Out of the Deep and Into Silence

The last image I have of Koh Pang Ngang is of sitting on the deck of the boat, ready to leave for Koh Tao, and seeing Anna striding along the pier to the next boat along. She is a small, determined figure in her black skirt and blue halterneck, long blonde hair tied up, striding in her flip-flops with her small rucksack on her back, purposely off to claim her destiny. Her destiny at that moment involved a trip to Bangkok and the Finnish embassy and then a visa run (common to long-term Thai stayers) to Malaysia before a return to Koh Pang Ngang, her home for now. I called out to her. She paused a moment, scanning my boat for the voice, and then spotted me and waved. Somehow the image was very poignant. It felt that she had shared essential markers of this trip of mine – and who knows when our respective odysseys will bring us to another meeting point? It made me realise how grateful I was to have had her company along the last month. It was good to have someone around who had also come from six months in India, similar but different to mine, and so with many common references and adjustments. It made the easing into the Thai backpacker scene (which I never quite felt I’ve done) much less traumatic. So thank you Anna – for company, for laughter, for help and for lovely massage practice.

I tried very hard not to be disappointed with Koh Tao. I was there over Christmas and new year 2000/01 and had utterly fallen in love with it then. It has changed a lot in that time, largely over the last four years or so, I am told. It is still very beautiful, but gone are the simple beach huts and easy, laid-back restaurants. The most astonishing quantity of building has gone on, right down to the beachfront, all squarely aimed at the package tourist rather than the backpacker brigade. Prices have consequently pretty much doubled. I barely recognised my old bay, which seemed much smaller than I remembered. I later realised this was because the beach has about halved in size, with all the dive resorts now built virtually down to the water.

But I did quite well on my accommodation. I think I found the last cheapish bungalow right over the sea at a little resort with some of the best food I’ve had since my arrival in Thailand and also some of the cheapest. My bungalow looked right over the bay and seemed to be pretty much the last one left on the beach. Here it is, with my usual colourful array of laundry:

The dive shop was small, German-run and friendly in a very old-laddish way. The overheard conversations of Koh Pang Ngang beginning “As a tantric man, I can…” (this is a verbatim quote) were supplanted by the porno mags scattered around the dive shop office. There weren’t many women around, so I went from artist to tomboy for ten days, hanging out with the divers and boxers. My dive instructor was a cocky Mancunian (but really excellent underwater – and Jackson, if ever you read this, that’s not flattery) and my fellow advanced course attendee was a Brummie Muay Thai boxer. The school’s divemaster in training was a Swiss guy who apparently used to play for his national handball team – so testosterone all round.

(That’s Philip, divemaster from Zurich on the left, and Adam, Brummie Muay Thai boxer on the right.)

I have to say that they were very nice to me, however, including me on their outings and teasing me only as much as I could just about handle.

Not having dived in nine years, I was a little apprehensive about launching straight into my advanced. Jackson, my instructor, assured me he would give me a briefing of the basics and then we would start with a “peak performance buoyancy” dive, which would apparently sort me out. This is basically diving a mini obstacle course (I’m afraid I can’t do headstand underwater, but I’m very accurate going through hoops or under legs, no tanks knocking into boys’ fragile bits) to practise optimum buoyancy (which you control with your breathing as well as your kit) so that you don’t waste lots of energy/air and don’t shoot up or down unexpectedly (not a great thing to do when diving). Despite the confident talk, I could tell Jackson expected some trouble from me – and also that he was quite pleasantly surprised. I did pick it back up pretty quickly and, as ever, it’s not the water but the kit that flummoxed me for a while. Despite my left ear deciding to make its presence felt (which basically just meant I had to go down and back up again slowly), my diving got progressively more confident and – dare I say it – skilful.

Yes, the water really is that clear.

Being an “advanced” diver means you can go to 30 metres, at which point we were tested for nitrogen narcosis. Well, I can still subtract from ten at that depth, though I do confess to feeling a wee bit light-headed, in an “I’m slightly tiddly but perfectly able to control myself if I concentrate” sort of way. However, the deeper you go, the more air you use, because it gets compressed in the tank with the pressure increase. The good thing is that my oxygen consumption is VERY low (because I have such a small brain, the lads kept reminding me), and so my deep dive was an extremely respectable 64 minutes long.

We did a night dive as one of our options. As I was jumping off the boat into the water, all petrol black, I had serious reservations. However, once we were in, I really loved it, and apart from watching the fish and coral doing their thing, I particularly enjoyed watching my breath. It’s a very tangible pranayama: if I inhale deeply, I float up a metre; when I exhale fully, I go down again. After the course ended, I did a few so-called “fun-dives” (can’t you tell PADI is written by Americans?). By that point, we were going through small caves every now and then. Since my stingray encounter (the mark is still on my heel) I’m very wary of touching anything – not easy to avoid when going through narrow caves. But what’s a girl to do when surrounded by gung-ho lads? Deflate her BCD, make herself negatively buoyant and swim, that’s what. And really, it’s fine – but I don’t particularly want to be the first one through, in case an angry trigger fish is waiting on the other side (our diving instructor described one as “a swimming brick”. He should know; he was knocked unconscious by one not so long ago).

Here’s Buddha rock (so named for obvious reasons) from the boat shortly before night fell for our night dive:

I particularly liked our dive boat, manned by Charlie from Burma (not his real name but it sounds like that) who must be one of the most sweetly smiling men on the planet and the Captain. The Captain is covered with mysterious faint tattoos and has three fingers of one hand missing. He’s also a very accomplished diver, unusual in a Thai, who, like Indians, rarely swim. But he came down with us on my last dive and added immensely to the fun – not that any of us understand him or he us. He would also rigorously inspect our kit as we prepared to leave the boat and clip me across the ear when I forgot to turn on my air (I told you I had issues with kit). Here’s the Reef Rider dive boat from the small boat that takes us to it:

I had a couple of beachy days on Koh Tao, but my favourite beach of years ago has been made impassable without walking half-way across the island (up and down some extremely steep hills in extremely hot sun) because all the new resorts have cut off access to it. Jackson and Adam (my advanced dive course buddy) had ambitions to conquer the island by canoe, so I hitched a lift with them one day. Thanks to their paddling, I got to see my old Shark Bay again, but it certainly wasn’t the daily pilgrimage I made it nine years ago. However, I did get to look across the water to my old beach at Koh Pang Ngang, and realised that the island I had seen every day in the distance during my stay there was Koh Tao.

And now here I am in Bangkok, just in time for the explosions of violence not so far away from the Khao San Road area. A friend from my journalism course who is now news editor for a northern radio station interviewed me by phone last night, so I was able to tell him that I’d seen strictly nothing and most of the tourists here seem pretty oblivious to what’s going on. But I haven’t been going out and about in Bangkok. It’s perfectly quiet where I am, but the Skytrain metro system was shut down across the city today.

I am grateful that the most tangible effect the neighbouring violence has had on me relates merely to my rucksack woes. My lower zip, which has been causing problems since November in Dharamsala, then repaired in Rishikesh (I did email Berghaus to say I expected better than this, only a month after purchasing my new rucksack from them, but they never deigned to reply), completely bust the morning I was packing to go to Koh Tao. I sewed the entire zip us with such panicked haste and long lengths of dental floss (very sturdy) that I didn’t even notice the blood pouring from my finger as I raced to get everything packed in time. The dental floss was holding well, but I didn’t reckon its chances with a month of Cambodian travel in the rainy season. After much debating and Facebook advice, I decided to try and get a new rucksack. Unfortunately, the only ones available around the Khao San Road are the cheap knock-offs which I am reliably informed will explode after a week (and probably less when filled with my 26kg of stuff). “You must be able to get a proper rucksack in Bangkok!” a friend said to me. Well yes, but the shopping malls are all in that area occupied by the protestors, currently experiencing sporadic gunfire and so unsurprisingly shut. So I got a Thai lady and an Indian tailor (all the tailors around here seem to be Indian) to reinforce my dental floss job, and now I have a professionally sewn-up rucksack. Unfortunately, it means I have to completely unpack it at each stop in order to get proper access to my things, but I’m sure I’ll manage.

I am told the rainy season is late starting in Cambodia. Koh Tao had no monsoon this year and so the sea never cooled down. You have to take a boat to get to cooler water and all the coral near the shore is bleached white by the hot water that is killing it. The inside of Koh Tao looks more like dry Mediterranean scrub than the lush tropics it sits in. I saw a lot of conservation and recycling activity on the little island (approximately 3x7 km), at odds with the mass building of resource-consuming luxury resorts going on there (all that air conditioning and those seashore swimming pools). April is supposed to be the hottest month in Thailand, and it was very hot. All the Thais are remarking on the unusual heat, and the May cooling hasn’t happened. I notice it more here in Bangkok, where there are no sea breezes to dry the sweat I am permanently coated in. I don’t know if this is more small evidence of climate change, but I am grateful I cope well with the heat and wonder if my journey from Keralan heatwave to Thai heatwave will continue into a Cambodian one.

So tomorrow morning I take the bus to the Cambodian border and from there must figure out my way to Battambang. It seems slightly eccentric, even by my standards, that the first thing I will do when I get to this country I have never before visited is shut myself and my senses away for ten days. But that’sthe plan. Tuesday, I go into a 10-day Vispassana meditation retreat, where you meditate 10 hours a day, starting at four in the morning. We are expected to maintain “noble silence” which means not even making eye-contact with other people.

So you shall hear from me again after the end of May.

From Lucy, with love xx

No Sex Please, We're (I'm) British

It rained solidly today. Up till now, storms have only lasted an hour or so, but today the rain fell from the morning when Anna began practising her abdominal massage on me (my fourth go now; it seems I have liver and solar plexus issues but really excellent kidneys and digestive tract) until late in the afternoon.

I love tropical rain. For the first time since the end of January, I experienced a temperature below 30 degrees (29, said my keyring thermometer). I’ve run out of books to read, which is an advantage when it comes to packing, but not so great on rainy days, especially as my plan to listen to everything on my iPod, systematically from A to Z, has come to nothing. My poor iPod died a death in Trivandrum and has never recovered. That’s probably another piece of excess baggage I should discard, but I don’t quite have the heart and part of me wonders whether the “iPod doctor” I saw advertised in Bangkok might help.

So I sat on my balcony in my raincoat and shorts and watched the coconut trees dance in the wind. Here I am in a break between storms, post-abdominal massage. I was quite surprised to see how brown I’ve got (so I shan’t be winning any Indian beauty contests any time soon – not that there was ever any danger of that):

But it’s not just the Indians who have a weird obsession with fair skin (the make-your-baby-white-cream I saw in an upmarket shop in Calcutta was perhaps the most disturbing example of this I came across). The Thais have it too and it’s quite a challenge to find a moisturiser, body lotion or deodorant that doesn’t promise to bleach you white. How strange (sad?) that the people in the world who are dark are working so hard to be fair and those who are fair are darkening up (I’m thinking of all those orange fake tans so popular in the UK).

But I’ll leave that discussion to the sociologists. Meanwhile, here’s the view from my balcony on a sunnier day:

And so from the shakti of storms to shakti of another kind. Sexual politics have been much in the foreground of my brain recently. There is a yoga school on this island which says it is “tantric”. And it probably is, in its way. At any rate, the blurb says “We teach genuine forms of Hatha, Kriya, and Kundalini Yoga meditation, and methods for the mastery of sexuality from Tantra Yoga”. It also says it is based in Kashmir Shaivism, which is something I have studied a little and attempted to practise in my own small way (no sex please, we’re British). So I went along to two lectures on the Spanda Karika, which is a text in the Kashmir Shaiva tradition I know a very little about and love very much.

Well let’s just say that the lectures didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with text in question but seemed more a sort of general interpretation of Kashmir Shaivism (note the word “interpretation”). Spanda (literally “pulsation”) was reduced to “the divine tremor of the heart”. Lucy sat there on her cushion getting very cross. She got even crosser when every example used to describe the upsurge of inspiration we all experience through things that move us (art, dance, music, football, chocolate, you name it; if it inspires you, it counts) was brought down to sex. “When you move towards your lover…”

So let’s clarify a few things. First of all, those inner upsurges that Kashmir Shaivism teaches can be a route to god, are described in the Shiva Sutras (“udyamo bhairavah”, Shiva Sutra, 1-5, translated as “The inner upsurge of energy is the supreme,” by Carlos Pomeda, not me, because I’m not a Sanskritist). Second, the constant references to sex “because we are a tantric school” are really unhelpful for anyone who is not sexually active, either through choice or through circumstance. And even for people who are sexually active, I suspect many of them are not having the kind of sex that lends itself to a yoga practice. Or even want that kind of sex. And generally, to reduce everything to sex is limiting. And sex is only one of the many billions of things manifested as spanda or which give that inner inspiration. It can be tiddlywinks, if that floats your boat.

In traditional Tantra, as I’ve understood (feel free to argue with me), there was no lover in question. The Kashmir Shaiva teachers, good householders that they were, had their wives, or for the more left-handed devotees (whose predilections might also include living in cremation grounds and eating or meditating on corpses), the meditation practices required by anyone seriously embarking on the sexual path were so involved and tortuous, that really, if it’s the sex you were after, there were much easier (not to mention more pleasant) ways to get it (for a fuller description, anyone interested can read the relevant chapter in George Feuerstein’s Tantra, the Path of Ecstasy. And for descriptions of modern Indian tantrics, there are a couple of stories in William Dalrymple’s very beautiful Nine Lives, in search of the sacred in modern India).

But Tantra in the west has become synonymous with a new-age sexual therapy of sorts, which might be very useful as self-inquiry or self-development, but is not Tantra. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t/aren’t tantric sexual practices. But they’ve got nothing to do with nice orgasms.

In fairness, I don’t think this yoga school is about that either and I’m sure some of the people there are very genuine. Certainly there are also some who are just out to get their rocks off (more on that later).

But it does lead to some very particular views. Here’s a snippet of a phone conversation I couldn’t help overhearing in a restaurant the other day, as the speaker in question had one of those very piercing female American voices that is utterly unconcerned with how far it might carry.

“You can be great in bed but if you don’t know how to access higher levels of consciousness, there’s no point and I’m not interested.”

Which seems to me a hell of a demand to place on prospective lovers (lovers - plural - apparently de rigueur here, as opposed to lover - singular). Do they then all have to be students of this particular yoga school (which narrows the choice considerably, especially, as with most yoga schools, there are far more women than men)? And who’s to define “higher levels of consciousness”? But hey, what the hell do I know, I reminded myself as I choked on my omelette, I’m single.

A few days previously, I’d finished my solo dinner in the same restaurant when a young guy invited me to join him as I was leaving. I sometimes have to force myself to be sociable, and this was one of those occasions. Why do I invariably regret it when I do this?

He started by asking me what month I was in, which is a standard question around the yoga school and unsubtly defines your rank. I gave my standard answer which goes along the lines of “I’m not in any month. I’m just doing my own practice and sometimes I come to the lectures or meditations.”

What ensued was a very dull conversation which I will abridge out of compassion for anyone who has been kind enough to read this far. Without bothering to find out anything particular about me, this young Finn whom I had just met (in his 21^st month, so really that’s the next best thing to enlightened) proceeded to comment on my “childlike personality” (really?), to equate shakti, and mine in particular (they aren’t “women” at this yoga school but “shaktis” – at which point I feel myself seized by the Bhadrakali incarnation of shakti and want to disembowel people)… But anyway, to equate shakti, and mine in particular with motherhood and children, assuming babysitting was a favourite pastime of mine (there’s probably a reason I’m the age I am, childless, and with no prospect of changing that state any time soon) – and then intimating that the other point of shakti was sex. He “could never live in a monastery” (who asked him?), he leered, the look in his eye clearly indicating that he quite fancied giving his sexual sadhana a go with me.

If there’s one thing that makes me especially queasy, it’s people parading their passes as spiritual advancement. From the little I know, one of the foundations of virtually any spiritual path is satya, truth. So practise a little of it! It was definitely time to go. I pointed out that shakti means creative power, that the whole universe is a manifestation of shakti, said my goodbyes and left. Without hitting anybody.

When I recounted this episode later, much incensed, I couldn’t resist pointing out that I’ve probably been doing yoga at least 15 years longer than this patronising git, not to mention that I’m probably 10 years older than him.

Apart from anything else, I get very upset at this reduction of shakti or spanda to sex because all the very beautiful links between modern physics and yoga (which have spawned such nonsense as the concept of “Quantum Yoga” asana – but let’s not get started on that) can be found in the heart of the Spanda Karika. But I’m really not qualified to go into that one; if you’re interested, read Fritjof Capra’s rather dense but very wonderful The Tao of Physics.

In case any Indians readers feel I have in the past unfairly characterised their country as generally incapable of seeing the point of a woman who is not attached to a man (married), you may be glad to know you are not alone in this. I was in the sea in the early days of my stay on Koh Pang Ngang, happily minding my own business, when a middle-aged (I’m being kind here) German guy walked towards me (the sea is very shallow, remember). Again, he didn’t bother to find out a thing about me but made a whole load of assumptions which had me struggling to remain polite. “You English, what do you do, you teach English like they all do? No? You teach what then, guitar? Cooking?”

We got to the point where he found out I’m alone. “Aren’t your family worried with you travelling alone?”

“As I haven’t lived with them for over twenty years, it seems an odd question to ask them.”

“Why do you travel alone? You had a bad experience?” Read, “with a man”.

Because, of course ladies, the only reason any of us would chose to do anything alone is because we haven’t found the right man yet. Because we are embittered, dried-up, frigid creatures. Just as women are only lesbian until they are “cured” by sex with a real man. How could we possibly not want one of them?

I was really struggling VERY hard to stay polite at this point. It’s one thing when someone from an uber-conservative Indian town can’t understand that you’re by yourself, but when a European financier who must encounter single women on a regular basis expounds such views, I seethe with outrage. But Lothario was too busy waxing lyrical about his Italian partner back in Europe to notice.

The next couple of times I saw him, he was in the company of a very pretty Thai lady. Pretty intimate company (and what did his Italian girlfriend back home have to say to that, I wonder?). Men like him provide no incentive for women like me to be anything other than single. But he would never get it if I told him, so why bother?

Of course, there are some lovely men in the world. I am friends with some of them and I love them dearly. But at the moment, the men I meet who show any remote interest in me simply inspire me to enter a nunnery, or at any rate, take a vow of chastity.

On a more reflective note, I observe that what offends me so much in the people I complain about is their tendency to judge. I’ve expended quite a lot of energy being mildly offended on this island. And yet, here am I, full of judgments, judgments of the people who annoy me, judgments of my surroundings, all the time: “in India, they do it like this”, “this was nicer in India”, etc. etc. Of course, it was also immeasurably filthier and more exhausting in India, but that’s beside the point. I remember the first time I came to Thailand being particularly irritated by a young woman who compared everything to India and found Thailand lacking. I’d never been to India at that time and I distinctly remember thinking “Well why don’t you go to India then? Why stay in Thailand just to moan about it?”

Quite.

And Thailand is very, very beautiful.

So healer, heal thyself. Or something of that sort. It’s certainly one for me to contemplate.

In this reflective vein, I have started taking self-portraits. It began in Varkala. So much of this travelling time is alone, it seemed odd not to mark it. Here is one in my bungalow a few nights back. It doesn’t look much like me to me – but clearly, sometimes, this is what I look like:

I am moving on soon. Monday sees me taking the boat to Koh Tao, the next island along, where I shall be doing some diving. It’s probably time to re-engage with some activity to get me out of my head.

The insects which have all emerged after the rains are now going mad about my laptop and head-torch, the only sources of light in this power cut I’m in the middle of. Before I inadvertently kill anymore of the suicidal creatures, I shall bid you farewell.

But to end on a less macabre note, here is a sunset at the beach I swim at most days. The old man you might just pick out steps carefully along the length of the bay with his walking stick. Every morning and every evening he exercises in this way, treading unevenly backwards and forwards along the length of the sand. He seems to be doing some sort of rehabilitative exercise, as he looks like he may have suffered a stroke. There’s something very beautiful about the way he picks his way methodically along.

With love from Lucy xx

Threading Through...

We wake one day and go to the beach and the tide is low – but somehow it’s shallow for miles and miles – I could walk forever, trying to reach a dry sandy island, trying to reach another shore…

Those few who saw La Blanche in Bangalore might remember those words from the soundtrack of the solo. Well it’s not just Port-Gentil in Gabon that has those sorts of beaches. Koh Pang Ngang has them too. The sea is tidal on some sort of seasonal level here and I arrived at the height of low-tide season. There is a bay near my bungalow that will eventually get deep enough to swim in if you venture far enough (about 300 metres) but there’s a lot of wading to do first. The sea bed isn’t as clear as the one in Port-Gentil, and having spied an urchin and a sting ray through my mask, I’m not overly keen on walking miles over it to reach a distant shore!

This reluctance is probably exacerbated by the fact that at a next-door beach at the beginning of my stay, my heel was lanced by some venomous thing I inadvertently trod on (I’ve since decided it was probably the tail-end of an escaping ray). It’s at these moments that travelling alone is a good character test, I told myself as I scrambled out of the water as quickly as possible, desperately trying to avoid treading on anything else that might object, and plonked myself on a washed-up log on the picture-postcard and utterly deserted beach. I there cried into the blood coagulating in weird ways around the cut in my heel, which thankfully was only just pierced on the inside, rather than on the bit I put weight on. It was my blood globbing around the fast-closing wound and the fantastic pain something so relatively small was causing that led me to the conclusion that my incensed attacker was a wee bit venomous. This was one of the many occasions I was able to thank the universe for homeopath ex-partners who are kind enough to respond immediately to text messages for help. The third homeopathic remedy I tried when I got to the bungalow stopped the pain instantly and I dried my tears and hobbled on. But I’ve not been back to that particular beach.

Two days later, a dog bit me. Twice. Not hard, but painful and unpleasant. I have decided that as it bit twice (completely unprovoked; it just walked up behind me and nipped), that counts as three and I’m not due any more. Having come through the chaos of India unscathed, from the high Himalayas of Ladakh to the southernmost point of Kanyakumari, I found it rather ironic that supposedly gentle Thailand was baring her teeth, and I find myself trusting her far less than the craziness of India.

So yes, here I am in Thailand. In fact I’ve been in Thailand nearly a month. My overnight and completely illogical journey (flying away from Bangkok as I took the plane from Chennai to Mumbai and then back towards Thailand with my Mumbai-Bangkok flight) was fairly calm. The only disturbance was created by an atypical Indian lady who got very angry at first class passengers jumping the security queue and one poor Scandinavian girl whose connecting flight was delayed and so only had 20 minutes to catch her next plane to wherever she was going. She was quite a modern, Westernised sort of Indian lady, but it is nonetheless extremely unusual to see one shouting, and queues in general are a bit of a fluid concept in India. My flight from Mumbai was virtually empty, so I had the great luxury of sleeping spread-out on a bank of seats for nearly all the four hours to Bangkok. That doesn’t happen very often! I’ve decided I’m a fan of Cathay Pacific.

I found the guide to Southeast Asia I’d been fruitlessly hunting over my week in Chennai almost as soon as I landed in Bangkok. This was typical of my experiences there. Everything is available; everything is easy, but oh my, do they make you pay for it! I began to view my various encounters with Indian price-inflation with near-fondness as the Thai equivalent hit me. And while my memories of Thailand from the turn of 2000 into 2001 are of an exceptionally friendly and gentle people, this was not my experience in Bangkok.

Following my friend Anna’s recommendations, I found somewhere cheap and clean, if basic, on one of the quieter roads off the craziness of the backpacker Mecca of the Khao San Road (those of you who’ve been following this regularly may recall a picture of Anna with me and another friend, Barbara, at the Shakti temple in Jwalamukhi, near Dharamsala. Anna is one of the surprisingly many good friends I made on silent retreat, ironically enough, at Tushita).

I had two and a half days in Bangkok and treated myself to daily massages at a sweet little place around a quiet corner off the Soi Rambuttri. The first time I looked in, the only other customer was an old Thai gentleman, which seemed to me a good sign. That first day, I had a very good foot massage from a nice lady-boy who was very taken with the mendhi (henna painting) I’d had done on my hands in Chennai. In fact the mendhi caused a bit of a stir wherever I went and lasted a remarkably long time (at least the part on my palms did). The day after that I tried the herbal massage, which is basically like a Thai massage except they press hot herbal compresses into the energy lines, and my last day I had a full 2-hour traditional Thai massage. Massage is the one thing I’ve found here that’s relatively cheaper than in India, and it’s by far the best value thing to spend money on in Thailand – the trick is finding someone good, though in fairness most people seem vaguely competent.

The Khao San Road is still a fun place to shop, though no one’s much interested in bargaining anymore and t-shirts you could buy cheaper in H&M or M&S back in the UK, with the added bonus that they won’t run or fall apart, are a lot less appealing than the bargains they were nine years ago. I remembered the Khao San Road being bonkers, but not as aggressive as it now is. It’s basically become like package holidays with rucksacks, with quite astonishing quantities of alcohol being consumed from early morning and Thais walking around with large signs saying “VERY STRONG COCKTAIL. WE DON’T CHECK ID”. There are also plenty of other signs offering every kind of fake ID (were anyone minded to check) or qualification imaginable, one next to a very credible forgery of a degree certificate from Cardiff University.

Most tourists behave perfectly well of course, but the few who don’t are so distressingly memorable that it’s no wonder the Thais are now so uninterested as to be downright rude (a bit of a culture shock after India, where everyone was so interested they never left me alone). Although this is not the sex tourism heart, you still see it. The rule seems to be that the Thai women look perfectly decent, sometimes very pretty, whereas the white men are invariably very ugly and very drunk. “I hope these women get what they want out of it because there’s no doubt they work bloody hard for their money,” I mused, as I watched one small Thai lady shepherding her very drunk, very loud English beau through the market. I’d previously seen this glorious specimen of northern European manhood passed out in a smelly heap in front of a cashpoint and had assumed he was some sort of travelling tramp.

Having never encountered a turbaned (Sikh?) fortune-teller in India, I encountered two on the Khao San Road. “I’ll tell you your boyfriend’s name!” one shouted after me as I made my escape. I nearly laughed, as this is more than I could do, but was nonetheless untempted.

But really my days in Bangkok were pretty uneventful (I was totally sheltered from any sign of the ongoing protests, still peaceful at that stage). I spent most of my time being very consumerist and adding yet more guff to the huge weight of my rucksack. Towards the end of my third day, I took the overnight bus (the trains were full) and boat to Koh Pang Ngang, one of the smaller islands off Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand. Again, I had a good lesson in the value of shopping around, as I discovered that a nice Dutch girl, who travelled most of the way with me but got off before me at Koh Samui, had paid twice what I had for her bus/boat ticket.

I realised on this trip that I have become a much hardier traveller than I once was. The travel agent who sold me the bus ticket outside my guesthouse anxiously warned me that it wasn’t like the train, no bed, only a reclining seat. Remembering my very unreclining padded bench over the hairpin Himalayan bends and uneven roads all night from Dharamsala to Rishikesh, I told her I would be fine, which indeed I was, even managing to sleep a bit on my journey. Once upon a time, an overnight bus journey would have been an unspeakable torture to me. Now they seem quite normal, and while other travellers were complaining about the nature of the loo on the bus, I was just grateful there was one, making sure I used it before everyone else did because travelling in Thailand nine years ago taught me that the only dirty toilets are the ones used by lots of Westerners.

I again followed Anna’s invaluable advice when I got to Koh Pang Ngang and spent the night at a reasonably priced beach-bungalow. Prices seem to be inflating at a remarkable rate here, and the simple beachfront hut Anna lived in for four months has doubled in price since her previous stay only half a year ago. In view of this, and because Thailand was generally making me panic that my money, which had gone so far in India, was slipping away frighteningly quickly, I decided to find somewhere on a monthly basis. And oh, how grateful I am for good friends! The afternoon of my arrival, Anna took me bungalow-hunting and we found a nice big solid one, near the sea (but not a swimming bit – far too marshy for that) with a fridge. The fridge is a great boon because not only does it stop my home-made moisturiser running everywhere (I am now on my last pot of it, alas) but it means I can keep fruit and other exciting things so that I’m not at the mercy of the restaurants every time I get hungry. I moved in the next day and have been very settled here (see below) ever since.

I can’t, however, say I’m finding Thailand the idyll I did nine years ago. The island is unquestionably beautiful but I find many of the people on it very odd. With a few notable exceptions, the Thais are not very friendly and the Westerners seem to divide themselves into alcoholic drop-outs (the tables in front of the 7/11 on a very unprepossessing stretch of street turn into drunk-tramp-central from around 6pm) or confused new-age yogis (as I wrote to friend) kidding themselves that their sexual adventures are a spiritual practice. Of course, I exaggerate, and I have met some very nice yogis, Anna amongst them, and even the occasional well-behaved (if smelly) alcoholic. I had hoped to do a bit of yoga on the island myself, but when I went along to my free first day, I very quickly knew this was not for me: scripted classes full of the sort of scriptural generalisations that make my blood boil and just a bit dull and unengaging. Which is a shame, as some of the information is interesting, but it’s not put over in a way I find myself inclined to give time to.

I have generally been very lazy but even if I don’t do any yoga asana, I do at least meditate every morning, and am finding the asana creeping in more regularly now. I did practise a bit of kalari at the beginning but I’m finding the motivation to get up early enough to do it before the heat kicks in very hard to find. This is despite the fact that I’m rarely in bed much later than 10pm (those who know me will know how astonishingly early this is for me) and often earlier. After all the activity of India, I seem to have gone into a bit of a slump here. I suspect it’s necessary rest and try not to get too frustrated with myself over it.

My friend Patty joined me for four days of my second week here. Patty lives in Berlin but had just completed a yoga teacher training intensive in Bali, really just a short hop away. Patty and I connected the day we both started at Laban, three weeks after everyone else, many years ago now. It was the first time I’d seen her outside London and it was great to be girly and talk dance and teaching and life in general as we mooched around the beach or the shops. Here I am on the day we did a snorkelling boat trip:

And here we are the morning of Patty’s departure:

Otherwise, my most regular company has been Anna, who has been practising her abdominal massage on me. Sometimes we share the hire of a scooter and scoot into town to run our errands (banks, muesli, skirts, body lotions, etc). I have had a go on the scooter but don’t yet feel competent enough to take it out alone. But I’m beginning to feel this would be a very useful skill…

I seem to have gone from one hot place at its hottest time of year - and in case that weren’t enough also in the grip of a heatwave - (Kerala) to another (Thailand). So most days I go swimming, though the shallow sea is often hotter than the water that comes out of my unheated bathroom tap. In fact, I would be in the sea even if it weren’t absolutely sweltering outside it. It’s a quasi-religious ritual for me, my daily warm salt bath, with the added advantage here that I’m less likely to be drowned by the layers of clothing that concealed my body during my three dunks in the Ganga. Swimming in a bikini is infinitely more comfortable (and safer) than fully clothed, no question. And my tan has now got to that stage where I wonder whether my skin actually goes any darker. In particular my back has gone a nice teak colour, what with all the snorkelling in my attempts to avoid stepping on anything else.

I have been drawing lots of threads, in all the time left to me in my hedonism of beach, sea and general mooching. There is a bird here whose call I recognise from Kerala. It sounds a bit like it’s whistling after the girls (which any woman who’s passed through Kerala will realise is perfectly apt). I discovered that it’s not just Keralan teenagers who like to pretend they are smitten with you. In my first week here, a Thai boy called out from the back of motorbike to me one night “I love you” (he looked about eleven to me but was probably about 15, Asian teenagers generally being slower growing than their western counterparts). “So it’s not just the Keralans who do this,” I thought to myself as I continued on in the dark to my bungalow. But no other Thai teenagers have pledged their troth to me, whereas it happened at least every two hours in parts of Kerala. I’ve not had any marriage proposals from bent Thai cops either, which is just as well, as I didn’t enjoy the one I received from the one with the mad look in his eyes in Trivandrum.

Like Kerala, there are coconut trees everywhere here. And I went from one country full of holy elephants to another shaped like an elephant’s head and trunk and whose symbol is the elephant. In fact, I’ve been doing lots more ruminating of my Indian time here in Thailand than feeling that I’m having particularly Thai time.

Events that seemed quite mundane at the time now take on the glow of a fairy tale. Here’s a selection:

Michika-Lakshmi, the lovely Japanese Brahmacharya who coached me through the Devanagari script at the Dayananda Ashram in Rishikesh. She sits on the bench near the temple, overlooking the Ganges and practises the Rudram, the Vedic hymn to Shiva that takes about 45 minutes to chant. The temple Brahmin, who had previously told her women mustn’t chant this particular hymn, stands over her. He corrects a mispronunciation, scolding “You must say it right! It is the name of god!” He sits down next to her and coaches her through, chanting with her. I can see it very clearly: the Japanese woman in her white sari and long black braid, the Brahmin in his lungi and shirt, the white of the light, the white of the temple behind, the green of the hill opposite and the turquoise of the river as goddess flowing past us, as the two sing the names of god.

Going to an early-morning class in Bangalore. The old auto driver corrects me because it’s a festival day and I forgot to hand him his fare with my right hand, giving him the money instead with my left. I am slightly bemused by this, as he is a Muslim and the festival is technically a Hindu one. I walk to the studio, which is a covered, tiled terrace at the top of a building. I step into the space and start warming up. The rising sun blinds me, reflected in the mirror along one wall. Above it are green palm trees and the sky. I’ve never had a view like this from any other studio I’ve known. The floor is hard and cold underfoot but it’s good to be outside and to see trees and wood, and Bangalore is unusually peaceful so early in the day.

At the ninth of the eleven temples we visited at Kanchipuram. Night has fallen and the nearly-full moon rises high in the sky. We are all tired after a beatingly hot Tamil day. Jayaram and Gopu, the Brahmin half of our unorthodox group, arrange for a special puja to be performed. They give a basket of offerings to each of us, Irene, the Indian Christian, and me, “the wannabe Hindu” as Jayaram joked, dressed to minimise attention in Irene’s beautiful salwar set. We creep barefoot along a narrow corridor which seems full of built obstructions. The Brahmin waits at the end at an entryway that is surrounded above and on either side by stone walls. We hand over the baskets and I’m slightly alarmed by the force with which he smashes the coconuts, breaking them on the stone floor. The details of the ritual escape me but he returns from the murthi with fruit and flowers and kumkum that have been with the idol and so are blessed. We too are blessed and given these in exchange for our offerings. He beckons us forward to see the god. It is impossible to see more than part of him and I have to crouch low to look up under the overhanging wall. A huge black Vishnu appears on the back wall. I can’t see his head; it’s too high and dark. I see the long leg, raised high like some ballet dancer holding an excruciating developé. But Vishnu looks very easeful as he prepares to bestride the universe. I am completely captivated, as we creep back out with our baskets to look at the moon outside.

I realise I have got into a bad habit with these blogs. Instead of writing little and often as I had originally intended, I store my stories up and write tortuously long occasional entries. I complain bitterly if I have to read anything too long on a computer screen, so I can only humbly beg you all pardon, hoping you’ve had the patience to read this far. I will endeavour to do better in future.

From Lucy, with love xx

The Next Prong of the Trident

So it's goodbye India tonight with very mixed feelings (sad to go, full of affection for the places I've been and the people I've spent time with, excited about Thailand and its possibilites). I suppose such a torn heart is appropriate for a place which accommodates such glaring contradictions side by side with no hint of irony. I'm thinking of the juxtaposition of personal cleanliness and public filth (rubbish is endemic here, with no apparently functional centralised system of collection - and public dustbins a rarity), and signs like this outside one of the 1500 temples of the holy city of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu:


I have spent this past week in Chennai being thoroughly spoiled by Irene, her boyfriend, Jayaram, and her parents, Agnes and Cyrilraj. Irene had warned her mum that I'd been going a bit mad in Chavakkad, my last stop in Kerala, with the lack of variety (to put it very mildly) in my diet. So Agnes has kindly ensured I've not eaten the same thing twice since my arrival, with her delicious south Indian home cooking.

It's been a bit of a shock (but a welcome one) to have everything organised for me and to be so spoiled, after months of working out buses, trains and confusing geography. It's been a delightful way to round off these six Indian months - thank you!

I was taken to Mamallapuram early in my stay, a sort of 7th (I think) century laboratory of temples:


Here I am, under Durga's foot (a good place to be in relation to the warrior goddess, I feel):


A few nights ago, Irene and her mum decided I should be arrayed in one of Irene's saris (and we're quite a good match on the blouse sizes, luckily). They wrapped me in six metres of beautiful turquoise Mysore silk and posed me appropriately. I couldn't well leave India without a camp sari shot!


Yesterday we went to Kanchipuram, a sort of Varanassi of the south, a very holy Hindu town of 1500 or so temples. One of my favourite moments was being blessed by fifteen year old Jayanthi (a girl elephant) in the Parvati temple (apparently known as the Kamatchi Ammann temple). Here's Jayaram guiding me through it:



Earlier in the day, we had been through the gorgeous old carvings of the Kailasanadher Temple (a Shiva temple). I say "been through" because this is one of the ones that practises Hindu apartheid (don't get me started) and won't let in heathen like me (or Christian Irene - her boyfriend Jayaram is a Brahmin, so he's ok). Outside, as I was looking at a particular carving of a rather fierce looking Shiva, I realised here was the meditation that started this blog off (the story is in the first entry, if you don't get what I mean). The carving was the exact image I had seen in my meditation, except the trident pointed vertically down at me instead of at this angle. Just picture me walking through the river under it!


I've never seen this image before and was slightly spooked to be presented it on my last day in India. I have no idea what this means, if anything, but I'm taking it as a good omen as I jump prongs onto the next leg of my journey. Wish me luck!

Wishing you joyful pathways,
With love from Lucy xx

Dancing the Enchantress through the Keralan Odyssey

Here is what I wrote just over a month ago (I know this as another period has just come and gone with all the weird kalari implications this involves). I don’t know if it’s the heat or if I’ve just gone into hibernation mode, but I’ve found it almost impossible to write anything lately…

This week has been a bit peculiar as I’ve not been allowed in the kalari. Considering entering the kalari is a bit like entering a womb (albeit one with a lot of straight lines in it) and that it’s choc-full of manifestations of the goddess, I find it a bit bemusing that menstruating women aren’t permitted entrance (I can’t believe there’s no blood on Bhadrakali). However, I don’t feel particularly equipped to take on that particular taboo, and seeing as I’ve met with such unstinting generosity from everyone connected to the CVN Kalari here in Trivandrum, I don’t feel much like complaining - quite apart from the fact that two of the four days I’ve had off I felt rotten and had no desire to cover myself in oil, sweat buckets and kick my legs about my head. If it hadn’t been for my Mohinyattam classes though, it would have been a very lonely week.

When I moved into his house, Rajan, who co-ordinates a programme here connected to the University of Wisconsin (his day-job is at an earth-sciences research institute, so my scientist friends can rest assured that the physics connection continues unabated), suggested that, as I’m a dancer, I might like to learn some classical Indian dance while I’m here. The words “classical” and “dance” anywhere near each other in a sentence have struck horror into my heart ever since years of ritual humiliation in ballet classes through my adolescence (a twelve-year old Betty Boo just doesn’t work in a leotard and pointe shoes). Nonetheless, I decided it would be silly to pass up the opportunity and so one morning after Kalari, Rajan popped me on the back of his scooter and took me down the road to Shoba’s house.

Shoba is my Mohinyattam teacher. She is a very pretty lady who makes me look rather tall (I’m five foot two and a bit, about 1.57m, for anyone who hasn’t stood next to me recently). This is where my classes happen, four or five mornings a week after Kalari (and after the breakfast in the house-come-café Rajan drops me off at).

Once we had made the arrangements, Rajan explained to me that he would bring the beetle leaf and nut for me to give to Shoba the next morning, that I should add a coin and touch Shoba’s feet to ask for her blessing as my teacher. I was very touched that he went to the trouble of organising all this for me, and also felt rather bad that I’d never touched his feet when he’d taken me as a student, as no one had told me this was part of the procedure.

To those not specialist in classical Indian dance forms, Mohinyattam uses very similar movement vocabulary to the more widely-known (Tamil) Bharatanatyam. Mohinyattam is from Kerala, is less percussive and exact in its lines than Bharatanatyam. Anyone familiar with my idiosyncratic relationship with rhythm (don’t ever make me play a drum) will realise it’s just as well I’m not attempting Bharatanatyam. The sense I get is that Mohinyattam is more concerned with the pathways to the form whereas Bharatanatyam is concerned with the perfection of the form and its lines.

People refer to it as soft and graceful and fluid. Essentially, the subtext is that Mohinyattam should be VERY sexy.

If I remember correctly, this is how the story goes:

The gods needed to churn up the ocean of milk to get the nectar of immortality from it, but the only way they could do this was to enlist the help of the demons. The demons (reasonably enough, as I think the churning went on for some millennia) would only help if they got to share the nectar of immortality (amrita, I think it’s called). Once the amrita had emerged from the ocean of milk, the gods decided they didn’t want to share it after all (or maybe they’d decided this all along) and so Vishnu took on the female form of Mohini, the enchantress.

Mohini was so fantastically alluring that the demons forgot all about the nectar they’d been churning the ocean for over millennia, and the gods got it all. A side story is that Shiva was also rather taken with Mohini, and the result of this union was another god, who I think might be the hunter god in the kalari (but I could be wrong here – any clarifications welcome). So basically Mohinyattam is the dance of the enchantress.

Now I feel many things when I dance, but enchanting isn’t generally one of them. I have a great kick-back reaction to any suggestion that I have to be pretty or alluring or feminine. So I thought I would find Mohinyattam a bit of a trial. Actually, the first class I did feel a bit stiff and all through the first week, I was under no illusion that Mohini was in any remote danger of competition from me. But after a few days, I was finding it really rather fun. Now I seem to have improved a bit and Shoba even gives me the occasional compliment.

Of course, there are plenty of things that aren’t so good. “You don’t do eye exercises?” Shoba asked in some shock, as I attempted to explain that they’re not a usual part of the training of western contemporary dancers. So my eye-control is poor. And I’m not convinced that my arms and upper body are quite there, but the whole thing is feeling a lot more fluid than when I started.

So there’s a revelation for me: it’s actually possible for me to enjoy a classical dance form! And whilst I won’t be distracting any demons away from nectars of immortality any time soon, they may condescend to look my way and laugh a bit while they glug their amrita down.

And, as I said, this week, with no Kalari, it’s been my only activity – and has probably benefitted from the fact I’ve not been doing it with Kalari-exhausted legs. It’s also been my main social interaction. Shoba and her husband Manuj also teach Ravi Shankara’s Art of Living and classes are peppered with snippets of conversation. The other day I was trying to explain what an olive tree looks like to Manuj, as he was bemoaning the lack of prana in imported foods.

Shoba is organising a performance on Saturday of Keralan performing art-forms for some government types, and I’ve been invited along. She had suggested dressing me in one of her saris if I got myself a blouse made up. Quite apart from my fears of tripping over six metres of cloth in public (or worse, it all falling down), I’ve decided that Shoba has quite enough to organise for this show without dressing a clueless European, so fun as it would be, I think I’ll stick to trousers and tunic.

And here’s backstage at Shoba’s medley of traditional Keralan performance:

I loved Trivandrum and the kalari and Rajan’s care and attention (no more “slowly” by the end of it, just “up!” as my thigh banged gently against my belly on the good leg-kick days). I loved his big airy house that I rented and the quiet walk to it from the bus stop, past the fresh juice shop, through the coconut trees. I loved being able to jump on the bus to Kovalam beach and swim in the Arabian Sea (which occasionally reminded me with a particularly rough wave that she was to be respected). I made some friends at the kalari whom I spent time with, namely a couple of Bharatanatyam dancers from Edinburgh and a French photographer/video artist. Despite this, I had swathes of time to myself, which I sometimes found too much but also valued phone contact with friends in Bangalore.

Having congratulated myself on avoiding the Kumbh Mela when I passed through Haridwar in the north (on my way to Calcutta from Rishikesh) – a gathering of literally millions of sadhus on the banks of the river Ganga (as someone pointed out to me recently, only foreigners call it the “Ganges”. Why do we? No one in India does) – I found myself in Trivandrum in the biggest gathering of women in the world (according to the Guinness Book of Records). Three million women lined the streets of Trivandrum on February 28th to cook in the midday sun for Attakal Pongala. And here are some stoves, lined up in preparation:

It was actually a very low-key affair, cooking pots lining the streets everywhere you looked. Rajan invited me to his house for the day, where many of his family had gathered from far and wide in Kerala. It was lovely to be part of it with them all, to be fed some very lovely food off a banana leaf and then to meander through the streets (the three million women pack up their cooking and head home at 3:30 sharp, after the priests have been round to bless their culinary efforts) through the older part of East Fort to Shoba’s house to chat with her and her family and be eaten by mosquitoes as dusk fell. Then, as I finally managed the walk back home, some neighbours I had not yet met invited me into their home for yet more paesum, the sweet rice dish that had been cooked as part of the offering. So food all round, and all of it blessed.

When I’d visited the local devi temple the week previously, where they were enacting a smaller scale version of what was to be Attakal Pongala the following week, I’d been adopted by its chairman (I’m not quite sure how) and would stop by his house occasionally to chat with the Prem family. His wife made me a very memorable fish curry lunch one day. Here I am, eating it:

And they also took me to the Attakal temple in the week of the build-up to the festival. Once we’d been through the crush to the goddess, it was a bit like a funfair: lights and balloons everywhere, lots of food stands and big Bollypop (or should that be Mollypop, as it’s Malayalam?) stage. I didn’t think “Jai Ho” had religious connotations, but maybe there’s more than I realised to the theme tune of Slumdog Millionaire. Here are some members of the Prem family, my extremely hospitable escorts of the night:

One thing that’s happened since I’ve been in Kerala is that I’ve got much better at eating with my fingers. I can even do the tearing of most breads one-handed now (touching food with your left hand is a big no-no here), which completely eluded me before. In general, I could cope with finger eating for bready foods but wasn’t too keen on it when rice was involved. I knew a corner had been turned when I was sitting in a Trivandrum “hotel” (which is not a hotel at all but a restaurant in India) finishing my porotta and tomato fry. Well, the porotta (bready round thing, very nice) was all gone and without thinking I finished eating the tomato-onion-chilly fry with my fingers, despite the fact a spoon was just in front of me (my fingers were already covered in food, so there didn’t seem much point in picking up the spoon). Usually I don’t have the choice. There just isn’t any cutlery and asking for it when most people barely speak any English and don’t understand mine, and I don’t speak any Malayalam, just feels more trouble than it’s worth. I occasionally wonder, as people stare at me while I eat (I’m now in a much smaller Keralan town and a solo woman is a complete novelty), whether they have any notion how completely alien it is to me to be eating with my fingers. But I suspect they put down any clumsiness to the fact I’ve not been taught proper table manners. After all, what can you expect of an unmarried woman travelling on her own?

Yes, I’m getting very tired of that question. “Are you married?” usually preceded or followed by “How old are you?” And then when I tell them I’m not married, an astonished “Why?!” It seems that a woman my age has no function other than as a wife (and mother, by implication).

Ummmm… because no one ever wanted to? Because I never wanted to? Because marriage in Kerala seems to be endless work (I’d call it drudgery, but maybe they enjoy it) for the women? Time and again I see beautiful sylph-like creatures on buses or the street who look about fifteen. I then discover they’re teaching electronics, which should make them at least twenty-two. But since leaving Bangalore, I haven’t seen many of the vibrant late twenty or thirty somethings. Here in Kerala, the transition from young girl to tired matron is swift. Perhaps they like it, but I don’t see that marriage is very kind to women here. Possibly most jarring to me was when I asked the young (female) championship-winning kalari star of this town if she planned to continue her kalari once she finished university. “That will be for to my husband to decide,” she said, no hint of regret or rebellion. Well, my life may be tricky and unpredictable and occasionally very lonely (and definitely unmarried!) but oh, thank you God that I have choice in it, that my mess-ups as well as my modest successes are my own, that I am responsible for my own destiny! Kerala is beautiful and lovely but I am grateful, grateful, grateful not to be one of her traditional women!

I left Trivandrum in early March, hoping to return soon. A short train journey took me to Varkala, hippy beach resort, where I spent two very pleasant days courtesy of a friend’s birthday. Varkala made me think that I was ready for Thailand and that I could quite happily while the time away there (something I had been slightly worried over after all the activity and focus of India). Here’s a self-portrait on the beach:

I then continued north to Fort Cochin, where I spent a lot of time avoiding the cruise-ship parties and tourist-touts. It’s very graceful and southern European in feel (I kept expecting to see pot-bellied men playing Pétanque, fag-end hanging out of their mouths, in the leafy squares), and surprisingly clean for India, but very expensive when you’re used to the rest of country. I was glad to see it but equally glad not to spend more than a day there. And from there I headed on to a small place near the temple town of Guruvayur. I arrived on the final day of yet another huge festival, in time to see the elephants parading around the temple. I don’t think I’ve ever been so near a creature so huge.

Here I have been experiencing a village kalari, where they train in a different style outside among the coconut trees. It’s been very interesting to see something of this different style and nice to be outside (though I’m constantly kicking sand into my face) but challenging too to be in a place so small that everyone stares at me like the woman with three heads (though I am becoming used even to that). There is a beautiful beach here, but no chance of swimming. I went for a walk on the beach fully-clothed one day, ankles covered, shoulders covered, no hint of décolleté, and even then every fisherman there wanted his picture taken with me (no, it’s not particularly flattering, more of a freak-show).

I’ve been very quiet here: training, endlessly washing sandy, sweaty, oily clothes, sleeping, somehow incubating this time before my next transition, taking stock of these last six months in India and the many unexpected gifts they have brought me. It’s been very hot. We had some rain the other night and the temperature in my room dropped from 38 to 33. I actually got chilly in the night and woke to turn the fan down and cover myself. I’ve had a lesson in the relativity of all things: the joy of rain (not something particularly joyful in London) and the greatest pleasure of my days being my cold showers (I've not particularly missed hot water in Kerala).

Monday I leave Kerala and take the train to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) to stay with my friend Irene, perhaps to do some teaching, definitely to sort out my Thai visa and then, on the night of the 30th, to say my farewell to India and leave for Thailand. I’m looking forward to more variety in my diet, to not having to cover up quite so ruthlessly, to the ease I remember of Thailand after the energy demanded of me by India. But I will be sorry to leave India.

Somehow I feel I have put down a few roots here, which for someone as rootless as me is a strange thing and I don’t know what it means. I feel that I have been woven into the fabric of this land – a rather strange thread that everyone turns and stares at, but an accepted thread nonetheless. I hope I will be back in not too long…

From Lucy, with love xx