Getting There....

Now each ride in India is always an adventure but this drive took things to a new level. We left in our Ambassador taxi in the middle of a torrential downpour. (very odd for rain this time of year here) I think I’ve already described driving here in India. The highways usually have room across for about two buses, one car, two auto rickshaws and various walkers/bikers. There is a constant race to pass here so when the cab pulls out, you just pray that that there’s not a bus or truck coming right at you. I swear that I get more of an ab workout sucking in my breath while driving than in all of my yoga sessions!! Our driver was especially wild on this drive because he wasn’t feeling well. About every five minutes, he hung his entire head out the window to do a major hoarck. (sp?) Everytime he did this, I had to lean over to Mich C’s side to avoid it coming back in the window… You think that would have prepared me for what came next, (and Danielle, I wish you were there to see this!), but as we were passing through a small town, an oncoming truck sent a tsunami through the driver’s window and it hit Michelle and I directly in the face!

After we got over the panic of the driver not being able to see and that we might crash, we burst into laughter. Mich C was ready to drink a bottle of hand sanitizer to clean out her mouth. Considering that we drink nothing but bottled water here in India, a mouthful of road sludge was not what the doctor ordered. We had visions of Charlotte in “Sex in the City” and we still had an hour to drive.
Arriving at Amma’s is quite the experience. You’re going through small towns and then all of sudden you see high rise buildings. It turns out that when Amma was trying to expand the Ashram, the government wouldn’t give her more land, so she built up.

The taxi dropped us off at the side of the river. We had two choices, up and over a large, large (did I say large) step bridge,

or by boat. I think the boat driver almost pulled a muscle getting my luggage out of the boat so I think it was worth the 10 rupees not to have to carry our bags over the bridge. On our tour of the Ashram, we learned that Amma built the bridge after the tsunami to help evacuate the town and ashram in case of another one. At the time of the tsunami in 2006, there were 15,000 people at the ashram and Amma coordinated the evacuation of everyone by small boat across the river. Not one person was injured.
Settling into our rooms here took a little massaging…Our first roommate, (three in a room) was a Slovakian older lady. The room was on the top floor, all the windows were shut, fan off and she was burning all kinds of incense and bug coils. Both Mich C and I were choking as we went to get our bags… Luckily a double room had become available so we happily said a sad goodbye to our roommate. On the way out, she scarily said in her strong Eastern bloc accent, “you will get bit…by mo-ski-toes!” Finding our new room was a bit of a challenge… one would think that D0804 would be on the 8th floor…but no. The building starts on floor zero so the 800’s are of course on the 7th floor. The winding hallways make us feel like we’re in a funhouse. We often bump into each other as we hit dead ends and have to go back. Sometimes I wonder how I travel all around the world…when I can’t even find my room?

The Ashram itself has the backwaters on one side of it.


And the Arabian Sea on the other.

There's big temple in the centre of the Ashram. Most of the building look about 100 years old but they were mostly built in the 1990's.