Film reviews!

While I've been travelling, I've watched a grand total of four films.. one great, one ok, and two dire, so I thought I'd give you my thoughts on them.

The Great

Me And You And Everyone We Know (Amazon link)

I was in no way expecting this film to be so fantastic. It's just one of those films that comes out of the blue and is charming, funny, and not squirmy at all. Really can't recommend it enough.

The OK

Men's Group

Apparently not available on DVD in the UK yet, film's website is here. An Australian film about.. a men's support group. It's a fairly watchable film, but I lost my "sense of disbelief" a couple of times at critical moments, and it kinda knocked the film flat a little. It's filmed using consumer digital cameras and isn't scripted, so it's pretty interesting, but feels like something I've seen before - lots of fairly normal, grumpy men eventually reduced to tears. Worth seeing, I think, but not as great as I'd heard.

The Dire

Changeling (Amazon link)

Boring. Boring boring boring. It's a true story, and it's sad, but it just didn't connect emotionally with me. The LAPD was corrupt, and there was a nutter. Angelina Jolie is a Strong Woman. Yawn.

The thing for me is, I'd read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Amazon Link) recently, and I've seen L.A. Confidential (Amazon Link) and Changeling kinda feels like an amalgam of the two, but more miserable. In short, it just made me unhappy, and I found Angelina Jolie irritating.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Amazon Link)

Oh My. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy pines for girl his whole life but sleeps around a lot. Girl marries boring guy. Boring guy eventually dies, boy screws girl on a paddle steamer. This takes 2 1/4 hours to tell.

The End

(Get the first film, though, it's absolutely wonderful. "Back.. and forth" will stay with me for life :))

Montenegro

BBC report on a Roma refugee camp in Montenegro.

How lucky most of us are. How ridiculous the governments of the world are, to not be able to sort something like this out.

Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath

I got this in Varanasi, India, with all the stuff about the current recession, climate change and so on going round my head... Of course, I'd heard of the Great Depression and the Dustbowl, but not having studied much history at school, didn't know a great deal of the history.

Anyway, The Grapes of Wrath (Amazon link) by John Steinbeck was first published in 1939 - 70 years ago.

It's a story of a family of Oklahoma farmers who, at the start of the book, have been forced off their 40 acre farm by a number of years of poor weather (actually, a return to the normal weather patterns, but much less rain than the preceding few years), non-Permaculture farming practises (leaving land bare rather than sowing a cover crop), and indebtedness to the banks/land companies (who lent the farmers money when crops failed, which they couldn't pay back).

The story is a very human one - it alternates between the story of the Joad family, heading from Oklahoma to California which they think is a land of plenty, and a general overview of what happened during the Dustbowl years. It is a story of human greed - Californian farmers over-advertising for labour in order to reduce wages to subsistence levels, and in the process leaving many many families with little or no income at all.

The thing that got me was that we're doing it all over again. Perhaps not in quite the same way, but.. in order for "us" to have our consumer lifestyle, people in the developing world are killing the planet - China is being desertified at a rate of 1300 square miles per year!

The core of the story is that it seems easier to give when you have nothing, that the best in humanity shines through at the hardest of times. The Grapes of Wrath is a fantastic book, really relevant to right now. I can't recommend it enough!

Up-to-date!!

I'm actually writing this now!

I'm sitting in our cabin at Crystal Waters, where it is raining. It's nice to have got the history of our travels so far uploaded - no pictures, admitted, so I'll have to sort that later.

Anyway, I'm feeling ok - a little under the weather I think, but nothing serious. Today Max, our host, left on a trip to Cambodia (I think), so we won't see him again, which is a shame - I like him.

This morning I have been clearning weeds from under olive trees, and.. getting this blog updated. This afternoon we get to move the cattle from one section of the paddock they are in to another - each section has enough grass for one day, so the cattle make a neat job of tidying up. Good permaculture at work!

Big Island

We got to Abu Dhabi for a stopover - a 14 hour wait for me, only 2 hours for Kara, due to flight costs. She went on to Sydney, had a night in a hostel and a lovely hot shower.. I had a night of free internet but no sleep. The Etihad flights were excellent, anyway, and I even got a free toothbrush!

One more flight - from Sydney to Adelaide. Phew. I guess we left our hotel in Kathmandu at 10am on Monday the 1st of June, and arrived at Kara's friend Michael's place at 2pm on Wednesday the 3rd.. pretty much 48 hours of travelling for me.

Michael lives with his family at Aldinga Arts Ecovillage. He had borrowed a caravan for us to stay in, which was really cold as it is winter here! Not anything like as cold as a UK winter, mind. We had a great time at Aldinga, looking at the different eco houses. In Australia you can get 1kW of pv solar panels put on your roof for... nothing. The grants are so good from the government. In the UK, an installed system costs about £7500, with a £2500 grant from the government meaning you'd end up paying £5000. Very disappointing. And the grants for solar hot water in the UK are even more pathetic! AND the Ozzies get a 25p per kWh feed in tariff - we get something like half that. Our green credentials truly are pathetic (still, getting good loft insulation is a much better initial return on investment than solar - I'll be doing the insulation at my house when I get back to the UK).

So we saw straw bale buildings, rammed earth, earth bricks (which we helped make a couple of hundred of!), and so on. Most of the rooves are powder coated steel, to enable rain water collection - Michael's had 40 thousand litres of water storage. Most houses have no air conditioning and little in the way of heating - they are all a good passive solar design. Compared to a conventional suburb in Australia, it's pretty amazing.

After a week at Aldinga, we took yet another flight (ugh) to Brisbane, a train to Landsborough, a bus to Maleny, and finally got picked up by Max Lindegger in his battered old car - equivalent to my old Vauxhall Nova - a famous (in eco circles) ecovillage designer, who took us to his place in Crystal Waters.

What a place! We are staying in their cabin, which could actually house 4 but just has us 2 at the moment. The Lindeggers have 8 miniature Angus cattle (beautiful animals), 10 beehives, 8 chickens, pecan and mandarin trees, vegetable gardens. We have mostly been weeding so far, but are taking a couple of days consultancy with Max as well - incredibly useful information, gathered over decades of planning ecovillages. This morning we helped him with the bees - taking frames out, uncapping them, centrifuging the honey out - magical. The honey tastes absolutely wonderful.

Nepal part 2

The rest of our time in Nepal was rather grating - we didn't do so well with the monastary, and after a failed trek up to the Annapurna conservation area (planned to be an overnighter, and we were told we'd not need a trekking permit for that; but the guy at the checkpoint was new and wanted to charge us double to even stay in the first village, get a nice view in the morning, and go back.. so we walked 25 km in one day, up and down more than a km too!), we went to another project.

The other project is part PhD study part eco-farm - a German woman who spends 3 months in Nepal, then 3 months in Germany, and has partnered up with some Nepali NGOs to create a demonstration project using agroforestry and more thought out farming methods. There were a couple of other volunteers there and we had an ok time. Of course, being Nepal, no doors shut properly, and the tap in the bathroom was set into the wall - with the water running onto the edge of the hand basin, not actually into it!! The food was good, though, and we had a couple of nice walks out to view the Kathmandu valley, mountains, and so on.

Then back to Kathmandu one last time, on a packed bus - we sat at the back, just next to a family of goats. On the day we left, there was a Maoist strike and we feared we wouldn't get to the airport in time, so set out very early.. and actually arrived early. And then airport security wouldn't let us inside, even though we had tickets - we had to sit outside on the concrete for 2 hours.

For a country so apparently interested in tourism, Nepal left a lot to be desired. Bangladesh was so much smoother, despite being "poorer". I can't phrase it right - it's not just Western snobbery, it's that all the walls were wonky, nothing is finished well, there is no craftmanship at all. And so often we'd get "Hello, what is your name, give me money!". Maybe it was just bad luck on our part, but nothing really worked out that well.. anyway, it taught us a lot, I think, both the bad and the good (of which there WAS a lot, despite my moaning - the mountains are beautiful, for example).

I've never been so happy to leave a country...

Nepal part 1

Kathmandu, Nepal, provided us with challenges from the get-go - they only accept tourist visa fees in, er, anything but Nepali Rupees, and don't take cards - and my debit cards wouldn't work in the ATM. Luckily Kara's worked, though we got double whammied - bank charges for using her debit card, plus commission for exchanging Rupees for Dollars. Welcome to Nepal!

Kathmandu is much smaller than Dhaka - it seems all the streets are windy, and nobody gives way. Often a motorbike will wedge it's way in front of two cars trying to squeeze past each other, causing more delays for all parties, including the stupid motorcyclist. The city didn't impress - as part of our programme here, we got two afternoons of sightseeing around the city, but it just didn't wow us. Lots of people in the streets asking us if we wanted hashish, treks, taxis or rickshaws, lots of touristy rubbish. Some pretty run down looking temples.

After three nights in Kathmandu we eventually headed out for Besisahar, about 180Km West and a little North of Kathmandu, in a packed minibus. Luckily we had the two front passenger seats, so I had at least a little legroom. A few guys travelled on the roof, with our large backpacks. The mountain roads are just crazy - going the 180Km took us almost 6 hours.

Finally we arrived at Besisahar, where we were met by Wandi lama. He is one of four twelve year old monks we are trying to teach some English to. He led us up the steeply climbing path to his monastary, or gumba.

Ah me. When I said "yes!" to Kara's idea of teaching monks English I was envisaging some sacred place, an ancient stone monastary with quiet, dedicated earnest students just trying to get a more rounded grip of English, both British and American; people with pride, welcoming and serene.

What we got... is quite something else. The Guru of the place is still in Kathmandu with 6 of his students. So here we have the four twelve year olds, one fifteen year old, two eighteen year olds (who don't come to lessons), a couple of other guys I haven't figured out yet (who sometimes come to lessons for a bit). There is also the Guru's father and mother, I think, plus couple of women of whom one is the Guru's wife. Only the monks speak any English, and not enough to form complete sentences ("Sir, come!" and "Sir, want more rice?")

The whole place is a mess. The toilet block has no plumbing - to shower, you take one hosepipe and shove it into another one, and ask someone else to turn the tap on and off when you need the water to run. There is litter everywhere, from the town up the hill to the gumba, and further on where we have walked. Litter and discarded footwear.

The monks get up at 5am every day and play some Buddhist chants from really old cassette tapes out to the town below. Our bedroom is maybe 5 feet from these speakers. I don't think they are loud enough to reach the town, but they certainly wake us up. Actually that bit is fine, the chants are nice, and we're used to being awake at 5am and sleeping at 9-10pm.

What isn't working so well is the whole teaching thing. We have one lesson per day, from 12 to 2pm. Unfortunately some previous teachers seem to have paid for treats, bought them gifts and so on, so they are almost demanding the same of us. They have very short attention spans, and are of very different abilities. But they like the Hokey Cokey, which is fortunate!

Worst is the fact that, when we arrived, the boys had two pens between the six of them, no textbooks, and nobody to tell us what they had covered before, what they understood, etc - so we are doing this blind. Neither of us has formal teaching experience, though Kara is doing a great job with them - she is very much the carrot and I'm the stick. The older boys whack the younger ones on the back of the head to discipline them, something I'm just not prepared to do - though I did have to bodily remove one of the boys from the lesson on the second day - which wasn't good.

Some lessons go well, and they enjoy the games, getting things right, and they do seem to be picking up a few things, but being so completely unsupported it's hard to know if we are doing good things or not. We were expecting to be helping with vocabulary and pronunciation, not babysitting... Only a few more days here, though, then we go for a two day trek, see some eco-stuff near Kathmandu, and finally on to blessed sanity, sanitation, and sandwiches in Australia.

Bangladesh - 2nd May

So we took the train from Kolkata, India to Dhaka, Bangladesh on the second of May. We got up early to get a taxi to "Kolkata Station" which is actually the fourth train station of the city, only built a few years ago.

When we got out of the taxi at the station we were in for a huge shock - only a few people across all the platforms, only one guy selling water and snacks.. wow! It didn't feel like India at all.

It was a 12 hour train journey - or, actually, a 7 hour journey interrupted by exiting-India customs and entering-Bangladesh customs. The train was only 10% full, so we were just sitting waiting for the scheduled departure time for a while at each place.

We only stopped in Dhaka overnight, after which we caught a bus to Srimongal (North East from Dhaka), where we stayed with tribal people who lived near tea plantations. This was all arranged with BASD - Bangladesh Association for Sustainable Development, through their director Boniface who came with us to the village. The tribal people - of the Khasi tribe - pretty much own their land, though there are ongoing disputes with the government. They grow jackfruit, betel nuts and leaves (disgusting chewing stuff), pineapples, mangoes... They have little, but what they have they shared generously with us. We got two breakfasts most days, one at home and one at another home we'd been invited to. Simple food, but tasty!

We saw microcredit schemes in action at the tea plantation, and another nearby village - with people proudly showing us the cow or goat they'd bought with the micro loan (I think about 3,000 Bangladeshi Taka, which is £30, buys a cow). The plantation workers earn about 28 Taka a day - 28p, give or take. 1Kg of rice costs about 22 Taka. "Poor" does not feel like an adequate description

After 5 days with the Khasi folk and tea garden and other rural villagers, we headed back to Dhaka, to see "sweeper" slums. "Sweeper" is a job description - these people are of Indian origin, brought to Dhaka by the British to clean the streets. But now, the Bangla government gives sweeping jobs to Bangladeshis, and generally doesn't do much good for the sweeper people.

They live in walled compounds, and can't really go outside at night because they aren't Bangladeshi. They live 8-12 people in under 100 square feet of living space. There are only a few battered communal toilets. Generally it's a very hard life, hard in a different way than the tea garden workers.

But here, like in the tea gardens and surrounding villages, BASD is providing microcredit loans, plus skills training when there is funding available - funding to educate young girls in sewing, beadwork and so on, enabling them to earn a living.

The poverty is simply staggering - don't get me wrong, the people don't appear to be starving, and it's not filthy like in the pictures we see of refugee camps in Africa, but... to work all day, 6 days a week, and earn less than £100 in a year? They have nothing. In a chronically poor country, the discrimination of the Bangla people against other tribes is incredibly saddening.
In Srimongal town, Boniface told us that beggars often "work" for a sort of company - the "employers" give the beggars somewhere to sleep, a little food, and maybe one or two sets of clothes a year, while the beggars give the employers all the money they get.

On the 10th of May, we left Dhaka by the ropiest plane I have ever been on in my life. Dhaka airport, like Kolkata station, felt like part of another world - air conditioned, virtually empty, without hustle and bustle - quite a contrast.

Kolkata, part 2

It's now Thursday, 30 April 2009. Illness has departed, and we're in good shape. We got our Bangladesh visas without any problems, then our flights from Dhaka to Kathmandu, and finally our train tickets from Kolkata to Dhaka for Saturday (2nd May - wow this year is going quickly).

We have done a fair amount of walking around the city, and... I like it. We went to the Victoria Memorial and a Planetarium yesterday, both of which were good. The Memorial is set in a 64 acre park (really helpful to see that amount of space, actually, if we're talking of an ecovillage of 200 acres), and is a huge white building. Like many white buildings with domes and pillars it rather reminds me of the White House, and a number of other buildings in Kolkata are similar too. I guess that form of architecture is fairly common (and I know the White House was based on something else, though I forget exactly what).

Inside the memorial is an overwhelming amount of history, art and artefacts. There are 4 different sections, one blessedly air conditioned - and containing an almost year by year history of Kolkata since the British arrived. It seems so sad to me that what was a prosperous partnership in India had to end because of misrule by the British. I'm not saying Britain should still control India, not at all, but rather that we could learn an awful lot from India, and vice versa. The partitions that happened after the second world war seem to have caused little but grief.
Just outside the Memorial is a statue to Sri Aurobindo, ha!

Anyway, after the Memorial we wandered a little, walked up to see Fort Willam only to realise it's a prohibited area, rather than a tourist attraction. So we walked back to the Peace Garden, next to the Memorial and close to the Planetarium as well, to wait for the next English language show of planets. The peace garden is really nice, except you're not allowed to lie on the grass or the benches (or do any number of other things, I imagine), else a nice warden blows a loud whistle at you. How uncouth!

The show at the Planetarium was a bargain - only Rs. 30 - and very cool, really old equipment. They showed the Indian satellite that is orbiting the moon at the moment, something I think they are very proud of, as well as a few slides of Pathfinder, Spirit et al on Mars.

After, a quick taxi ride home, bananas and biscuits, and I fell asleep early...
Following our unpleasant experiences after Agra, we have been eating safe, at a couple of nice restaurants, and often buying stuff from proper supermarkets, rather than off the street - expensive, but...

One of the things I have noticed is how few manufacturing companies there appear to be - TATA does maybe 80% of the cars, with the rest mostly being Suzuki; Coca Cola and Pepsi make amost all the drinks (including most of the bottled water - TATA, oddly, do the premium water); biscuits, toiletries and God knows what else are made by Unilever, with a couple of other companies doing the other biscuits. Unilever make the bread! It's quite scary, really. That, and how much focus there is on improving yourself BY buying this stuff - that you are a real person, important, worthwhile... if you buy this stuff. The adverts here seem to tell you that. How much effect this will have on the average man on the street I don't know, but it is certainly being pushed hard onto anyone who watches television.

What do people aspire to? Owning a mobile phone that defines them? My God.

Kolkata

We got on the train from Varanasi on the 25th, at about 17:20 - delayed half an hour or so in arriving. I was in a black mood, feeling physically much stronger but angry with India as a whole - the stupid rules, the lack of certainty that anything is clean (food, for example - how much is my upset stomach because I'm ill, and how much because the food we are trying to eat has bad stuff in it.. I just don't know), the dust and heat.

People on the train stare at us, as usual. I want to poke their eyes out with a hot poker, as usual.

Sleep helps, and when I wake I'm more mellow, less purely angry. We arrive in Kolkata, and get a taxi out to our hotel - what a mess of a place. In a poky hot non-AC room we swelter for a bit, then I go out to do some shopping. I buy a bad selection of things, apparently, and it gives my almost-okay stomach enough of a shock to set me back to square one. After a few hours sleep, I feel weak but in need of something to eat, so Kara and I head back to the supermarket and get some more sensible food, breakfast cereal and plain stuff. Coke, amazingly, helps me no end - perhaps the combination of caffeine, sugar, and cold?

Anyway, when we get back to the hotel, we move into an AC room. It's about twice the size of the other room, and while the AC isn't the best, it's a damn site better than sweltering. I feel comfortable for the first time in ages. 40+ degrees C is just not for me, I understand that now.

So we sit and watch films, til the lights go out at 11:30 - oh no, the AC goes off at 11:30?? Then the generator comes on, which powers everything BUT the AC. Let's hope the power doesn't go out too much... Sleep comes, eventually, and I wake just before 6.

I'm learning, though. I may not be enjoying the experience much, but I am learning things. What I want out of life, what I don't. How much I dislike large busy cities - actually Kolkata isn't so bad, some how. A nice small city I could cope with, I think, but I'd rather be out in the middle of nowhere, as long as I have broadband and a decent postal service... take what I want of society and leave the rest? Perhaps.

Now we are waiting for our Bangladesh visa appointments. After Kolkata we head to Dhaka, then a place called Srimongal, to stay in a tea garden ecovillage for a week. After that, Nepal. So here we sit, before getting the privilige of paying to go to Bangladesh. Apparently it's a reciprocal thing - Bangladesh's charges slide on a scale relative to the UK's, Canada's (Kara's is about 75% the cost of mine!!), etc.

I feel stable. That this is something I can cope with. I'm under no illusions that I'll want to travel much when we are done, other than the UK and Ireland, Canada, some of Europe, the northern US I suppose. I want to walk up mountains, and eat cheese and tomato sandwiches; I want to get a decent camera and take photographs. I don't want to be in 40-degree heat ever again. I guess I can sympathise with Californians living in the desert - of course they'll have AC on all the time. Surely better to move somewhere that isn't a damn desert, though.

We saw a documentary on a guy called Sam Peckinpah yesterday, it looks like he made some good films. Also a film called Love and Honour, a Japanese one - more to look up when I have time. That, the history of India, the list of Things to Do in Ireland... I'll be busy a good while, I think!

Varanasi

It's Friday night. We've been in Varanasi a whole week, and done almost nothing - we have both been sick in bed most of the time.

I'm struggling most here with how I feel about India - how I feel about giving a guy Rs. 10 (about 15p) for an hour of his time. I just don't want to do it, though logically that is perverse - surely it's better to give the guy the damn ten rupees and him be able to eat, than not? But I have this feeling that if I don't give him money he might go to the country and grow food. There are just so many people here able to get by on so little money (by Western standards). People can live on Rs. 100 a day, easily, I think. And because they can earn a living even without working solidly during the day, they all flock to the cities. Isn't it easier work cycling round a city all day carting a couple of Westerners in your rickshaw, than growing food?

Am I misjudging something? I think there are plenty of jobs available, and plenty of manpower. I guess everyone is just desparate... no, but it isn't even that, here. In the Holy City of Benaras, people are much less pushy than in Chennai or Agra.

Perhaps the sheer number of tourists passing through means there is enough money for everyone to be okay? It is quite a small city.

Our hotel is right on the Ganges, and I really don't like the river much. It brings up feelings of revulsion - it is brown, has litter floating it, lots of motor boats going up and down it, and it's just filthy and stinks. People bathe in it, swim in it. People in boats light floating candles. Only five minutes walk downstream they burn dead people (Brahmin using sandalwood; others using Mango wood; lepers and Dalits, I think, just get thrown in...), and have hospices for the terminally ill - the souls of people who die in Varanasi go straight to Heaven, apparently.

Of course they do. Because otherwise there might be justice, with good people - truly good people - being rewarded, and bad people going somewhere else. But I guess you have to believe that there is a Higher Authority able to do the judging, and I don't think I do.

But this leads me to a conundrum. If the people, en mass, choose to believe in this stuff, and run their society in a way where there is a caste system, labour is cheap, and so on (ignoring government corruption), then who am I to say they can't?
And I guess this kind of thing is the cause of so many wars - Group A wants the laws to work like this and group B thinks it would be fairer to have them run like this - wouldn't it be great if, after 15 years of fair and unbiased education, a person got a free choice of which group he or she wanted to belong to? No forcing people to say the same stuff as you or else.

Would it work? If not, what would?

Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Train to Varanasi

We spent Thursday (April 17th, 2009) afternoon at the Taj Mahal. The whole complex is actually huge - with surrounding walls, domes and so on of red sandstone. The Taj Mahal itself is of course white marble. The intricate stonework is incredible, and just the sheer amount of it...!

Our hotel was onlt a ten minute walk from the Taj, so we ambled down past all the cycle rickshaw guys trying to get us to go with them, past all the kids selling tacky mini Taj Mahals in perspex.. ugh. Getting in to see the Taj was incredibly expensive, for India - Rs. 750 each! A week's wage for a labourer. It's a much smaller entry fee for Indians, though.

I'm not sure what else to say about the Taj - very impressive, as a human monument, in terms of scale amazing. But it didn't really move me. The gardens were nice...!
The following day, we walked to Agra Fort. Another impressive structure, from which you can see the Taj Mahal (it's only a couple of km away), and full of all sorts of different things. It is partially occupied by the Indian army, partially occupied by monkeys; it has a number of small mosques inside, and all sorts of places were closed off - it has been rebuilt once, and altered quite a bit by successive Emperors.

We were asked to have our photos taken with Indians maybe ten times - I wasn't sure if they had come to see the Fort, or us! A couple of walking monuments... very strange. On the way back we were trailed for maybe a kilometer by a 7-8 year old boy, begging for "lunch" and "money" - he was trying to cry, I'm sure of it, but not quite able to. He seemed perfectly healthy, and even showed us his stomach.. looked fine to me! Dave at Evergreen suggested we give beggars food rather than money, but in this case we had none with us, and nobody was about to sell us any.

Anyway, we then walked back to find some dinner. We chose the wrong restaurant. It smelled a bit funny, but it had A/C and we'd been out in the sun a lot, so... but something we ate made us both very very sick.

So out of the restaurant, in to a marble shop - selling beautiful tables, coasters, plates and so on, mainly of white marble with stones set into them. Really beautiful. Back out and.. ah, my stomach. Let's go and find a toilet...
We went back to our hotel, got our bags, killed some time, went to the station and waited for the train. Eventually, after some confusion over whether this was the right train, boarded and spent a very uncomfortable night and morning on the train. All part of the experience!

Then out into the bright heat of bustling Varanasi! Wow, the station was busier than any yet, with crowds of people trying to shepherd us to the right auto stand, good grief just give me some space!!

And into an almost brand new tuk-tuk, vroom off we go.. except he can't take us right to the hotel because it's on one of the Ghats, so he has to drop us and we walk the last half kilometer (or more, I suspect), guided by a very helpful Indian. "Very easy" it wasn't, though no doubt we'd have found it eventually!
Check in, drink some blessed cold Sprite, and into (or, onto - no sheets!) bed, and let the illness get defeated by my wonderful body.

Now I'm lying on the same bed, almost a day later. Just about ready to be a human being again.. just about.

Auroville Endings

The days at Evergreen were really good, with two workshops given by the Point of Convergence on Deep Ecology - Dave, Natasha, Tamar and Amir from Evergreen, plus their friend Mark who works at La Terrace, as well as having just started a small coffee roasting business.

On Monday, after cycling to Financial Services to close our guest account at Auroville, then going to see the Canadian Inuksuk, and finally dropping our Hercules Thriller rented bicycles back at the Visitor's Centre (such awful bikes! No gears, and just hard work on Auroville's dirt roads! Still, it was good excercise cycling all over the place), we went and sat out the back of Dave and Natasha's lovely house at Evergreen.

We sat in a circle and did a little tuning in, a round of names - a small fraction of that "Findhorn Feeling," wow! After running through a timetable for the week, we did a couple of excercises. Firstly, in pairs, holding another person's hand and exploring it with eyes closed - rather like one of the Group Discovery Games, but interestingly only one way - we did not switch roles. I partnered with Mark, and he said he really felt I had "added something" to his hand - that it felt heavier afterwards!

The second excercise had us walking slowly, then more quickly, around the house, looking at interesting objects Dave and Natasha have collected over the years - stones, feathers, porcupine quills, and so on. Eventually we came to rest in front of one object, and were led through really seeing it, feeling it, connecting with it - drawing it - and finally immersing ourselves within it. Very potent stuff! I found myself inside a stone, looking out through the cracks, feeling safe inside my Cave - and then stepping out into the bright sunshine.

On the second day - Tuesday morning - we first did a concentration. Beginning seated, cross legged, with hands resting fully on our knees, and with eyes closed, we very slowly lifted our hands to mid shoulder height, then rotated our palms inwards; moved our palms to meet each other in the center; and then reversed the whole process, to end as we had began. Everyone went through this concentration at their own pace - once only - and I think it took roughly 15 minutes for me. What comes up when we focus in this way is amazing.

Finally, following the end of the Concentration, we individually walked out into the forest to have some time alone with nature. For the other participants, this was time to connect with a being that they would create a mask to symbolise on Auroville's Earth Day celebratory march. As we were not there for Earth Day, it was just a nice time to be outside, really seeing the forest. Kara connected to an ancient whale, where I spent time stroking and studying one of Evergreen's cats, climbing a tree, and watching nature just be.

Goodbye, Evergreen! You were a lovely oasis of peace.

On Tuesday afternoon, then, we finally left Auroville, after almost 3 weeks there. We took a taxi to Pondy bus station (25 minutes, Rs. 163); a bus from Pondy to Chennai (3 1/2 hours, Rs. 104 for both of us!!); a bus from Chennai Bus Station to Chennai Central Train Station (40 minutes; Rs. 8 for us both); and finally a train ride from Chennai to Agra (about 32 hours, Rs. 1400 for us both).

At the station, we went into the international section of the large restaurant they have there - blessed air conditioning, a really good meal for Rs. 70 that we shared, and two cups of "Special Milk" for Rs. 15 a cup. When I asked what was special about the milk, the waiter said "nothing, just milk" - so I had to see... and it was absolutely wonderful, hot milk, perhaps sweetened or just very full fat... yummy!

On the train, I'd opted to put us in Sleeper class - reserved seating, with both of us in upper bunks. The upper bunks stay as bunks the whole time (whereas the middle bunk becomes the backrest for the lower bunk, which everyone sits on) - so we could stay "upstairs" relaxing the whole way. We departed Chennai at about 10pm, so I was soon asleep - curled somewhat uncomfortably around my big backpack, with my small backpack on my chest. I actually got cold during the night!!

Next morning, Wednesday the 15th, we got bread cutlets for breakfast - two heart shaped deep fried slightly spicy something-or-others, a sachet of tomato ketchup, and two slices of white bread. The bread wouldn't fit both the cutlets, so I'm sure I wasn't supposed to make a sandwich. Anyway, it tasted good, and cost Rs. 20 each.
During the day we drank cups of chai at Rs. 5 each; had vegetable biryani for lunch and dinner (a big tinfoil tub; very tasty, but rather heavy) for Rs. 40 a time; drank butterscotch milk for Rs. 15 (cold! Mmmm...), and finally slept fitfully, ready to get off at Agra at 3:45am...

As it turned out, the train was about an hour late, so we didn't get off til nearly 5am. We got a prepaid taxi to our hotel, and sat in the lobby til 8am, and then crashed into a nice room. The owner thankfully told us the Taj Mahal is closed on Fridays; as we were staying Thursday night in Agra only, off we went (after a good if expensive lunch - chocolate milkshake with real icecream!)...

Auroville, India: 25th March - 14th April

After a few days "in between," travelling from Erraid to Glasgow, down to London, then flying to Mumbai, Chennai, and finally taking a taxi we arrived at Auroville..

To me, Auroville is somewhat a contradiction in many ways. It is the second Ecovillage, if it should be called that, that I have visited; situated as it is in east India, there is a large contrast between it and the other Ecovillage I have visited, the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.

With a long term goal of being a "universal city" for some 50,000 residents from all over the planet, it has a way to go - currently 2,000 people call Auroville home. It has a large number of guest houses of varying levels of comfort and facilities, town hall, visitors centre, supermarket, farms, a bakery, a number of places to eat including the Solar Kitchen - built to cook up to 1,000 lunches a day just using the power of the sun.

We chose to stay at one of the more basic guest lodgings - in Evergreen forest, in the green belt surrounding the city-to-be. In fact we are living in a wooden house on stilts, which is fantastic. The only electricity is captured solar; water is pumped up using solar pumps, and some days there isn't quite enough water, and on others the lights go out rather early in the evening. There is a community kitchen, and the other people staying here are very friendly and helpful. They are a reforestation project as well as being a guest house, planting and sustaining TDEF - Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest, which was cleared away in the past.

At the center of Auroville is the Matrimandir, a place to meditate and attempt to achieve a higher state of being. It is a large globe coated in golden discs (as we found out, each disc is coated in about 2,000 small golden tiles, made by sandwiching gold leaf between two plates of glass and then heating the glass to melt it into a single piece. In total they made about 2 million gold tiles over 5 years). Inside the globe is a pair of spiral walkways, arranged almost as a double helix, ascending to the inner chamber.

The inner chamber can seat about 80 people, around a large crystal sphere that continuously has a beam of sunlight directed onto it from above. Concentration feels heightened in the chamber, and I felt very focussed during my time inside.
The whole golden globe is actually raised above the ground; below, the ray of sunlight that passes through the crystal sphere in the inner chamber shines on a much smaller crystal sphere at the center of a beautiful fountain; surrounding the globe are twelve smaller meditation chambers called petals, each dedicated to an attribute (courage, aspiration, etc).

Isle of Erraid - 14th March

Erraid is a tiny island, off the island of Mull, off the island of Great Britain! We left Findhorn on Saturday at 6am, taking the weekly bus that goes to Erraid, via two ferries and some spectacular (though, as I am now acutely aware, unnatural, deforested) countryside.

The roads got narrower and twistier the closer we got to Erraid, with a lot of single track roads, especially once on Mull. Eventually we changed busses, and were taken by Paul a bit further... until the bus could go no further, at which point we put our heavy bags into a trailer pulled by a tractor! On the flat parts we hitched a ride on the tractor too, but walked over the bumpy bits. Usually people get to Erraid by boat, but the sea was too rough that day, so we had to do it "the hard way" - though the walk was welcome after 4 hours or so in the first bus.

The settlement on Erraid consists of one street of 9 houses, actually 5 buildings; a few other buildings; a lighthouse observatory; and not a lot else. They have mains electricity and a couple of telephone lines; dialup internet is available, but only at one house at a time, so there is a connection schedule. They harvest rainwater for drinking and have a well for other water, burn wood for heat, grow a good amount of their own food (though now, through the Hungry Gap they are buying food in). They have only composting toilets, set away from the houses, and with no electric lighting - you can feel the wind on your cheeks! But also look at the stars, clear and bright in the sky with no light pollution...

On Sunday we went on a walk around the island, led by Val, Chris and Britta; we saw sheep, birds and seals. There is no unnatural noise here - no motorways, no aeroplanes. Kara and I made leaps to get onto the Wishing Stone, which is surrounded by water - they say, be careful what you wish for!

Of the 30+ of us that partook of Ecovillage Training, only six went to Erraid for this optional-but-recommended digestive week. I felt bad for those of EVT who had to return to jobs in the "real world" on Monday - what a blessing to be unfettered and free! Of course, I was thinking of the next few months and years - planning and plotting, scheming and wondering. In Canada, can I grow everything we'll need? How much wood will I need to heat us for a year? Where will I be able to get a cheap woodburner? What are zone planning regulations like? Where can I get 5-10-15-100 acres of land that is cheap, has the right location with respect to attracting visitors yet not being too close to a city, and has good soil, water, solar... Wow!

So we spent the week helping in the garden, cooking, and chopping wood; I helped baking bread (I love baking - and the results tasted wonderful!); Kara made beautiful Erraid Rainbow candles, and milked a cow. On Wednesday we had a day trip to the holy isle of Iona, walking up to the top of what I think used to be a hill fort, Dun I, and then back down to the Abbey. It is a very sacred, peaceful place.

I spent a lot of the week recovering from the intensity of EVT, actually - thinking and relaxing, spending time alone, singing a little taize. The idea of voluntary simplicity might be a hard one for many to grasp, and even harder to accomplish in an urban setting; but I found the opportunity to visit somewhere that has all this in place, and working well, a real blessing as well as an eye opener - what do I actually need to live a happy, contented life? Not much, compared to what I had just a few months ago!

EVT

Ok, so I'm filling in this blog from what happened several months ago, to present, and then the main focus will be on my time spent studying permaculture in Ireland - at the same place that Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame started the whole Energy Descent Action Plan thing, Kinsale. I'm hoping to live in a camper van for the two years, too - as a real challenge just to see how environmentally friendly I can be.

This post is a brief summary of the I spent at Ecovillage Training, at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, from the middle of February to the middle of March, 2009, and is also available on another blog focussed on environmental issues in Ottawa, Canada - Living Lightly.

Week 1 at Ecovillage Training, the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland (14 Feb)

The theme of this week has been "people care" and what better way to dive into that than by being part of a group of 30+ new friends? It has been an incredibly intense experience, with group discovery games, dancing, singing, and music; with permaculture, group dynamics, history, and looking to the future; with care, love, curiosity, and tenderness.

After the initial awkwardness of not knowing anyone's names, the group began some serious bonding, the Findhorn way - with a series of activities, long practised, that open us up, and peels back our usual defenses, allowing sharing, support and care to flow amongst the group. It is incredible to observe - I have been through the group discovery games before, during Experience Week (a wonderful one week program at the Findhorn Foundation - I would highly recommend it to anyone). How quickly a group of strangers can become a cohesive group of friends!

The program is an intense one, running for six days of the week, and usually three sessions per day - one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.
One stalwart of the community is that "Work is Love in Action"; meaning, everyone does KP ("Kitchen Party") once a week - that is, washing up! We also have one session of work within the community, and for this I am working in Cullerne Garden, a market garden a few minutes walk from the Park campus.

So, an intense program, split between really examining the countryside and the state of the world, working in gardens, "classroom" sessions about group dynamics while learning the dynamic of a new group, rituals, facts, the wisdom and curiosity of people participating in the activities.
Wow!

Week 2 (21 Feb)

Our second week of EVT has passed in a similar manner to the first: it has been incredibly intense, with the feeling that the week has lasted a month yet passed in a heartbeat. Filled with laughter, passion, awe, and experience.

The theme of this week has been "Fair Share" and so we have focussed on alternative currencies, community projects, community supported agriculture, and local food production. The whole group visited Cullerne Garden for a tour on Monday afternoon, and I returned for my work placement on Tuesday afternoon - in fact I spent the whole afternoon shovelling horse dung. A truly grounding experience!

Cullerne is an organic garden, and the whole of Findhorn Village and the Park are built on sand dunes. Much compost and manure spreading is done, to keep life in the soil. They call Cullerne a market garden, and grow most of the Foundation's leafy greens there. Most of the other vegetables are grown by EarthShare, which we visited on Wednesday.

EarthShare is a community supported agriculture project. Once part of the Foundation, it is now a separate organisation. They grow food for roughly two hundred boxes of food (to feed 3-4 people each) per week; about two thirds of this food is bought by the Foundation to feed the members.

So the group potted up chives, "riddled" potatoes, dug jerusalem artichokes, and lugged 25Kg bags of seed potatoes around! After that, the owners of the next farm over gave us tea, some of their delicious cheese, and a wonderful talk on the difficulties of being organic farmers. Thank you so much, Pam and Nick of Wester Lawrenceton Farm - you were a huge inspiration to the group.

Perhaps the highlight of the week was Thursday afternoon, where the entire group cooked dinner for the community at large - 32 of us in a kitchen generally used by 8. It was an afternoon of chaos, creativity, a couple of burned fingers, lots of flavour... and lots and lots of love. The outcome was fantastic - in this "hungry gap" before the spring produce is available, the community loves the diverse meal laid on by EVT every year. My bulging belly was a testament to how good the food was. Though, of course, it did raise issues - how lucky and blessed we are to have such plenty when others go without.

Every meal here is blessed before it is eaten, and it isn't just a token gesture - the people blessing the food really were thinking of those with less than ourselves. It is so sad to know that world food production could feed the human population, but that due to... well, let's just call it "the system," many are hungry.

As well as all of the above, we have had two birthdays in the group this week - many happy returns, Diego and Biz! Diego is leaving the group too, which is very sad - safe trip back to Brazil!

Week 3 (28 Feb)

Three weeks gone already! This week's theme has been "Earth Care" and consisted of two sections; the first, a good look at sustainable building, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like - culminating with the group building a cob (which is basically moist earth and straw mixed together) cooking stove. The afternoon ended with torrential rain, but the stove is complete, and drying out. While we were building the stove, some of the group cooked pizzas in a cob pizza oven a previous Ecovillage Training group had constructed. They tasted wonderful!

For me the value of the first part of the week was that, in giving an overview, the session leaders were able to focus on what rules of thumb and key factors they had discovered throughout their lives. An invaluable insight, giving me a real sense of what to think about when planning projects in the future.

During the second part of the week, we spent a couple of days in Glen Affric, a couple of hours west of Findhorn. The charity "Trees for Life" works there to restore part of the Caledonian Forest - which now stands at ~1% of it's original area. They are working with the Forestry Commission (the British government arm that is responsible for forestry and timber) to link all the way from the east coast to the Isle of Skye in the west.

Suffice it to say that the two slide presentations we had reemphasized how badly the generations leading to us have ravaged our planet. Forests the world over are in single digit percentages of the area they once covered. We are in the middle of an extinction crisis - we are losing perhaps 150 species per day. The time to act is now...

On the positive side, our time out in the Glen was wonderful. We collected pine cones from native Scots Pines, the seeds of which will be grown and planted out in about two years time. There was snow on the ground so we were unable to plant any trees, but the group had a great time throwing snowballs. Best of all, we could see how quickly Mother Earth can heal herself when we allow her to.

One huge issue is that we have killed off all wolves, lynxes and bears in the UK - so there is nothing to prey on the deer that eat the pine needles.Trees for Life excludes the deer from areas using fences, and both plant saplings out, and allow those that would grow should the deer population be reduced naturally. Their philosophy is to allow nature to do most of the work, and just plant where the forest has been completely eradicated.

Out final week will consist of a design project, working in small groups... It's bound to be an interesting process!

Week 4 (7 Mar)

Week 4 was the final week of Ecovillage Training, and what a week. It began on Sunday with a sweat lodge, which was an amazing experience from start to finish. We started with making prayer bundles, collecting firewood (and planting trees to replace them), continued with taking stones to the fire, drumming, singing, sweating, and ended with sharing soup at the guest lodge. The following morning, I went for a jog followed by meditation - leaving me in a very calm, steady place.

Inside the sweat lodge was intensely hot, incredibly potent and very revealing, though I must admit the awareness I gained there, and outside lying on the cool grass, faded away quickly. Many participants, including me, felt a loss of ego during the process, emerging from the lodge disoriented and dizzy. Kara and others felt a very deep connection with the Earth and the other participants.

On Monday we used Open Space to form our groups for our design projects. If you have not heard of it, Open Space is a fantastic organisational tool that allows any participant with an idea to hold a space devoted to that idea, while the remaining participants circulate, talk, listen and contribute to the spaces they feel drawn to. It is very organic and flowing, and trusts that people will end up where they should be, and is designed around the understanding that, at conferences, people often get most from the coffee breaks!

Anyway, it was a chaotic process, but everyone ended up in a design project of interest to them. In order to gain a Permaculture Design Certificate, which is the most formal qualification of EVT, one must both learn Permaculture basics, then apply them in a design project, and finally present that project to the group. Kara and I filmed a short video about the Ethics and Attitudes of Permaculture as our project, starring our EVT group, a chicken hand puppet, and a very cute toy rabbit!

We began by designing, storyboarding and brainstorming on Monday afternoon; we filmed on Tuesday morning (being at our work departments on Tuesday afternoon!); we did two final pieces of filming and all the editing on Wednesday; and finally presented the film on Wednesday night! Talk about a crash course in video editing - I have never done it before. The film turned out well (though needing much polish before we release it to a wider audience), and we both got our PDCs.

Other groups designed permaculture gardens, whole ecovillages and settlements on areas of land they already owned or had an interest in; one group made a beautiful stone mosaic from local beach stones, and one group designed a new banking fund that would be much more holistic, geared towards investing in sustainable, transition (as in Transition Towns: see Transition Culture for more info) projects - while still generating a return for the investors. All very positive stuff, and great to see people using their strengths to create amazing ideas.

While we were filming we went back out to our cob cookstove - I think it turned out really well! We ended our time at Findhorn with some Homecare (that is, cleaning up the spaces we had lived in for the past four weeks), some sharing, and some very silly games that worked so well because of the closeness of our group after all the time we'd shared together.

Thank you to Craig, Gabrielle, and Biz for their care and support of us during our time with you; thank you to the other EVTers for their openness, willingness to participate, and passion; and thank you to Findhorn for the space where all of the magic we experienced could take place. Now we can see how Peoplecare, Fairshare and Earthcare are all equally important in building community, and we are already putting these principles into action in our own lives!

Day 1 of our travels

11th of February, 2009

After a final day of scrubbing, dusting, hoovering, and giving stuff we don't need away on Tuesday, we were - finally - off. The house is clean and empty, they keys have been handed back to the estate agents, and we have only the things we can (just about) carry on our backs (and fronts. And in our hands...).

We were up and out in plenty of time, took the bus down to Alfreton station, where I left Kara and all the bags, while I walked in to Alfreton to return the house keys. Goodbye, Alfreton! I won't miss you.

On the way in to town, I passed commercial rubbish bins with "Peak Waste" on - how ironic! Crisp packets and empty beer cans fluttered in the wind as I walked past...

The rest of the day was spent either on, or waiting for, trains. Alfreton to Nottingham, to Grantham, to Doncaster, to Edinburgh, to Aberdeen. At Aberdeen we picked up train tickets for our onward journey from Erraid. Then we were met by Pete, Kara's friend from Experience Week at Findhorn, who took us to his flat in Aberdeen and made us very welcome.

Despite being half asleep when we were picked up, we stayed up well into the night chatting about Oil, Bees, and the Nature of Things. Oh, and I tinkered with Pete's laptop. Typical!

... and Endings

2nd February, 2009

So. Here we are. Just about to step off the edge, and into the void - the unknown. I have hung up my programming, uh, fingers, and am busy packing, organising, giving away and panicking.

Eight days to go, before we move out with only the packs on our backs (and possibly the packs on our fronts!). I have lived here - in Derbyshire - for only 7 months; I moved in with Kara in July 2008.

But really, what sort of ending is this? Life is full of Beginnings and Endings, though I'm beginning (excuse me) to see that there are very few true Beginnings or Endings - that whatever happens *now* will influence decisions I make down the road.

This choice we have made, to see Ecovillages first hand, with a long term plan of growing our own - sure, this is a "new" thing. But the seeds were planted a few years ago, when I first read about Peak Oil, and despaired. Or perhaps a few years before that, at school, when in Geography class our teacher told us what non-renewable resources are. Or maybe, just maybe, the ideas and thoughts arose listening to my grandparents, about how many people worked on the farm with them when they were young - compared to just grandpa, one gamekeeper and farmhand full time, and me or one of my cousins as the extra hand at harvest.

Or, in truth, what I am, what I believe, and where I am going is just the culmination of all these experiences - and many more. So today is no more a Beginning or an Ending than any other day?

Today, perhaps. Tomorrow also. But next Wednesday.. well. It's not The End. But it is certainly An End. No more office job, no more stable income, no fixed abode.

Get this - no keys! One of my habits is to pat my pockets frequently to confirm I have with me what I need. Wallet, phone, keys. I sold my car last weekend, so no car keys; no key to work, no bike lock key. No front door key!

Strangely, this strikes me as more abnormal than packing all my (admittedly much reduced) stuff into boxes and sending it off to the four corners of the globe. Habits.. perhaps habits are something we, the Green Movement, need to End. Not the lightbulbs.

Perhaps that is a New Beginning?