and realize that it really is her picture, she just improved her hair a lot since it was taken. We find this quite amusing, because it implies that the Indians see other countries in Asia as having scary immigration personnel.

The big movie in the cinemas right now is Salaam Namaste, a story about an Indian couple who lives together before getting married! We are going to try to see it tomorrow, if we manage to get in. I haven't been to a Hindi movie since "Black," which was a remake of "The Miracle Worker." But Bangalore seems to be boycotting US movies at the moment - all we have is "Cinderella Man" and "The Interpreter."

Continuing our water saga from last time, our shower has begun to leak into the apartment downstairs. So the neighbors chased me down in the stairwell last week and asked if they could take a look at our bathroom. They determined it was the shower and said they would send a plumber and talk to our landlord. We said fine, but no plumber ever came. So this Monday, they rang our doorbell at 8:30 am to tell us that their ceiling was still leaking and that we'd better stop taking showers. I guess that's one solution, but not the cleanest one...

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink

It has been raining nearly continuously for the past few days, and coincidentally our shower has started leaking into the ceiling of the apartment below us.

Last Wednesday I flew to Pune on the new low-cost airline, Spice Jet, which proved to be as efficient and bare-bones as you might expect. None of the delicious food and cloth napkins of Jet Airways, for one thing. I didn't get to try out their baggage-losing capabilities.

Pune was rainy - they didn't receive as much rain as Bombay in this year's monsoon, but they did lose one bridge, apparently. The hotel that I checked into was moldy if not exactly seedy. I was trying to blend in, so I didn't ask too many questions when the nice child laborer offered to fill my thermos of "pani" (water) for me. He brought back the water, I assumed it was from somewhere other than the faucet in the bathroom, and I was thirsty so I drank. I should mention that I have not had food poisoning very often in India - I think that before we went away in April I had been sick twice, once from cooking at home and once from eating at an expensive expat restaurant. Meanwhile, Gilles has been sick from eating at an expensive expat restaurant and an expensive Chinese restaurant. Go figure. Maybe it's the meat and the salad; maybe there just isn't enough chili in Western/Chinese food. Anyway, I have been so healthy in India that I even bragged to my professor at the Film and Television Institute of India that I can handle Indian food and filtered water (which is what they serve in restaurants, and actually what we drink at home). And only four hours later I was sick!

Well, suffice it to say, food poisoning in India is a dramatic but short-lived affair. Both Gilles and I seem to have a fever at the beginning and then feel relatively okay the next day. I regretted having chosen a moldy and seedy hotel, but at least I had cable. I watched "Cast Away," "Love Actually" and several episodes of "Will and Grace." I'm still surprised that they show it here. Of course, in the ads for it they show someone from some other show talking about and saying that Will is cute and "not that gay."

Anyway, I didn't get to visit the Indian UWC on Friday as I had intended, but by Saturday I was well enough to fly back to Bangalore and have a six-course meal with friends at a posh restaurant outside Bangalore. We got soaked on the way and paid far too much for the autorickshaw, which was so open to the elements that we needed an umbrella inside it.

In other news from Pune, I told my advisor, who is very nice but not that familiar with my subject, about the fact that the subject doesn't actually exist. He told me about other "village myths" in India. Apparently there is also a village in South India where everyone speaks Sanskrit, and one where everyone speaks Polish (shipwreck). I am really going to have to write an article about mythical Indian villages.

I toured the Film Institute itself, which has nicer facilities than UCLA, of course. The students look rather familiar, except that there are very few women. Apparently filmmaking not really considered an acceptable career for women. Really, is it an acceptable career for anyone? I asked the FTII professor about "Born Into Brothels" but he didn't see why they would want to ban it. Prostitutes have children, he said, and they have to grow up somewhere.

God's Own Country

So, apparently I haven't posted in a while...though to me it seems like we just got back from Kerala. We've been saying goodbye to a lot of friends since then. Anne-Julie, the Institute French teacher, went back to Paris last week. Her replacement, Cécile, seems to be enjoying the job so far. Ivan is still here but his parents are visiting, so we haven't seen him much, and he'll be heading to China and then back to Switzerland soon. Valérie and Michel went back to France, but they were only here three weeks, so it's not really the same kind of farewell. Finally Charline is leaving tonight - we just had a farewell lunch for her at our favorite local Continetal restaurant, Baron's Court.

Just last week we were at the engagement ceremony of Charline and her Indian fiancé, Prince. They are both in the same field as Gilles, so he knew them both from France. (Prince spent 8 months working in Paris, and Charline has been to India twice as well). The ceremony was interesting - it took place in an old Catholic church in the suburbs of Ernakulam, which is the big city part of Kochi. We stood up, there was no singing, and we had to take off our shoes, so it didn't seem much like a Catholic ceremony. Afterwards we went to Prince's house and ate tons of Malayali dishes, including a lot of beef. Apparently the Keralites eat beef often - at least the Christians, which make up a large part of the population there. They say that Christianity dates back to just after the year zero, when St. Thomas came to India, but no one can really verify that story. The early Christians were essentially Orthodox, but many became Catholic after the arrival of the Portuguese. Anyway, Prince's family is part of that second group, so Charline converted to their religion (Catholicism). Previously she had belonged to the official religion of France (atheism).

Before we went to the engagement we visited Fort Cochin, which is a very nice part of Kochi. It has a real small-town feel, with a lot of old churches and schools and very few vehicles. The churches themselves were not terribly fascinating, but we enjoyed walking around and eating fish. My favorite part was the old Synagogue, which was the focal point of the Cochin Jewish community, which now seems to number about ten. They also have a story that might be based in myth - that they arrived after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD in boats. The synagogue is not quite so old (I think it was 17th century) and its floor is covered in blue and white Chinese tiles - it looks kind of like it belongs in China, and kind of like it belongs in Delft. We also had to take off our shoes to walk into the synagogue. Supposedly the population of Jews has decreased to nearly zero because of the creation of Israel, but they also may have simply not found enough other Jews to marry. I guess it's easy to disappear in India if your community is not as big as the others.

While we were in Kerala, we also visited the Periyar National Park, which is on the border with Tamil Nadu, up in the hills. We signed up for a trek, which involved walking through the woods for three hours with a very small man who smoked a lot. Actually, before we could walk in the woods we had to check out leech-proof socks and board a not-very-seaworthy bamboo raft that took us from the ranger station to the trekking area. The leech socks came in handy after just a few minutes, when we realized that every time we stopped our shoes and pants were covered in leeches. We poured tobacco powder over our shoes, and that seemed to deter the leeches, though when we finished the trek both Gilles and I found leeches on the tongues of our shoes. No harm done, anyway. The ranger just casually knocked them off his arms when they landed on him.

We didn't see too much in the way of wildlife - a giant squirrel, some nice birds, a sambar deer. We heard some angry elephants in the distance and tried to track them, but the ranger said it could be dangerous to annoy them further so we couldn't get too close. We didn't really like the idea of being trampled by a herd of elephants. After our trek we took a very educational tour of a spice garden - it was interesting to see the plants our spices come from.

The highlight of our trip to Kerala, which they call God's own country, was cruising down the beautiful backwaters. We didn't see much and we didn't go very far, but the environment was beautiful and our boat was none too shabby. I think Kerala is still my favorite part of India - it just seems more laid-back, and the lush vegetation makes it much more pleasant than Bangalore. We also noticed that Keralites seem to sing all the time - on buses, on ferries, on the little bamboo raft. They seem pretty happy to live in Kerala, really. Heck, if God lives there it makes sense...

Tamil Nadu

After a few days back in Bangalore, our friends Sam and Noémi arrived from France. Sam is a researcher at Météo France, and Noémi is a science teacher. We immediately took them shopping and Noémi bought a salwar kameez. Then we reserved bus tickets for Kancheepuram, a temple town about 5 hours from Bangalore. We arrived around 7, which was fine except that the bus driver decided to drop us off in the middle of nowhere, on the highway. We were apparently the only passengers going to Kancheepuram; the rest of the bus was an express to Chennai. So rather than taking a detour to the Kancheepuram Bus Station, we were left by the side of the road. There was one rickshaw but someone else flagged it immediately. He offered to share it with the four of us, but we didn't think that would be very easy. We waited around for a while, until finally a local bus appeared. We hopped on and were greeted with some friendly stares and very simple conversation.

Happily we found our hotel without much difficulty. Most of the hotel employees were 10-year-old boys who took every opportunity to come into our rooms. They seemed extremely tickled by us, and kept coming back to bring soap and towels, dividing up the tasks into as many possible small errands as possible so that they could bring their friends.

In the morning we headed for the temples on bicycle, which was very hot and dusty. The temples were interesting, though not as memorable as what we had seen in Hampi and Halebid, particularly because certain portions were closed off to non-Hindus. We saw a famous tree that is older than my country, as a drunken man from Madurai once boasted, but it seemed to be dead. We also saw more trained elephants; I found one of them particularly charming.

Kancheepuram is renowned for its silk industry; supposedly the first silkworms were smuggled to India in a Chinese princess's hair centuries ago! We could not go without the mandatory silk factory tour, so we visited a saree shop. We were shown different types of looms and visited a weaver's room. The loom took up most of the room, but there was a separate kitchen and bath. It seemed that the weavers slept underneath their loom, possibly on the floor. They had some fancy French Jacquard equipment - this basically involved punch cards with design codes printed on to them: the weaver sticks in the card and voila! they don't need to design anything themselves.

After another journey on a local bus, we arrived in Mamallapuram, on the coast of Tamil Nadu. This is a small town that relies heavily on tourism, though they also have a local stone-carving industry. In the morning we ate at a beachfront restaurant and spoke with the waiter, who told us how most of the structures on the beach had been damaged by the tsunami. His restaurant seemed to have been recently repainted and perhaps refurbished. We watched ten brand-new boats being lowered onto the beach, all with names painted in bright colors on the side. They had been donated to the fishermen by businesses and foreign individuals, which seemed like a nice idea to us: buy a boat for a fisherman, and it gets named after you.

One of the more famous sites in Mamallapuram is the Shore Temple, which was somewhat disappointing, especially since it cost $5 to enter. I prefered this temple, which was hidden in the sand for centuries until it was excavated by the British. To me, it looked like a sand castle. Its elephant statue is apparently one of the most realistic in all of India. I suppose it must be life-size.

After one day in Mamallapuram, we took a bus to Auroville, an international intentional community north of Pondicherry. We arrived just before dinner, and were greeted by a small blonde girl who spoke to us in perfect French. We realized later that she also spoke Tamil and English, and as we sat down to eat dinner with her and her father she pulled out her cell phone to call her mother and started speaking German! Auroville is apparently quite a multilingual community, though it is dominated by French, German and English, plus the local language, Tamil. The father, who owns a very beautiful house and guesthouse in Auroville and was one of the 6 original settlers, was happy to meet us, since he had questions about wind speed for Gilles and Sam and was also invovled in filmmaking. He might be contacting Gilles to help him measure the windspeed and construction requirements at an ecotourism site he is building in Coorg.

The next day, we visited Auroville on scooters, including the Visitor's Center at the giant Matrimandir, a huge golden sphere. Auroville was started in the 1960s by a female guru called The Mother. She came from France to help Sri Aurobindo, an early revolutionary and spiritual leader, in his work in Pondicherry. The community is supposed to welcome all spiritual, peace-loving people in the world, and they are supposed to work together in harmony and without exchanging money. The community is quite successful at producing cheese and jam, which we find for sale here in Bangalore. We were interested in learning about the education system and community projects in Auroville, but we were equally drawn to the beach maintained by Aurovilians, which is unusually clean. Anyway, we had a good time and a nice rest in Auroville, and it was fun to be in a French-speaking environment and to see lots of white people riding motorbikes.

Our next stop was Pondicherry, which is not really all that French, though it used to be a French colony. The small French quarter, where the Europeans once lived, is actually nice and colorful, unlike the rest of the city, which is as noisy and crowded as other places in India. We had a good time walking around and even ate some wood-fired pizza. We didn't get to visit the Aurobindo Ashram, which is the attraction for many foreign people visiting Pondicherry, since we had to leave the next morning at 7:30 to make it back to Chennai for our afternoon train. But we did get to sleep in one of their guesthouses, with portraits of Aurobindo and The Mother staring at us.