… Though I Know I’m Starting Again

Today I made yogurt.
It was amazing.

It Feels Like This Is The End

Ahhh.

Gray, chilly Toronto. How nice it is to be home!

I have said goodbye to masala dosas and shakshouka, and have slipped back into the world of blueberry pancakes and rain. I arrived in Toronto two days earlier than expected (due to some whirlwind airport adventures), and have been trying to ride through my jet lag while at the same time adjusting to being back in a place that now seems so strange. Though it’s been three-and-a-half months, part of me feels like it’s been only a few days, and that same part of me also still has the ‘travel itch’. It keeps nudging me to not sit still… “Just work for a few weeks to make some money,” it says, “and then pack up your bag again and of you go.” I’m mulling this advice over.

And now for the promised story:

About four and a half weeks ago, I was sitting on a beach in the south of India and had a experience that pushed my patience over the edge. The experience was not as significant as the voice that popped into my head immediately afterward and stated loudly and clearly: “I think you may have had enough of India and are ready to move on. You’ve done all the growing you can do here for the time being, and you should probably go to Israel.” Now, I don’t know if any of you have had a similar experience with the voice of sense, but she and I have had to build a loving and trusting relationship with one another over the course of my travels… so when she came around and said “go to Israel,” I said: “hey, that sounds like a pretty great idea. I think I’ll do that.”

When I booked my ticket a few days later, I was confronted with an email that I had received a few weeks earlier. The email informed me that recent changes had been made to the conditions of Indian multiple-entry tourist-visas, and starting in January all tourists who decide to exit the country must then wait at least two months before re-entering. But, of course, there were also a list of detailed exceptions – namely, if you could produce evidence of existing airline tickets leaving from India that necessitated that you re-enter before the two month period, you would be exempt. So of course, I went ahead and bought my ticket to Israel, planning to fly round-trip from India and return 3 weeks later to catch the tail end of my return flight from Mumbai to Toronto. Seemed logical to me – why spend an extra thousand dollars to get a new ticket from Israel?

Well, after all was said and done, I arrived at Ben Gurion airport at 3:30am on Shabbat morning to catch my return flight to India. I walked up to the desk, presented my passport, and I found myself being denied entry to the flight. The woman who was supposed to be printing my boarding pass had a little note pop up on her screen stating that I hadn’t done my mandatory 2 months outside India before trying to return. I explained that I already had tickets purchased to return to Toronto, and I explained what I had read about the exemptions to the 2-month rule. The woman sent me upstairs to the Turkish airlines office to print the document detailing the exemptions, and after discussing the print-out with several other airport personnel for another hour or so, it became clear that I wouldn’t be making my flight.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t panicking. But maybe I should have been… after deciding that the best thing to do would be to try and re-book my Mumbai-Toronto flight as a Tel-Aviv Toronto flight, I realized that I had lost my wallet. In it were my VISA card, my debit card, and my driver’s license.

Then there was a lot of running around, a lot of phone calls to Toronto, and a lot of sitting and waiting. As fate would have it, it turns out that it is completely and utterly impossible to buy an airline ticket at an airport without a credit card or the necessary cash on your person. As I had neither with me, I had to have my father (to whom I am indebted) call into the National Continental Airlines office in Boston and have them transfer the information to the airport where I was. It was quite a production… the woman who had been helping me for the last few hours (and who was shocked at my calm attitude through the whole thing), brought me to her supervisor’s office and let me use the only phone in the airport that had long-distance calling on it. I was able to get the ticket booked, and even had the luck to find some traveler’s checks that I was able to cash to get me back to Tel-Aviv for the day. It just goes to show… you should really always be kind to the airline staff. And always, ALWAYS travel with traveler’s checks.

In the end, I arrived back in Toronto last Sunday afternoon. I have since continued my travels with a good friend as we took a week-long road trip through Boston, New York and Washington DC. And now, I am home again. And Toronto is still gray and chilly.

As I find myself re-counting my adventures to friends and family, I’m getting more and more time to process what exactly happened to me in my travels. Unfortunately, I’m watching as many of the feelings of self-understanding and much of the resolve to change my life fade into shadows of themselves, though I’m trying to hold on. It’s hard to keep up the clarity when there is so much pressure to fall back into old habits and vices. It’s so easy to do here because life is so much less of a struggle… or rather I should say that a sense of adventure is harder to stir up when the cows on the streets are nowhere to be found. But I’m finding that all it takes is a moment of focus to bring back all those resolves and intentions that I’m so thrilled and awed to have discovered on my travels. I just have to remember to focus…

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So this, I believe, marks the end of this blog. I could keep writing, but I doubt that brushing my teeth in the morning and walking to the grocery store in North York will make much of a story. So it is here that I will choose to bring things to a close.

If my being home means that we are now on the same continent, and possibly even in the same country or city, please be in touch. It would be great to see you! And for all you lovely souls that are scattered around the world, we’ll speak soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Thank you all (whoever you all are), for following along all these months. It’s been fun – both the journey itself as well as the beautiful opportunity to write for an audience that isn’t my grade 12 English teacher. Thank you for your comments, and for your kind words, and for keeping me writing! The writing has really been such a pleasure.

May enchanting adventures find you wherever you are .

With love,
Hava

A Backwards Experience

Israel has a certain mysterious quality to it that I’m discovering much later in the game than expected. I’ve heard from most Jews that the first time they arrive in Israel they are profoundly moved in some way. Some people find themselves weeping at the realization that they are actually as close as they are to the ancient Temple, others find themselves swept away by the life that pulses though Tel-Aviv on a Friday night. The land, with its history of heroic perseverance and spirituality, and the culture that is so rich with Jewish heritage that its practically overflowing at the seams with hummus and Israeli folk music – this place has the power to rip people out of their normal reality and into a head space of complete and stupid ecstasy. People leave for a 10 day high-speed trip around the country and, when they arrive back home to Toronto or Montreal or New York, they spend the next year-and-a-half going off like maniac about how Israel is the best thing that ever happened to them and they’re making plans to make Aliyah. Really… I’ve seen it happen.

For those of us who have not accompanied these people on their journeys, we’re kind of at a loss of what to say. “Yes,” we tell them, “I can see that you’ve found the one thing in your life that makes you tick. Yes, I understand (to the best of my ability) that you’ve had a profoundly life-changing experience that has made you re-consider your choices and your lifestyle and your religion. And yes, I hear that you want to marry an Israeli man…” We understand the brevity of the experience for our friend, but we have no idea what to say. What exactly is this experience they’ve had, and why are they not just moving to Israel?

So I’ve been to Israel four times in my life, and I never had this experience. Not really. The first time I came here, I was forced by my family to miss my best friend’s bat mitzvah (how could they have done that to me!?!) and found myself resenting almost every minute of our travels. The second time I visited I was part of a delegation of counselors from the Jewish camp system in Quebec, and the trip was a real bummer. We spent most of our time doing only mildly-educational activities on hills and in parks overlooking majestic historical sites… instead of experiencing the sites themselves. The third time I came to take part in an international leadership convention and my experience was a little better, but a long summer at camp left me feeling exhausted and not really all that there. And the last time I was here was a year and a half ago, and I found myself regarding the entire country with an air of cynicism and frustration – why did it seam like Israel was divided into a hundred exclusive sects and that I didn’t fit into any of them?

So, while most people experience the brilliance of Israel in their first 10 days, and then it takes them years of subsequent visits or years spent living here to recognize all the issues and imperfections of the place, for me it seems to have been exactly the opposite. I spent my first 4 visits experiencing only the issues and the frustrations, and it was only on my 5th visit (which began 2 weeks ago) that I really discovered Israel’s brilliance. And what a brilliant place. It’s a totally different plane of existence.

So how to describe this plane…
My experience this time around has been as follows: people live simpler, realer lives here. People live with a spiritual consciousness in their every-day comings and goings. They structure their world around meaningful things… family, picking fruit, learning and celebrating… and work is something you do to support those meaningful things in your life, not something you do for the sake of itself. And for me, surprisingly, this is a profound change of perspective. Where I come from, work is something meaningful in the most serious of ways. Work is something you build up to with many years of studying and perhaps several university degrees. It’s something you’re always looking forward to, even when you’ve gotten there… the possibilities of raises and upward movement and increases in responsibility are what drive you to keep working. And sacrifices are perfectly acceptable, even in the realms of all those things that are really the point – family, picking fruit, learning and celebrating. Here, the point is to live a spiritually whole and meaningful life, and work is a means to an end. This is HUGE. Or at least, it has been for me. To think… being connected to God is the point of things… who would have thought?

Now I should point out that this description is definitely not indicative of the entire Israeli population. But it’s a real and present reality for many. And it’s been the theme of my experience here. Being in the presence of so many connected people glowing with joy at simply being alive – it’s been at the very least incredibly moving and more often than not inspiring and contagious.

So I have had my “mysterious and moving Israel experience”, albeit later in the game than most. Though at this point the inital euphoria has worn off a bit, there’s still something special sitting with me, and I’m looking forward to taking that home with me and seeing what happens with it. Who knows… maybe I’ll be back in Israel sooner rather than later, or maybe I’ll just find myself living differently at home. I know one thing for sure – I will learn how to make yogurt. In my mind, this is the first key to simple and beautiful living .

As it stands now, I’ll be arriving back to Toronto in the next few days (just in time to catch the last of the snow). While I was supposed to back-track through Istanbul anbd Mumbai to catch the tail end of my return flight to Toronto, there were some glitches in the airport that meant I couldn’t get back into India (to put it simply), and instead I’ll be catching a direct flight home from Tel-Aviv. It was a hectic few hours at Ben Gurion, but all is well. The full story is yet to come. I’m hoping to post some follow-up thoughts to set the record straight for the last few days of my trip once I get home to Toronto.

And then, onto the next leg of the journey – namely, the rest of my life.

To all of you who have been following my rants, thank you.
I’m hoping to see you all soon!

B’ahava,
Hava

Going With The Flow

I am
really
going with the flow.

My feet have been leading me, always two skips and a jump ahead of my head. And I’ve just been following. Because somehow, up to this point, things have been working out in unbelievable ways. I’ve somehow landed myself in Israel, and as I stepped off the plane in the airport after over 15 hours of travel, I thought to myself quite honestly: “what on earth am I doing here? How did I manage to get here, for one thing, and now that I’m here what on earth am I supposed to do?”

Dazed and a little confused, I’ve been following myself around – from Ra’anana to Tsipori and onto Tsfat. From home to home, friend to new and beautiful friend, from synagogue to synagogue, and from one welcoming Shabbat table to the next. I received an invitation to spend this past Shabbat and Purim with a friend from McGill who is currently living in Tsfat. And so I got on a bus and went up to meet her, and the weekend was unbelievable and surreal in the most unbelievable of ways. Purim in Tsfat… it deserves more explanation than I can possibly give here. Needless to say, it made an impact. Today, on Shushan Purim, I made my way down to Yerushalayim. And here I am. Tomorrow morning I’ll start taking some classes at Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo in Jerusalem, and see where things go.

To give you all an idea of where my head is at right now (which, given my state of mind seems like the only rational and appropriate thing to write on my blog for the time being), I’ll say this… in the past week the following things have come to pass:

I flew to Israel. I realized hours before departing India that my cousin, who I rarely get to see, would be landing in Israel a day after me to start her exchange program here. I connected with her, and got an invitation to go and visit her and her host family. I found myself in the most beautiful home and garden that I could imagine, in the company of the most beautiful family, and i had the opportunity to pick fresh lemons from the tree and collect freshs eggs from the chickens in the yard. I connected with a friend in Tsfat who determined my plans for Shabbat and Purim (both of which I was worried about coordinating), and in addition recommended an awesome place to learn for a little while I’m in Israel – something non-committal, spirited and open-minded. I emailed this Yeshiva and received an email two hours later welcoming me and inviting me to take a look at their schedule. They looked forward to receiving me, they said. I travelled to Tsfat and found myself in the company of strangers who I felt like I had known for years, and coincidentally connected with a family that friends had been telling me to meet for ages. I met a girl who has connections to midwives in Israel, and she was coincidentally going to be at the same Purim party in Jerusalem that we were planning on heading to after Tsfat. I got on a bus to Jerusalem, and found myself at a Purim seudah at the home of the only female in the orthodox world ever to have been given halachic authority to teach Kabbalah, and I learned that she teaches classes twice a week… and I found myself being invited to come. And when I stopped off at another purim party I ran right into my cousin Nedarah who I not only was hoping to see in Israel, but who I phoned up earlier that day to get in touch with. And there she was, at the party… and she was introducing me to the Rabbi and Rebetzin of the Yeshiva I was about to start at, beacuse of course she’s good friends with them both. And now I sit on the floor in the dorm room of a friend at the Hebrew University trying to comprehend it all.

You can imagine… it’s a bit of a trip that I’m on. And I’m so, so loving it!
Funnily enough, despite the fact that there are far too many words needed to describe my present reality than will fit on this page, I do happen to have pictures. And I’ll post them tomorrow Maybe it will give you a taste.

So I am here, and here I am. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. And I will try and write more, once I’ve had a little time to process.

We should all be blessed with those things that we need most at the moment, and we should be blessed with the ability to recognize them, in all their incredible and insane beauty, as they come our way.

So much love,
Hava

And also…

There are new pictures up.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Varkala, Operation Aussie-Go-Home, and a change of plans

As I write this post, Joel and Anita have likely already landed somwhere in the general vicinity of the east coast of Australia. Characteristic of Indian pre-paid cell phone plans, our last phone conversation before they left was abruptly cut off mid-sentence as one or both (you can never be quite sure) of our phone minutes ran out. With no warning. I can only assume that they successfully made it through their overnight train voyage to Chennai and their afternoon-long stay in the city, and that they boarded their plane and arrived home safely without a hitch. Given my affinity for dark humour (largely involving me cracking compassionless and fatalistic jokes about others’ probability of death at any given moment), and Anita’s distaste for just that kind of humour, I am torn… but mostly I am eagerly awaiting my first ever phone call from Australia!

[ed. note: would Joel and Anita kindly announce their safe arrival home. The only thing to do here to cope with my anticipation is drink sweet lassi upon sweet lassi...]

We spent our last week together in Varkala. After our many bouts with sickness and head colds in Varnasi and the cold weather we had to stick out in the North, I think we were all craving some good, hot sun. Bangalore was a beautiful introduction, with its warm air and beautiful breeze, but we wanted ocean. We decided to head south to the coast. As you have no doubt come to learn, in India things happen fast. At least decisions happen fast – actually getting things done is another story… But in this case, the whole thing was shockingly fast and easy. Our semi-sleeper, air-conditioned Volvo bus left Bangalore at around 6:30pm, and by 7am the next morning we were hopping off one bus and onto another, catching a rickshaw, signing our names in a guest house log, and before we knew it we were lying on the beach on fresh new beach towels in the morning sun. I have to say, in my memory the experience feels like a dream. It was so seamless and fast, it’s as if I blinked my eyes in one place and opened them to find myself in another. The air was deliciously humid, and much like our arrival in Rishikesh after a long haul in dirty Varanasi, this was a thoroughly cleansing experience. And thus began a week of fighting with myself to relax.

While Joel and Anita live their day-to-day lives with an ocean next door, I grew up in a city – with no ocean. In cities, we spend a lot of time on ‘projects’ of various kinds… school projects, art projects, gardening projects, mowing the lawn, making elaborate meals with friends, plucking our eyebrows, going for a haircut. My life in the city has always seemed laden with “things to do next”, or “plans for the weekend”. And when I’m in the city, I revel in it all. It’s not that I’m a workaholic… anyone who knows me would probably agree that I tend to procrastinate more than most. It’s more that I love having a goal, or at least a theme around which to organize my daily life. Sometimes, to be fair, the theme of the day is “sit in bed and watch movies”, but days like those are numbered and occasional – they break up the projects and the goals (often the stresses) of the rest of the week, month or year.

And so I have always had trouble with the idea of the “vacation”. In a book I’m reading at the moment (Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert) the author points out that in America our vacations must be sold to us. We grow up with a cultural guilt complex that makes us constantly question our entitlement to any kind of pleasure… why on earth would we possibly deserve it? Like many Americans (in this case, I’m throwing Canadians into the mix too), I have always had a hard time throwing away all of those goals and projects of everyday city life to simply endulge in the pleasure of the moment. And I have always felt strong and secure in that discomfort, having experienced just the guilt mentioned above. I’ll tack on that I have an additional academic distaste for the notion that people should need a vacation from life (shouldn’t life always be fulfilling, despite its hardships?)… but you get the idea. But here I was, on a beautiful beach in India, with two wonderful friends, and I was fighting with myself to try and enjoy it.

To give you a sense of what the place was like, the best thing I can say is that it was full of tourists. And I mean full. In India it is sometimes possible, and often likely, that you will go for several days in a place and not come across a single other westerner. You will be the only white person in a sea of smiling Indians, and this will in turn make you feel like perhaps you are the only westerner in the country… and if you’re really feeling overwhelmed, you may experience the fleeting thought that the rest of the westerners that you once knew have somehow disappeared into oblivion… It’s a little bit funny, really – sometimes the entire universe can exist only in our minds. But sooner or later you will be reminded that there are others out there like you because you will spot a blond tuft of hair sticking out from behind a restaurant booth, or you will hear some whispered words of French pass you by as you nudge your way through a crowded bazaar. Or you will land yourself in Varkala, and you will momentarily forget you are in India altogether.

There is one major attraction in Varkala, and that is a cliff that overlooks a beautiful beach. Here, along the top edge of the cliff, there is a single pathway lined with quaint shops and restaurants owned and run by both local Indians and those from other parts that follow the tourists around the country depending on the season. There are two stairways down to the beach which are generously laden with the last week’s worth of trash – the only way, it seems, that the locals have found of keeping the beach clean is to hoard all the garbage in one place. On the average day in Varkala, Joel, Anita and I would wake up with the sun, head down to the beach for a morning dip, and then make our way to our favourite Italian (yes, Italian) cafe for some fresh fruit and museli, and a big pot of milk tea. On our way we would see only foreigners. Then we would while away the hottest hours of the day playing cards, reading and drinking cold juice – again, only in the presence of foreigners. The only Indians in this area of Varkala seemed to be the shop owners and restaurant workers, both of which have joined to create quite a close-knit community of friends and co-workers that help eachother work the massive inflow of tourists so that everyone benefits as much as they can. Somehow the place just seems to work. And people love it.

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I had a hard time with it all, and by day three I was feeling the itch to get moving again. It wasn’t that there was anything particular that I was dying to see or do, but the idleness, the expensive food, and the “packaged vacation” feel of it all was eating at me. We put the options on the table, and two third’s of us were happy to stay put and not push things in the last week we had together, so againt my body’s vote of protest, we stayed put. We had a wonderful week together (and I have to thank Joel and Anita almost entirely for that), but it was hard at first. Really hard. I found things – vows I could make to myself – to keep myself grounded. I vowed one day that I would do no more shopping in Varkala. The next day I vowed to try and spend under 300 rupees per day on food (that one only lasted until dinner that night when something delicious presented itself on the dessert menu). Another day I woke up and did yoga on the beach instead of going for a swim, and I told myself I would keep this practice up for the rest of the week we were there (this didn’t last either). And slowly, as I made promise after promise to myself, I found that the promises were becoming less and less important and I was actually feeling more at peace with myself. I found that I was actually enjoying the simple, straightforward routine of doing nothing. The promises I was making were helping me to simplify, to clear my mind of the responsibilty I felt I had to suck every last bit of juice out of my travels (which is an exhausting responsibility to put on yourself). I spent less time lamenting the lack of authenticity of the place I was in, and more time appreciating it for what it was and appreciating that I could let my mind be in whatever state I wanted regardless. And I’ve since spent a lot of time re-thinking why I’m here in the first place. And I’ve since bought myself a ticket to Israel.

I leave for Tel-Aviv on Thursday.

Last week, sitting on a beach in the afternoon, I had a moment of clarity where I realized that at this particular point in my life I’m looking to do some growing of a particular kind (though I can’t really put a name to it). In that moment on the beach I admitted to myself that India is just not feeding my soul the way I had hoped. I don’t mean to say that I haven’t been learning, growing, exploring, experiencing, questioning, forming beautiful relationships, and becoming more in touch with myself the entire time I’ve been here – because I have been doing all of those things. More importantly, they have been happening to me. More accurately I might say that my travels in this strange and altering place have been just what I needed to find clarity and a bit of direction, and perhaps have fittingly given me a sense of personal strength that I know I will need to re-enter the intensity of Israel (last time I visited the Holy Land, she and I parted on not such great terms, and I’m keen to have another go…). India has been brilliant but, after two and a half months of internally exploring my Jewish self against a backdrop of Hinduism and Indian pop-culture, I’ve decided to listen to that nudge I’ve been feeling and take a leap across the Arabian Sea.

At the moment I am in Bangalore, with Eliot and Gudiya and their beautiful daughter. I’ll spend the next few days here relaxing with family and trying to process my last few months in India, and then I’ll be on a plane to Tel-Aviv to spend the next and last weeks of my trip in Israel visiting with dear friends and doing a little learning and soul-searching.

I can’t wait

Ad machar u-be’ahavah,
(Until tomorrow and with love)
Hava

Delhi And Bangalore… in the wrong order

So I’m picking up writing after a long break. The past few weeks have held for me many decicions and decision-revisions, many journeys over long distances, and mostly a lot of zoning out from the rest of the world. I have told myself in the past, or convinced myself really, that travel for me must be a space for learning and integration. I’ve always bawked at the idea of making quick stops in a chain of “hot spot” destinations in order to fulfill the ideal backpacking experience, and it’s not that I don’t like movig around… I do. I love seeing beautiful places and meeting people, and challenging myself. I guess I just felt in the past that that wasn’t enough of a reason to burn many tons of carbon fuel and drop many hundreds or thousands of dollars – the “memories of a lifetime” just weren’t worth it. Or maybe it’s that I thought the memories were largely fabricated anyway…

And now here I am, and looking back I find that I have successfully done all those things that I was determined to avoid (perhaps for no real reason) with incredible ease. I have hopped from place to place, often spending no more than a few days in a city. I have made on-the-spot decisons to purchase domestic plane tickets when taking the train would have been much more economical and environmentally friendly, if not nearly as convenient. I have allowed myself to fall into a bit of a traveler’s trance… where emails sit in my inbox for days and the only real necessities at any given moment are finding a reasonably-priced pineapple milkshake and some good company with whom to while away the day. Like all my other experiences in India so far, I have found that the most honest and meaningful thing to do is just to let yourself be. And so I have. And though I have mixed feelings about the experience, I feel that I’ve been honest with myself… and perhaps I have a little bit of a better sense of my capabilities and my limitations. At the very least, all the sitting around in a tropical climate has left me with a great tan .

Now despite the fact that I’ve been largely ignoring my connection to the rest of the world, I did try to write a blog post over the past few weeks. Though the effort was largely futile, I thankfully have at least a few of my thoughts documented, and I’ll try and piece it all together as best I can.

This installation will come in three parts:
Part 1 – Delhi and Bangalore
Part 2 – Varkala and the end of the Aussies
Part 3 – Cochin

So here she is – the first installation:

Delhi and Bangalore

[from an attempted blog post at the end of January]
Bangalore is, in most visible ways, a western city. Or at least that’s how we felt when we stepped out of the airport into a well-manicured car pick-up area and hopped into an air conditioned taxi. We drove into the city along a freeway lined with modern billboards, corporate buildings and Levi’s stores. As we got closer and closer to my uncle’s place, I was reminded strongly of summer days driving through Toronto’s Forest Hill streets. The roads were lined with beautiful, old trees and the traffic had a slow, sleepy pace to it. And it wasn’t just the well-kept streets that seemed out of place in India… we noticed a shocking absence elsewhere as well. Where had all the beggars gone? I’m sure they were hiding out somwhere in Bangalore, but their hiding spot was well-kept by someone (the city, the government, the IT companies??) because we didn’t see a single beggar during our stay.

We had just arrived from Delhi and this was all a bit of a shock. Kind of reverse culture shock, if you will. Delhi is an intense and overwhelming city – the geographical space is expansive, the streest are noisy and crowded at rush hour, and the energy is chaotic. Anita, Joel and I had a hard time adjusting to the bustle and the mayhem. After a relaxing week in the countryside in Purkal, we found ourselves again bombarded on all sides by people offering goods and services of all flavours despite our desperate attempts to communicate “no”. To be fair, we did opt to venture into one of the busiest markets in the city (we thought it would be good fun!), and we ignorantly wandered straight into the Muslim area of the market, which was apparently not the place to be. We had been warned of extreme anti-westerner sentiments floating around in that area, and as we made our way timidly through the marketplace filled with black head scarves, we could tangibly feel (whether in reality or in our own heads) the hostility. This was a new experience to add to our archives… usually we were gawked at by the locals, but there was always a smile to go with the stare. Here, no-one was dropping a even a hint of hospitality. Apparently the relationship between the west (specifically the USA) and the Muslims of the world has had a strong impact in India as well… however removed it felt to us. Sufficed to say, we were a bit overwhelmed.

On that particular day, and in the particular head space that we were all in, Delhi was for us a world of chaos. Add to this day of chaos some solid dehydration and one manipulating rickshaw driver for good measure, and you have, ladies and gentlemen, the perfect day of hell for the Aussie-Canadian bunch. Needless to say, we were ready to leave almost as soon as we got there.

Despite our feeling toward the city, our stay in Delhi was really quite a treat in other ways. Sadhana Forest, where I met Anita and Joel, was an incredibly fertile ground for friendship and a good friend, Sugeet, who we spent 3 weeks with at Sadhana Forest, graciously invited us to stay with him at his home while we were in Delhi. It was quite a relief to have a quiet space to retreat from the outside world and the company of a good friend to keep us sane (and more than entertained). I have always believed that traveling should be a space of learning, and at Sugeet’s we learned loads. We learned that jackfruit (check out this website… it’s the biggest fruit in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackfruit) can be cooked in a delicious tomatoey curry so that its texture becomes a combination of artichoke heart and stew-beef. We learned that I’m a good marksman with an air rifle, and that Sugeet can rock a cowboy hat with style. We learned that in order to heat up a bucket of water for bathing, Indians will sometimes use an electric coil that gets lowered into the bucket on a wire and acts like an electric stove element (so cool). We also learned our limits in the city, and we learned how to make group decisions on the spot.

We knew we needed to get out of crazy Delhi, but there was the dilemma of deciding where to go. We decided on Rajastan, but at that time of the year we seemed to be faced with a never-ending waiting list for train tickets, and the buses were of no use because the distance we needed to travel was so great. Joel and Anita only had about two weeks left in India, and Rajastan was slowly becoming less and less of an option. So as a quick alternative, I posed the idea of heading to Kerala with a stopover in Bangalore, and after some glances back and forth we had all decided – Bangalore it was. Quick change of plans, quick booking of three plane tickets, quick dumping of all of our things into our backpacks, and the next morening we were off. Goodbye Delhi, hello Bangalore. And hello southern heat.

We spent about three days with Eliot, his wife Gudiya and their beautiful baby daughter Roselyn. They live in a strikingly modern apartment complex on a bustling Bangalore street, but from their living room balcony the view could be of almost anywhere… Toronto, Miami, Israel. The trees and the greenery around the compound block out the noise from the street almost entirely. We ate a wonderful meal – the first family meal in India where we all ate together at the same time, rather than with Gudiya serving us and eating on her own after we were done, as most Indian women have done in our presence during meals. It was a surprise to me how much I had missed that feeling of equality and participation during a meal. While you’re traveling you take everything in with such a hunger that you sometimes don’t allow yourself to feel homesick for the things you know. Or at least you learn to forget the homesickness over time, and then you start to accept the new thing you’re exposed to at face value and the strangeness of them disappears. When I was presented with what I’m so familiar with, but in an Indian setting, the strangeness came back – both the strangeness of traditional Indian meals AND the strangeness of an Indian meal that was so modern. So western.

Over the next few days we explored the city here, did a little shopping there, and booked our bus tickets to Trivandrum, from where we would catch a bus to Varkala and begin our last few weeks together in the south-Indian state of Kerala. Goodbye Himalayas, goodbye northern cold, goodbye city maddness, and hello beach!

Thanks go out to Sugeet and his wonderful parents and to Eliot and Gudiya for their wonderful hospitality. Come visit in Canada!

Stay tuned, dear friends, for part 2.

Much love,
Hava

Quick Update From Oblivion

So I’ve been a little MIA over the past week or so. Things here have been moving and tumbling around, and I’ve been caught up in the wash. I’ll post some news soon, probably in segments so that your attention won’t wane on me half way through .

Over the past two weeks a lot of distance has been covered, both on the Indian sub-continent and in my own head… I’ve been to Dehradun, Delhi, Bangalore, Varkala and finally Kochin. And as per usual, I’ve traveled the distance from elated to distressed, and back again. So if you’re interested, check in over the next few days to hear the latest!

With love,

Your frazzled and tanned Canadian friend

Tackling Waste Disposal In India

PYDS: Purkal Youth Development Society.

The Purkal Youth Development Society can be found at the end of a long and winding road, hidden in the folds of a deep valley in the foothills of the Himalaya mountains. The town of Purkal is a quiet and peaceful community that lends itself to wonderful hospitality and warmth, though if you mention to the bus driver that that’s where you’re headed you’re sure to get a few stares of disbelief. Purkal is a little off the grid, and it’s leaps and bounds away from the usual tourist path. It’s likely that you will be the first white person to be spotted in 10 years, if ever. However, if you happen upon this magical and unassuming place and make your way down that long and winding road, you will find yourself in a little hidden world of beauty and selfless giving. And you will find yourself swept up in the flow of generosity immediately.

We were introduced to PYDS through Cathy, Anita’s aunt, who generously hosted us for a week at her home in Rajpur. On our first morning with Cathy, we decided to go “to school” with her to see where she had been working for the last year. We arrived at PYDS and we were greeted by Swami, the founder of the school. He and his wife re-located to Purkal about 15 years ago, and began what would be the seeds of a great educational project. Most of the villages in the Purkal area are still made up of farming communities, and there is little accessible education for the kids in these families. Many of the kids come from abusive homes and many others deal with malnutrition. When they arrived in Purkal, Swami and his wife began a small “school” (if you could call it that) where they took in children from the surrounding villages and donated their time to teach them during the days. This “school” began with 4 kids sitting around a table – now there is a school building and a PYDS society that provides free food and education to over 140 children. They also started a group called the “Stree Shakti” society that buses in women from the surrounding villages and teaches them how to quilt. They are given a free workspace, free quilting lessons, and are given access to an income. They form self-help groups, learn about saving, and are given a sense of personal empowerment that will hopefully help to shift the power imbalances in Indian homes and reduce the amount of abuse and violence these women experience. Swami is the kind of guy who just kind of goes for it. If you need a school building, you build it. If you need teachers, you find them. If you need uniforms, you just go and have them made. Somehow, the donors appeared and the two projects snowballed forward. And there was a school. And there was a women’s quilting society.

It was to this school that the three of us arrived. We had only just been introduced to Swami when he sat us all down and said “I would like to know what the three of you young people might be able to contribute to our project.” [Pause. What does he mean? We don't know anything about this school or this community...] “We are looking to design an environmental studies program, and with your expertise you might be able to help us.” And with that, off we went. Swami has a way of convincing you that anything is possible, and for the next 5 days the three of us worked to put together whatever we could of this environmental studies curriculum (that we apparently had the “expertise” to write). What we came up with was likely some fusion of our own elementary school introduction to recycling and food chains, combined with some knowledge we picked up along our lives’ paths (read: we know that kids like active games and planting gardens is a probably good way to learn about plants). We did as much as we could manage in a week, and though it was far from a completed concept, Swami seemed happy with it in the end.

The biggest challenge we found ourselves confronted with was this: how can you possibly educate a society about waste management and recycling when they are part of a generation that has been trained to toss their left-over wrappers over their shoulder’s without a second thought? As we slowly learned, this behaviour stems from the fact that until about 10 years ago the “waste” that was being created from food consumption in India was mostly leaves that were used for plates. As India has introduced plastic, they haven’t adapted their disposal practices. Whereas they once would finish their meals and toss the leftover leaves on the streets to be eaten by the cows, now the leftovers are plastic. And they accumulate. A lot.

The challenge has become finding a way to bring this contradiction to light in the Indian consciousness. This is compounded by the chaotic and lawless reality of daily life, the corruption, and the lack of personal responsibility in towns and cities. It doesn’t seem to be enough to implement waste-collection services, because the guy you hire to collect the waste will just dispose of it on the other guy’s lawn. It doesn’t seem to be enough to create fines for littering because rather than learning not to litter children learn how much bribe money is necessary to avoid the fine. And even when you get through to the kids that throwing plastic out the train window is bad, their parents (on principle) will continue to pollute because this is what they’ve been doing their whole lives and they’re not interested in learning a new way of doing things. So it will take time for things to change. It seems clear to me that education on environmental principles will play some role in the change, but I believe it will also be essential to find ways of actively demonstrating new practices for these kids. This is the hardest part. In my head, I just keep thinking: there is probably some ingenious way to show these kids how to take responsibility, and this “way” is probably related to some cultural tradition that I have absolutely no understanding of. Maybe it means using Bollywood as a tool. Maybe it means dressing up as samosas and doing a dance. Who knows. It all makes me feel rather helpless to contribute anything, AND being confronted with such ignorance in myself really drives home the reality that the complexity in our world is way, way over my head.

BUT, I do have some awesome learn-about-the-environment activities. I can say that much. So I’ve passed them onto this little gem of a school in case there’s a chance that they can do something useful with them. And maybe, maybe as the project evolves someone will happen upon this mysterious method of teaching that can penetrate the Indian cultural consciousness and make environmental stewardship make sense. I hope.

Early this week we left Purkal for Delhi, and from Delhi we’re moved to Bangalore. Though our volunteering with PYDS has mostly finished, I’ll likely remain somewhat involved over the next few months by sending over some environmental education resources to supplement our work at the school. The society is always looking for volunteers and eager individuals who want to contribute in some way. If you’re interested, I’d encourage you to check out the society’s web site and see what you think (www.purkal.org). As a volunteer opportunity abroad, I’d say this would be top notch. You’ll find yourself immersed in a sea of small uniformed school children addressing you endlessly as ‘sir’ or ‘maam’, and supported by unbelievably dedicated volunteers and staff. And the scenery can’t be beat!

It’s 11:00pm here, and I’m off to sleep. Tomorrow Anita and I will take a dip in the swimming pool here – we’ll submerge ourselves in a full body of water for the first time in what seems like forever. Here in India, we take sponge baths and keep covered… even on the beaches. Tomorrow will be epic!

Sleep well, sweet world, and we shall speak soon!

The Rest Of The Trek

Back again – but in a different place. We’ve moved from Rishikesh to Rajpur, about an hour away… more on that later.

When Joel, Anita and I woke up at around 7:30am the next morning at our campsite, the thermometer on the back of my backpack declared that it was a crisp -5 degrees celsius. No matter – our sleeping bags had kept us toasty warm all night, and there was a knock on our tent door that declared hot cups of coffee to usher in a new day. We woke up and unwound our twisted muscles from sleeping on the hard ground, and got our things together for the day’s hike.

The 4×4 drove us about 15 minutes down the road from our site and dropped us at the base of a trail, which we promptly started down. There was snow – lots of it. And we were still on the shady side of the mountain, so it was cold. We slowly climbed and descended through a beautiful, if dark and mysterious forest. The bear tracks in the snow didn’t put us off, we all just broke into some aimless whistling and yelling led by our trusty guide, Dron. The trail basically led us down into a valley between two peaks, and then up again along the side of the peak in front of us. As the sun rose we all warmed up and began to peel off our layers, though we were careful not to take off too much clothing. We had begun the hike at around 3000 meters, and would be climbing higher in through the day, and the altitude meant that the temperature changed drastically when you moved from sun to shade. We wanted to stay warm!

By lunch time we reached a peak where we stopped to lunch. In the last few meters between us and our lunch site, I stopped to “oooh” and “ahhh” at what appeared to be some beautiful (and what appeared to be contained) flames that had caught in some patches of grass just over the side of the trail. I had never seen this before – fire burning up vegetation in what looked like a relatively wet and alive area, and on top of a mountain, no less. But my Aussie friends didn’t let me stop for the view. Their experience with bushfires in Australia, and their knowledge of how quickly a change in the wind can make a little flame catastrophic, meant that there was no way we were stopping to look. We hurriedly pushed on to our destination, not even stopping to take a second look. Where we finally stopped for lunch, the ground was completely charred. Black. And crispy. But there were no flames.

Over lunch, we asked Dron what the deal was. He explained that it’s fairly common practice in the area to set intentional fires at the base of the mountain in order to burn out all the vegetation in an area and make the soil more fit for farming. As it is, the sides of mountains are not the best place to grow a vegetable garden, so you’ll see in my pictures that many communities have actually created a tier system, carved into the rock. It’s really pretty innovative. But the fire I felt I could do without.

After lunch we began a trek down from the peak and toward a famous lake in the area – “Chopta”. The smoke and fire followed us for a while, and made me incredibly nervous… especially when I felt that there was little to no fresh air around me left to breathe. But we trekked on, noting that the fire wasn’t really moving anywhere, it was just creating a lot of smoke. We were leaving it behind us, and when we looked back we could see the pillar of smoke that we had just walked through. It was cool, but I’m glad it’s not a regular occurrence in my life.

We spent the afternoon at a beautiful (and again, slightly eerie and mysterious) lake. The water was completely green. Kind of a food colouring, nuclear power plant green, but apparently completely natural. After about 40 minutes there, we began the long trek down to town where we would be picked up by our driver. Incredibly, the weather warmed up a lot in those last few hours. We were hiking in the sun, and our layers had to go. But by the time we got back to our campsite, the sun had set yet again, and the temperature began to drop. Another delicious meal, and another frigid night in the Himalayan mountains.

The trek the next day was really the jewel of the trip. We left our site at 8:30am, and walked up the road to where a trail began. This trail would take us up to the peak of a mountain called “Chandrashila”, which boasts near its top the highest Hindu temple in India. We would hike up to an altitude of 4000 meters, and at the top we would have a 360 degree view of the Himalayan range, including the peak of Nanda Devi – the second highest mountain in the world, after Everest.

We began a non-stop uphill climb on a rock trail that wove back and forth up the hillside. There was thick, crisp snow on the ground, but only in the shade… in the sun all the snow had melted, and our grip was a bit better. The temperature in the sun was 1 degree, and we all broke out the sunglasses because the glare was more than a little intense. Right from the start, I began strategizing about when to keep the hat and shades on and when to take them off, keeping in mind that the likelihood of coming away from such a trek with an atrocious sunglasses-and-hat-tan was high. There was no way I would succumb to the elements.

The view on the way up was kind of indescribable. I would take eyes off my feet for a moment and look up to see glistening white snow, bright sun, and feel the most crisp, refreshing air all around me. Smiles just kept breaking across my face, because really, there was no other possible reaction. Despite the fact that Anita and I were panting, sweating and taking breaks every fifty steps, it was spectacular.

Now I don’t want you to think I’m out of shape. I am a little out of shape (sitting on trains and eating in restaurants will do that to you), but the altitude of the hike and the cold really took a toll on us. It was like this: we would take stock of the next little bit of the walk and think, “only a few meters to the next bend in the trail. No problem. Piece of cake.” And then we would just launch into it. Because really, a few meters on an incline is a piece of cake. But after no more than three or four steps, our lungs would be retaliating and our leg muscles would be screaming in protest. It was complete lack of communication between our brains and our bodies. One was saying “I’ve done this before” and the other was saying “I’m so tired and out of my element that there’s a good chance I’ll break down momentarily”. So we rested. A lot. And we took our time and focused on taking in the awesome sights all around us. And we laughed and stopped to pee on a snow-capped mountain, and we trudged on some more.

The walk up only took us 3 hours or so, but we rose almost 1000 meters in elevation. When we finally made it up the last stretch (a hillside completely covered in snow and with not much of a trail to speak of), we gasped for breath and I struck a victorious pose – which ended up looking kids of funny, as it usually does. But there it was, documented on film – we made it to 4000 meters.

We sat down to eat lunch, and out guide took a quick nap. We all split up to take some time to ourselves and think. That’s what you do at the top of a mountain – you think. I picked up my phone to see if I had cell phone service. I did. I scrolled through the list of people in my address book, thinking that it would be pretty awesome to call some friends and declare that I was at the top of a 4000 meter mountain, but something inside me told me to put the phone down. This was my moment, and I didn’t really have the urge to call anyone. The only people I wanted to be with at that moment were the people I had hiked up to this point with, and they were right there in front of me. So the phone went back in my bag, and we sat up there for a good while just being – at the top of a mountain.

The climb down was SO much harder than the climb up. And my knees are still paying for it, I think. Our guide went ahead with his protegé, Joel wandered off on his own, and Anita and I made the descent together. When we finally made it to the bottom, I was pretty much convinced that I might not walk for the next week. We were all feeling similarly, so we decided to veto the next day’s short trek and head out early the next morning instead. That night I sat around a fire and explained to Anita my wacky and bizarre past at summer camp. When explaining it to an outsider, it really seems unreal that parents ship their children off to the forest for 6 weeks each year to be taken care of by teenagers. Anita loved it

Our drive back was treacherous. It was foggy and rainy, and we had to tackle the same mountain roads that we had on the way in. We passed cars that had flipped over, speeding buses, and side rails that had been broken from cars going over the road’s edge. We kind of didn’t speak for most of the ride – we just concentrated on not flipping out, and tried to meditate on the idea that our lives were not ours to control. For most of the ride, I actually found myself incredibly calm. I thought about this, and I guess that it was all just so “ordinary” by Indian standards that part of me felt like there was no reason to panic. If hundreds of Indians drive these roads every day, in every condition, then what made me more likely than the next to drive off the side of a cliff and die? Nothing, was my answer. So I just sat back and enjoyed the heavenly scenes outside my window. Thank God, in the end, we lived to tell the tale. I don’t think any of us will be making a trip through those mountain roads again for a long time.

So that was the trek. Not quite 4 days of trekking in the end, but definitely enough to quench the thirst that the three of us had for mountain air and exercise.

Since I posted last, we’ve moved to Rajpur. This is a small, ordinary village town where Anita’s aunt lives. We arrived on Sunday, and right away were swept into a beautiful volunteer opportunity at a school in the area. The short story is that there is a wonderful man who has taken it upon himself to build a completely funded school for children in the area, and work on implementing holistic education for all these children. The organization is completely un-corrupt in its functioning, which is unique for any NGO, and especially in India – one of the most corrupt countries in the world. This is the short story.

The longer story is on its way.

Much love to all of you,
Hava