My Wanderings in India Come to an End: Ooty

July 31, 2004

Hello all--the following entry wraps my India journal. The past two and a half weeks have flown by! When last I wrote it was July 11th and I was in Mysore, wrestling with the decision of whether or not to spend my last two weeks traveling in south India or take a 10-day vipassana meditation course.

To Meditate or Not to Meditate

Vipassana, or insight meditation, means the practice of "seeing things as they really are." The strict 10-day course in Buddhist meditation I was signed up for from July 14th to the 25th has been likened to "meditation boot camp"; the technique it uses is based on the original teachings of the Buddha. During my travels in India I'd met a half dozen people who'd taken the course and described it as a very powerful experience. Seems like my whole life I've been after some kind of inner transformative experience (even as that reflects a resistance to accepting my life as it is--hmmm). Meditation unquestionably can be an important tool for many on the road to personal peace. Although I have some experience with meditation, to this point I've not established a real consistent practice and this course sounded like it would be great training and experience. In addition to acquiring a boatload of inner peace, I imagined coming out of those 10 days with unshakable equanimity and a permanent Buddha-smile playing on my lips.

Problem was, I'd signed up for Vipassana when I had six weeks left of traveling time, but as my days in India passed quickly and the course approached, I noticed a growing reluctance to go. Sure, part of it was that I'm a wimp and I knew enough about meditation already to realize it was going to be really hard to sit for 10-11 hours a day, my back and knees were going to ache, some of that time would take an eternity to pass, and there was going to be a significant aspect of suffering involved in the undertaking. I liked the idea of being able to come back from India and tell all my friends proudly that I'd done such a thing, but I also knew from people I've talked to that it was going to resemble somewhat of an ordeal to actually do it. I'm a big believer in listening to your intuition (that's partly what meditation helps you to get better at). When I got to Mysore and had such a sore butt from riding so many buses recently, I considered that might be a sign from the universe to reconsider the advisability of heading off to sit on my bum for 12 hours a day. I didn't want to stop doing yoga for 10 days either, which I knew I'd have to agree to; I'd just started to get back into my yoga groove after losing it a bit over the past month due to so much traveling, cold in the north, heat in the south, stomach problems, etc. Even as I was feeling a bit beaten up by traveling in India at that point, and was tempted to go to the course simply to escape from two more weeks of the discomforts of the Indian road--long waits for long rides, bad beds, feeling alone and surrounded by an alien culture (and hey, sometimes India can make you crazy and a slightly less than warm and charitable bad attitude towards Indian society can develop)--I sensed that I needed to continue traveling in the south during my last two weeks in India. [Note: 10-day Vipassana courses are offered all over the world; in fact there's a center in Shelburne, Massachusetts, so if I really want to have that experience someday, which I might, I can do it without being in India.]

So Monday the 12th I emailed my course withdrawal to the Vipassana people and bought a ticket for the afternoon bus to Ooty. My plan was to head south from Mysore through the hill station country until I reached the southernmost point of India, then work my way up the west coast until I reached Bombay, from where I would depart India.

Ooty

One side of the hill station town of Ooty (seen from the other side of town).

A relatively short 4-hour bus ride took me out of Mysore and up into the green wet Nilgiri Hills to the town of Ooty (short for the old name of Ootacamund; the town's recently restored traditional name is Udhagamandalam). Ooty is a "hill station," one of the places in India used by the British to retreat from India's intense seasonal heat; Ooty was the cooler summer headquarters for Madras during the Raj.

Street scene in the hill station town of Ooty.

When I rolled into town it was raining, gray, raw and cold--after all that's what you get when you visit the hill stations during the monsoon. But the rain was usually pretty light, more like mist, and for the most part didn't interfere with being able to do stuff outdoors.

This short street at the center of town serves as the transportion hub in Ooty.

I'd originally planned to stay just a day in Ooty and then head on to Kodaikanal, another hill station about 8 hours away by bus. But my first day in town I met Sharon during dinner at the YWCA where we were staying. We hit it off pretty well, and since Sharon planned to have her full hill station experience in Ooty, and I was enjoying her company, I decided to stay in Ooty longer.

Ooty is a pretty small town, reflected by the size of its clock tower.

Street scene in Ooty.

Sharon's a really interesting woman; having grown up in Connecticut, she's been living in Delhi for the past twenty months working for Oxfam and gender equality, and before that she worked as an advocate in Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet republic for more than a year. All told she's been living abroad and working for social justice non-governmental organizations for the last seven years. I enjoyed hearing of her experiences and views on various issues during the course of the next few days; I've always admired people who figure out how to shape their careers to work for a better world.

Ooty Botanical Gardens, established in 1848.

Really enjoyed the Ooty Botanical Gardens; they reminded me of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Interesting map of India in the Botanical Garden composed of Indian flowering plants.

The town center of Ooty itself is a bit of an ugly hodgepodge of buildings crowded together around the muddy main streets, which were occupied with plenty of people as well as noisy buses and autorickshaws. But just outside of town it has a beautiful large botanical garden that spreads up into the hills; walking there reminded me of walking in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Sharon and I found members of one of the indigenous tribes of the area, the Toda, living in a small village at the top of the garden and spent some talking to them one afternoon, which was interesting (though at least part of their motivation was to sell us their handcrafted shawls).

This hut belongs to a family of the indigenous Toda tribe; we spent a half hour visiting with the family inside.

This guy belonged to the Toda tribe; I was glad he didn't decide to get up when his picture was taken.

One day we arranged to go horseback riding up in the hills, way out in the country, over land that resembled Scottish moors and through eucalyptus groves and pine forests (being on a horse for the first time in 30 years was fun too, though I realized it's not so easy to stay in that saddle when they start running.) Another day we booked a guide who took us hiking through paths among the hills that led through tea plantations.

St. Stephen's Church, built in 1829; there's a graveyard behind the church with the graves of many British soldiers and settlers.

Graveyard behind St. Stephen's Church in Ooty; a pretty far away and lonely resting place for the British soldiers and settlers who are buried here.

We also visited an old British church built in 1829 by the British founders of Ooty. It was during a walk through the cemetery behind the church that I sensed the ghosts left behind by the British; for the first time since I'd been in India I reflected on what it must've been like for the many English people who'd come to this faraway land to live and die (at fairly young ages, from the dates I read on the headstones) in what must've been a very strange and difficult environment for them.

Rustic scene in the Ooty hills: a tea plantation.

New friend Sharon, who I spent a couple of days with exploring Ooty.

Me and Sharon posing on a tea plantation.

Sharon and our guide for the horseback tour of the back country and tea plantations of Ooty.

After three days of pursuing the hill station experience it was time for me to leave Ooty; Sharon was going up to Hampi to check out the ruins of Vijayanagar and, with my last precious days in India dwindling, I decided to skip Kodaikanal and get down to Kanyakumari. The Nilgiri Hills Railroad operates one of the few surviving older, smaller-gauge miniature trains which run through Ooty and the two other hill station towns, Kotagiri and Coonoor. The 4-hour ride on the small train was scenic and memorable; I could reach my head out the window and look out upon awesome views of the green hills sweeping down to the valleys below, or watch as the diesel locomotive disappeared into a tunnel blasted into the rocks or carried us over a railway bridge. Reaching the bottom of the hills in early evening, the train stopped in the small town of Mettupalayam; there I walked to the bus station and found a local bus bound for the city of Coimbature.

Boarding the miniature train for the ride down the mountain from Ooty.

This is the miniature steam engine locomotive which draws the meter-gauge train from the top of Ooty down the mountain.

Looking out the passenger car of the miniature train on the way down the mountain.

Another look out the miniature train window.

Looking down as we descended from the mountains known as the Nilgiri Hills.

A breathtaking view from the train as we slowly moved down from Ooty.

Mystical Vision on the Way to Coimbature

During the hour and a half ride to Coimbature I sat in the last row of a packed bus, squeezed into the corner against my backpack on one side and an Indian man on the other; more and more people boarded the bus and as usual it was standing room only before it departed the station. The man next to me smiled and inquired how long I'd been in India. I told him about my travels, and he asked me if I knew about Sri Aurobindo; he was impressed that I knew a little about Aurobindo's philosophy. He mentioned that he liked Osho's writings too; I said I'd heard his ideas were quite good, regardless of whatever the crazy westerners did in the Pune ashram. He smiled again, and we stopped talking for a while. The bus continued along in the darkness; as we drove through the sprawling city of Coimbature I gazed out the window and watched the streets passing by, filled with people, stores, buildings. I was pretty tired from having hiked for four hours in Ooty that morning and then the sitting on the wooden bench of the miniature train all afternoon, and I still had to find a hotel room that evening before catching a 4:55am train early the next day, but I was feeling lucky and grateful just to be there and be having this rich experience. As the faces flashed by out the window, for a few moments I imagined I could feel God breathing through India as the bus rolled along, carrying me onwards.