Travelling By The Moon

Copyright (c) Will Kemp 1996

For reproduction rights see copyright notice

December - continued

*** The 23rd - Hampi to Pondicherry ***

I wanted to stay in Hampi for the new moon, which was on the 22nd, along with the winter solstice, or northern hemisphere new year. I guess new year must happen on the new moon once every thirty years or something, but it seemed like a specially good time to start a journey. However, the next day seemed like the right day to leave so i booked a sleeper on the night train from Hospet to Bangalore for that evening.

I was heading to Pondicherry, but there's no really easy route from Hospet. I wanted to go all the way by train as i was thoroughly sick of buses, but that meant going to Madras first and involved three changes of train on the way. The easiest way - and the way that didn't involve getting to Guntakal first, was to take the night train to Bangalore and work it out from there.

I had a couple of beers with Jenny in the afternoon and then we walked to the bus stop at about dark time. The bus to Hospet went via Kamalapur, where she was staying, so she was going to come with me as far as there. We waited for quite a while and no bus appeared and i began to get a little bit anxious. I thought the train was due to leave at eight o'clock and although there was still plenty of time it was getting a bit tight. The bus should only have taken half an hour to get to Hospet but, especially in India, what should take half an hour can easily end up taking two.

In the end, i decided to take an autorickshaw, which was much more expensive than the bus, but should have been much quicker too. I asked the driver to go via Kamalapur to drop Jenny off. As we left, two men, who the driver said were friends of his, got in too. I wasn't very happy about this, but it seemed a bit difficult to do anything about it - specially as it wasn't a major problem.

The rickshaw was even more of a wreck than usual and with four passengers on board it travelled at a slow crawl and came to a halt on hills unless the two spare passenegers got out and walked. However eventually we got to Kamalapur and dropped Jenny off at her hotel. But the driver didn't start off again straight away, even though i asked him to keep going. He went off a little way with his mates and they had a quiet conversation round the back of a pillar. He came back and i asked him again to get going, but he was evasive and didn't do anything. He also had a weird look in his eyes and he was definitely up to something dodgy. I didn't know what it was, but i had the feeling that it wasn't going to end up doing me much good whatever it was and i got my bags out of the rickshaw and, ignoring the driver's protests, forced him to take the normal fare from Hampi to Kamalapur. I walked into the hotel so he couldn't keep arguing with me and waited for them to go.

Then, of course, i had a worse problem than before. I still had to get to Hospet and there was now a lot less time than there had been at first. There were no buses or autorickshaws around the hotel normally and the nearest bus stand was a bit of a walk away. Luckily though there was a long-distance taxi, which wasn't really for hire, as it was already engaged by people who were staying in the hotel. But the driver agreed to take me to Hospet anyway. It was a pleasant and fast trip, although much more expensive than the rickshaw would have been. When i got to Hospet station i found the train wasn't due to leave till half past eight anyway.

*-*-*

Bangalore was cold when the train got in at about seven thirty the next morning. For the first time since i'd arrived in India i had to put my shirt on over my t-shirt. It was too late for the fast express to Madras, which i'd thought about catching, and in the end i decided i'd have to grit my teeth and catch a bus. It wasn't a pleasant prospect, but it seemed to be the only one out of a limited range of choices that would get me to Pondicherry by early evening.

However, it wasn't quite that easy. The bus station was just over the road from the railway station, which was nice and handy, and there was a bus to Pondicherry which was due to leave at half past nine. But it was fully booked. However, for a fee a seat could be found. I don't know who the man was who sorted it out for me, but he was in and out of the ticket office like he worked there, so he probably did, but he took a hundred and fifty rupees off me and came back a few minutes later with a ticket. The fare on the ticket was eighty rupees, so it had cost me almost twice as much as it should have, but it was worth it to not have to go through all the hassling involved with normal booking - not to mention the fact that i couldn't have got a seat anyway as the bus was "full".

The journey took a little bit over eight hours, including a stop for lunch about half way. When we'd had lunch, we had to swap buses with people travelling from Pondicherry to Bangalore for some weird reason. Maybe the buses don't like being away from home after dark!

We passed through Senji on the way, which completed an interesting and varied circular diversion on my journey from Madras to Pondicherry. It was nice to see Senji again. Although i doubt i'll ever have a reason to go back there, i'll always rememeber that little town with affection.

The disgusting materialistic excesses of the christian festival of mammon didn't seem to have penetrated into India, not surprisingly i suppose. But nevertheless a lot of people had christmas holidays - which meant all the hotels in Pondicherry were full the night i arrived, which was a bit of a problem. However, although Pondicherry is supposedly a city, it's a very relaxed place, with none of the deranged hassle of the larger Indian cities, so i wasn't particularly distressed by this problem. I'd taken a cycle rickshaw from the bus station and the driver went round a lot of hotels and guest houses without any success or any sign that there might be somewhere with a bed. In the end, he took me to the youth hostel, which was next to the beach at Muthialpet, right on the northern edge of Pondicherry.

The driver asked me for a hundred and twenty five rupees, which was an extortionate ammount for that journey in a cycle rickshaw, and i doubt he expected me to agree to it. But i didn't argue, in fact i gave him a hundred and thirty, as i didn't have any other change. I always overpay cycle-rickshaw drivers because they do a lot more work than an auto-rickshaw driver, although their value is set a lot lower. And i enjoy travelling in a cycle-rickshaw much more than an auto. It's quiet and it's not polluting the air and you can see a lot more. Autos are really noisy and smelly and you have to bend right down to see anything from the back of one of them.

Pondy youth hostel is a very strange place. I think i encountered the first unfriendly Indians i'd met up the that point there. The staff were fine - just as friendly as everyone else, but the other guests were weird. I tried to say hello to a couple of them but they just ignored me. And the two other people who had beds in the dormitory i was in moved out into another one i think - anyway, they didn't sleep in that one that night.

At the front desk there was a list of rules as long as my arm - in English and French. The whole place was generally quite weird, but then youth hostels usually are, i think, and i wasn't really bothered by it. All i wanted to do was sleep. And that's more or less all i did.

*-*-*

I woke up at about half past six the next morning, to hostel staff stripping sheets of the other beds in the dorm. It was a good time to wake up, i felt like an early start that day, although i didn't really know what i was going to do. The hostel staff told me the banks would be closed that day as it was a public holiday. That was a bit of a worry as i was down to my last fifty rupees due to a lack of foresight which mainly came from my desire to completely ignore christmas, combined with an excess of wishful thinking.

Fifty rupees was enough to eat for a day, but not really enough to do anything else. And i wanted to do more than just eat, i wanted to get out of the youth hostel and find somewhere else to stay. However i knew i'd change some money somehow. I still had thirty five quid which i'd kept in notes for just that sort of emergency.

I walked into town, which was two or three kilometres away, and began to follow my nose. I found one little shop which didn't sell anything and where apparently you could change money, but the person working in there told me the boss wouldn't be in for half an hour, so i said i'd come back. Walking down the same road a few minutes later, a man on a bicycle asked me if i wanted to change money. He told me i'd get fifty rupees to the pound, which was two rupees less than the normal bank rate, and i said ok. He took me back up the road to a barbers shop, not far from the first place i went, and i changed a twenty pound note. The only problem was i got two five hundred rupee notes for it, which i thought i'd never be able to change - one hundreds are are usually hard enough. However, i managed to change them both for hundreds within a couple of hours.

After that, i had a wander around the town. It was a small city right on the coast and unlike most of India it had been a french colony. The French had only left a couple of decades before and a lot of the street signs were still in French. But, apart from a few obvious signs of french influence, the general layout and feel of Pondy was very different to the other, British influenced towns. It's kind of hard to define quite what the difference was, but somehow it wasn't quite as ugly as most cities.

The geography of Pondicherry seemed to somehow revolve around what was called a canal, but in reality was just a large open sewer. This ran from north to south in the central area of the city, parallel to the coast and two or three blocks inland from it. Between the "canal" and the ocean was the old french colonial area, where all the posh houses and administrative buildings were built. The area on the other side, known as the "Black Town" was where the Indians lived and carried on their businesses. The architecture hadn't changed and the eastern part of the town looked very european while the western part was a fairly normal indian city, although possibly slightly cleaner and less chaotic than most.

The seafront was quite pleasant in an unpretentious way, with a long esplanade running along the edge of the water with a gigantic statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the middle and a cafe over the waves a little bit further on. Apart from that, there was nothing else there, but the fresh sea air and the long view to the horizon made it a nice place to walk along to escape from the city.

After wandering around a bit, i decided i had to find a room somewhere and get out of the youth hostel. I couldn't face another night there - it was far too weird for me! I didn't particularly want to stay in town either, as there didn't seem to be really any need to or any benefit from imposing the noise and pollution on myself. I knew there were some guest houses about half a dozen kilometres up the coast near Auroville, so i jumped on a bus and went to have a look.

I ended up at the Palms Beach guest house as Periamudaliarchavadi, a small village on the main coast road north from Pondy. The road to Auroville turns off this one at this village, so it was a handy place to base myself while i tried to check out that place. It was also very close to the beach, and that was something i needed after the dry inland parts of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, where i'd been for the last couple of weeks.

The Palms Beach was a pleasant place, although too close to the main road for comfort. You come in the gate into a largish garden, with lots of trees and shrubs surrounding half a dozen tables. On the left there's a block of half a dozen rooms with their doors opening onto the garden and large bougainvilleas growing up the front and covering the roof with their beautiful violet, pink, red and orange flowers. Opposite this block was the kitchen and at the far end of the garden there were half a dozen circular buildings with thatched roofs, all different sizes, including one with two floors. Three of these were double rooms and the rest were covered public spaces. The overall feeling of peace and a kind of natural beauty was only disturbed by the roaring engines and honking horns on the road outside - although this certainly wasn't constant.

However, despite the basic tranquility of the Palms Beach, there was one major problem. Every morning and every evening at about five o'clock the peaceful sea air was ripped into a million shreds, as sharp as broken mirrors, by a horrible, deafeningly loud screeching sound that went on and on for at least an hour. Some power-crazed bastard had decided a good way to totally fuck up any chance the local residents might have of achieving any kind of spiritual enlightenment or inner peace would be to set up a sound system on the roof of the local temple and subject them to a twice daily sonic attack. The hideous noise sounded like indian film music played with scalpel-blade treble and mountain-shaking volume through the public address system of a large and acoustically deranged railway station. Through the distortion you could hear that it must have been music of some sort when it was recorded, although the final resemblance was only very slight. It made the worst indonesian mosque muezzin pale into pleasant easy listening by comparison.

Religion is truly the cause of all the evil in the world!

It's harder and more dangerous to criticise other religions than it is to criticise the one you were brought up with, because people are always less tolerant to attacks that seem to be coming from outside. But if i lived near a catholic church that rang its bells fantically and tunelessly between five and six every morning, the first thing i'd do would be to brick all its windows and if that didn't work, i'd fucking set fire to it.

However, Indians seem to like to suffer even more than catholics do, so i guess they welcome the opportunity to not only go deaf very quickly, but to gain a few brownie-style karma points every morning and evening. Jesus! every one of them in that village should have achieved nirvana after just a few weeks of suffering that obscenity!

Anyhow, i didn't realise this until after i'd moved in there, of course, otherwise i would never have taken the room in the first place.

At about four o'clock that afternoon i decided to walk up to Auroville and see if the information centre was open. It took me about two hours to walk there and when i arrived it was closed, which was a bit of a drag. But it was a really nice walk and i began to feel that i'd definitely come to the right place.

In fact the route i walked went along the edge of Auroville land mostly, rather than through the place, but it was enough to inspire me and to make me feel happy to be there. For a start there were lots of trees all the way along the road i was walking on. And after the places i'd been so far in India it was like wandering into an oasis after being lost in the desert for a month! And even before i'd got to India i hadn't seen much in the way of trees for a while either. Five months in deforested Europe and two months in fairly treeless Mexico had starved me of the closeness of trees which i'd been so accustomed to for so long. The last time i could remember being surrounded by any quantity of trees was at the organic farm in Penang, eight months before. Eight months was an incredibly long time for me to be without trees in my life, although i hadn't been conscious of how long it had been until i walked along that road in Auroville and felt an intense relief and happiness - it was like coming home again.

And it wasn't just the trees that made me feel at home, although there were quite a few eucalypts and familiar australian types of wattles. The place reminded me a lot of Australia, particularly northern Australia. The soil was the same bright red colour that i'd never seen anywhere else before outside of that continent. And the atmosphere, the climate and the general feeling of the land all seemed totally familiar. I wasn't quite sure how my visit to this place was going to go, but i was certain that i'd finally arrived in the right place. This was what i'd come to India to find.

*-*-*

I was woken up at five the next morning by the evil ear-splitting screeching sound coming from the temple down the road, although i was so tired i managed to sleep through it, on an off, anyway. But i got up fairly early, although i didn't feel that great, and walked a couple of hundred yards up the road to the bike hire shop. They charged fifteen rupees a day to hire an old-fashioned, heavy framed, single gear bicycle - which is the standard bike you find everywhere in India in vast quantities. It seemed like a pretty reasonable price to me, so i hired one.

That morning i cycled back up to the visitors' centre. It was a nice ride, although the first part of the road from Periamudaliarchavadi was in terrible condition. But after that, it was pleasant cycling along the country lane, surrounded by trees all the way. Most of the way along the main road, which i'd walked along the night before, there was a bicycle track just off the road a bit, which was better than sharing the narrow strip of tar with cars, motorbikes and bullock carts.

This time the visitors centre was open and there were a lot of photos around the walls showing different aspects of life at Auroville and different stages in its history. There were also a few leaflets available in several different languages. I spoke to a man there who was giving information to people who wanted to stay or work at Auroville and he gave me some names of people to see who were working on the sort of things i was interested in - in other words, computer networks, sustainable agriculture and reforestation.

After i left the visitors centre, i cycled around a bit, enjoying the countryside, and then went to find a phone to try and call one of the two people involved in computer network stuff at Auroville. However, neither of them were there so i'd have to try again later.

I finally managed to catch Bobby, one of the computer network people, on the phone the next morning and arranged to go and see him the following afternoon. That left me with nothing particular to do for the next twenty four hours. I could have gone and checked out some of the other people whose names i had, but it seemed too complicated to be trying to deal with several people at once, so i decided to keep it simple and wait till after i'd seen Bobby to start chasing around after somebody else. After all, Auroville was spread out over about twenty square kilometres and some parts of it were a long way from others and a lot of it was a long way from where i was staying.

However, as a result of not having anything to do, i began to get that lost and aimless feeling coming back again. Normally i'm not one of those people who feel like they have to be constantly *doing* something - to justify their existence - and i can quite happily do very little for long periods of time. But recently i seemed to have developed a need to be doing something constructive or creative or i'd start getting depressed and feeling my life was pointless, meaningless, and that i was wasting time. I think this was partly due to enforced inactivity that so much travelling had produced over a long period and partly due to the fact that since i'd been in India i didn't seem to have done anything that really made any sense of being there. I still didn't really know what i was doing there and in some ways i didn't really want to be there at all.

When i was in Huddersfield, i bought a book called "City of Trees and Fields" (i think that's right), by Stephen Butler, for a pound from a cheap book shop. It was about a journey he did all over Britain in an ancient Morris Traveller van. He started in northern Scotland at a place whose name started with the letter 'A' and went from place to place, working his way through the alphabet, back and forth across the island until he got to somewhere beginning with the letter 'Z' in the extreme south west of England.

It was an interesting account and i enjoyed his weird english sense of humour and the overstated understatement of his narrative. Part of the reason it interested me was that at that time i was trying to write the part of this book which is about Britain, which was proving very difficult.

Anyway, towards the end of the journey his narrative got quite jaded and uninspired as he obviously became sick of it and began to wonder why he was doing it at all. I can see the same sort of tone creeping into this story - on and off, at least - and i guess parts of it don't make very exciting reading. However, it seems like this is an inevitable part of a journey like this and of a story that's being written while i'm doing it. The worst of this will probably disappear when i edit the manuscript later, but you'll just have to put up with the rest i'm afraid - if you want to finish reading it, that is! If bits of it are dull, it's because i was feeling dull at the time, and seeing as i'm writing this for you to read, you can share some of the suffering with me! Sorry about this, but i'll try not to suffer any more than i have to!

*-*-*

The following afternoon i cycled up to the Centre for Scientific Research, where Bobby worked. It was right on the other side of Auroville and it must have taken at least half an hour to get there. It was a pleasure cycling around Auroville although there wasn't an amazing ammount to see except trees. Most of the roads were fairly rough dirt tracks but it was almost completely flat so it was the perfect place for bicycles. Lots of people zoom around the place on motorbikes and mopeds, but i much preferred cycling as it was more peaceful and relaxing, as well as not producing any pollution. And you got to see a lot of things that motorbike riders never would, because of the slower speed and also the lack of noise, which scares away wild animals. As well as that, i desperately needed the exercise. The long months of physically destructive travelling, the period of illness and the hours spent sitting in front of a computer had combined to make me less fit than i remembered being for a very long time.

Meeting Bobby was interesting. He was working on a public access computer bulletin board system that was available to Auroville residents for sending e-mail to each other or, via Internet, to people all round the world. They were running the same software as our BBS in Melbourne and were working on a very similar project in a similar way. I offered my help, if there was anything i could do in the small ammount of time i was going to be in the area and we agreed to meet up again the following week.

From there i cycled a couple of kilometres to a farm called "Aurogreen" to try and find Charlie, who was one of the names on my list. When i got there, he was milking a cow and he told me to come back the following morning and he'd show me round the place.

When i went back again Charlie wasn't around, so i just sat in the shade and waited for him to show up. The simple pleasure of sitting on the roughly made stone bench, under a shady tree, in the warmth of the tropical morning, surrounded by trees and with nothing much to look at except three or four cows lying under another tree, is hard to express. But that sort of feeling was one of the most important things i'd been missing since i'd left Australia.

Really the only time i'd been away from tarred roads and cars had been those few days at the organic farm in Penang, all those months ago. But over the last seven years i'd become so accustomed to spending a large proportion of my life in that sort of environment and this had become something that was almost a physical need for me. I go crazy if i'm away from it for very long. And by the time i got to Auroville i was certainly well on the way to going completely certifiably mental! Sitting under that tree was a kind of occupational therapy.

After a while, Charlie showed up and he kept his promise to show me around the place. He'd been at Auroville for something around 20 years and growing fruit trees there for most, if not all of that time. As well as fruit trees and the small herd of cows, there was a small vegetable garden, some chickens and a few small patches of timber trees and bamboo big enough to build with. Among the fruit trees at different times, they grew black gram - a lentil-type legume - which they sell and grass which they feed to the cows.

The farm was divided up into topes - or fields - which were fenced with thorny bushes. The layout of these topes seemed strange to me at first. Each tope was divided up into padis - which were separated from each other by eight or ten inch high earth walls for irrigation purposes. Water running down a concrete and brick channel into each tope could be diverted, via earth channels running the length of the tope, into individual padis and allow selective irrigation of whatever needed water at any particular time. Generally there would be one tree in each padi.

It was interesting to see this irrigation system in action, as i'd never seen it close up before. I couldn't really say what the advantages and disadvantages would be compared to the plastic pipe sort of system that i'm more used to. It's probably less efficient, in terms of limiting water wastage, but it's probably cheaper to construct - although the quantity of bricks and cement used in it make me wonder about that. However, plastic pipe has a limited useable life before it's got so many leaks you can't repair it any more and the type of channel system they had there would probably, with a bit of maintainence, last a lot longer. Anyway, the plastic agricultural pipe probably wasn't available when they set it up, and quite likely still isn't.

After he'd showed me round, i told Charlie i was interested in doing a bit of work on the farm while i was around and he said to come back on Monday morning and i could help with pruning the trees.

*-*-*

On Saturday morning i felt so sick of the shit food and instant coffee that was served up at the Palms Beach that i couldn't face eating breakfast there. So i jumped on the bicycle and cycled the three or four kilometres to Muthialpet to go to a coffee shop where i'd eaten on the night i stayed at the youth hostel. I knew they did good coffee and the normal good quality south indian food i'd become used to - idlis, dosai etc.

After breakfast i decided to carry on cycling down Mahatma Gandhi Road and go into Pondicherry, which was only a couple of kilometres further on. When i got there i had some more black coffee and some more food in the Shiva vegetarian restaurant. Then i went to check out a bookshop which had been closed the last time i was in town.

It was branch of Higginbotham's, a large Madras bookshop, but somehow it seemed to have a more intersting selection of books than the Madras one. I bought a book on the Tamil language, which seemed to be a bit better than the one i already had - well, it couldn't have been any worse! I also got a sort of combined travel and guide book about Karnataka by the south indian writer R.K. Narayan and a very weird little book called "A passage to England" by Nirad C Chaudhuri, an indian writer. This last book was about a trip the author did to England in 1955 and it looked like it could be interesting as a view of history, if nothing else.

Then i went for a ride along the seafront before heading back on the long trip towards Periyamudaliarchavadi.

*-*-*

On Sunday night there was a new years party at the Palms Beach guest house. I wasn't in the mood for a party, and anyway i don't celebrate the calendar new year as it's a totally meaningless day and celebrating then is just a perversion of the winter solstice festival which was deliberately mutilated for the purposes of colonization. Anyway, i live in the southern hemisphere and southern hemisphere new year is at the end of June.

However, i didn't have a choice, i was living there and there was going to be a party. As it happened, it didn't affect me very much at all. I went to bed at about ten and, despite the loud disco music, i slept well... until five o'clock in the morning, that is, when the hideous screeching sound coming from the temple cut through the disco that was still playing. I was suddenly wide awake. Bastards!

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