On Thursday our journey brought us to a hotel on the beach in Chennai. The drive from the airport was an adventure, as the cab driver had to ask a variety of people on the street how to find the hotel (something we’ve gotten used to here). Some of the alley ways he drove thru seemed too small for the car…. But we squeezed thru.
The hotel was the nicest place we’ve been at since we left the States. The morning breakfast buffet was a wonderful treat.
Friday morning I tried booking a hotel/guest house on the beach in Auroville or Pondecherry (this town has several spellings, but since the gods here have thousands of names, it’s to be expected). The three hotels I found seemed to all be booked (although I couldn’t reach one of them) so I booked a farm house that looked like it had promise.
We hired a car and driver to bring us to this farm house (a 3-hr drive) and stopped at a wonderful artist community along the way.….
It was tough to find the farm house (again, what a surprise) and we had the driver wait … just in case. The grounds were beautiful. The room was fine… the quails and chickens roaming the grounds were colorful…. even the lizard crawling the bathroom wall was a treat… but this place seemed in the boon-docks, away from the towns we came here to see. The third of the guest houses on the Ocean left an email that they had a room available, so we paid the cancellation fee for the farm house and took off for the Ocean side guest house.
Thatched roofs on brick buildings along the ocean…. We didn’t even ask the price, we just said, “we’ll take it!”
Auroville is known for a number of things…. It was created to bring together people from all nations, all religions, all differences… and live in peace. Parts of it are like a resort… you can’t use credit cards or money from outside Auroville here…. You need to get an Auroville money card for everything. You can’t get into the center of everything without going to the visitor center first, seeing the “indoctrination film first”… then returning the next day. In the center, it’s for meditation – no cameras, no talking, no coughing or sneezing. These folks are serious – I won’t be playing my ocarina or taking out balloons here (a good thing because I only have a handful of balloons left after Mysore).
With the price of this guest house three meals and laundry (5 pieces per day) are included. The meals have been good so far… and another point – at the dining table the other guests were a mixture of French, Swiss, Dutch, and I don’t know what else. However, they all seem ages 50-75…. Annie and I are no longer the generation of the parents of the others at the table. That makes a subtle difference (not saying good or bad).
This guest house offers all sorts of healing sessions. We don’t have much time here and we want to see Auroville and Punducherry… but if Annie wants to take one of these workshops, I’ll be happy just vegetating watching the waves or strolling around the area.
….