I'm not in Kansas anymore...

Our last day in Madurai began with a fabulous breakfast of fresh dosas and boori served up on a banana leaf with the ubiquitous samber (a kind of orange vegetable curry sauce which they serve with seemingly everything in southern India) and the obligatory sugarey chai in a local eatery. We hopped in a rickshaw for the 4km to the bus station and boarded a local bus to take us high up inside the western ghats to the hill station of Kodaikanal. The journey would have been pleasant had not the bus driver sounded his ear-splitting horn every single time any traffic appeared - be it pedestrian, motorcycle, car or cow. This seems to be the style of driving in India, which is OK when you have a rather inoffensive beeper, but not when it is the deep bass of a very loud horn through the open air of a windowless bus. Our ears did not grow accustomed to the constant cacophony and it was a very uncomfortable ride out for the first couple of hours whilst we continuously passed tr...

A few hours after boarding the train at India's most southerly point, we landed in the dusty heat of Madurai, one of Tamil Nadu's 'temple towns', home to the famous Sri Meenakshi temple. Once we had schlepped around for a while with our backpacks on, we settled ourselves into a Hitchcockian Psycho -esque hotel (kitsch furniture, formica finishing) near to the entrance of the temple's West Tower. The immediately noticeable thing about Madurai was the omnipresent sound of car horns (and I thought that living in Hackney was bad.) Despite the traffic being as crazy as it seems to be in most cities, we took an instant like to it, found it easy to navigate and the people as characteristically nice and friendly as they had been elsewhere in Tamil Nadu. Sri Meenakshi Temple We spent the afternoon getting our bearings, wandering around and catching up on admin. There is something about the Indian way of life which means that what you might allocate half an hour to i...

Breakfast in the station dining hall After 15 days of asceticism and austerity in the Sivananda ashram, I finally escaped 'yogatraz', light of heart and even more so of body. The sun rays shone through the palms as I descended the mountain back to civilisation to take the local bus 1.5hrs down the mountains where I would be reunited with my friend and sometime Indian travel companion, Liz. A girl I had met in the ashram had tipped me off about Swami Isha Layam, a 'self realised human' who was living somewhere outside of Trivandrum. Apparently she had randomly met a gay couple from New York in a Keralan coffee shop who were on a 'guru tour' of India and had insisted that she go and meet him. She said that the guru was full of useful insight, so I had vowed to find him as part of my ongoing spiritual quest and ask his advice on some issues that had been preoccupying me. Once we had eaten a hot breakfast of channa masala in the train station dini...

There were so many amazing moments in the ashram and it is hard to explain them all. My  complete photo sets are on Google + but I thought that I would include some further images for you here, just to give a slice of my ashram life.... Joseph's yogic contortion ability at the ashram 'talent show' Ganesha puja Diagram drawn by priest to invoke energies Prasad on a banana leaf Rajesh the astrologer who read my chart Demonstrating 'jala neti' - ritual nasal cleansin g Another nasal & throat cleanse with rubber length (!) I'm am old hand at jala neti J ack fruits in the ashram courtyard -  these are chopped for food The panchakarma ladies Shree, who gave me my daily panchakarma oil massages Drinking the foul panchakarma purgation concoction The Sivananda Institute of Health where I underwent Ayurvedic treatment Me in the Head Stand, king of all the yoga asanas Leaving Lakshmi womens dorm.....