hi from Tanjore
We went to Pondicherry last Saturday via temples at Kanchi and a fine hill-top fort at Gingee and spent a couple of days enjoying French food and sort of croissants and coffee, staying at a new-agey hotel (no shoes beyond the front door) . Pondi is a major new age centre, dominated by the cult of Sri Aurobindo and his disciple "The Mother" (French/Egyptian). They own the hotel we were at plus half the other businesses in Pondi, and they are developing a new international city just outside Pondi at Auroville. In fact, the city at present is no more than a few scattered ashrams between the many Tamil villages in the area plus a weird sphere at the centre, which looks like something out of Thunderbirds (for the more mature amongst you) or some 60s sci-fi movie (see above). The inhabitants of the ashrams are also mainly leftovers from the 60s - hippies who presumably found their souls and settled down here.
From Pondi we've been doing some more temple visiting - the Tamil temples are very different from those in Orissa, huge and generally brightly painted, though the older ones are very impressive. We got here (Tanjore) mainly by back roads where along with the usual challenges - cows, dogs, potholes etc the car had to negotiate the local system of threshing - leave a (rice) haystack in the middle of the road and the cars and buses driving over it will separate the rice from the stalks.
We're off to relax in the Cardamom Hills for a few days now, probably out of cyber-contact.
We went to Pondicherry last Saturday via temples at Kanchi and a fine hill-top fort at Gingee and spent a couple of days enjoying French food and sort of croissants and coffee, staying at a new-agey hotel (no shoes beyond the front door) . Pondi is a major new age centre, dominated by the cult of Sri Aurobindo and his disciple "The Mother" (French/Egyptian). They own the hotel we were at plus half the other businesses in Pondi, and they are developing a new international city just outside Pondi at Auroville. In fact, the city at present is no more than a few scattered ashrams between the many Tamil villages in the area plus a weird sphere at the centre, which looks like something out of Thunderbirds (for the more mature amongst you) or some 60s sci-fi movie (see above). The inhabitants of the ashrams are also mainly leftovers from the 60s - hippies who presumably found their souls and settled down here.
From Pondi we've been doing some more temple visiting - the Tamil temples are very different from those in Orissa, huge and generally brightly painted, though the older ones are very impressive. We got here (Tanjore) mainly by back roads where along with the usual challenges - cows, dogs, potholes etc the car had to negotiate the local system of threshing - leave a (rice) haystack in the middle of the road and the cars and buses driving over it will separate the rice from the stalks.
We're off to relax in the Cardamom Hills for a few days now, probably out of cyber-contact.
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