Monday, February 12, 2007

Solar panels are the only source of electricity

The Vegan Commune Asia » India » Tamil Nadu » Auroville By Chlo and Jesse January 27th 2007
After Mamallapuram we travelled south with Ryan and Neal to Pondicherry. Pondicherry is a bizarre cross between India and France, where we stayed in a vaguely seedy hotel over a definitely seedy bar. Pondicherry is very clean and middle class and it was a nice place to relax a while. After a few days of relaxation and lots of games of cards with Ryan and Neal, they left, as they only had a week left in India.
We then headed into Auroville, "an experiment in human unity", founded on the ideas of a guru called The Mother. In Pondicherry we had bumped into a girl we had met first in Mamallapuram, who was very enthusiastic about a community called Sadhana forest so this is where we headed and where we have been staying for the past two weeks. We live in a small hut, and go to work in the forest in the morning, (the project aims to restore Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest to the area, which was all chopped down by the colonialists, oh the irony!). Everyone in the community helps cook and clean.
Its a Vegan community in a way that goes beyond food, there is a dry composting toilet (very interesting as we both had the dreaded fever-diarrhea that went round camp last week), solar panels are the only source of electricity so we only have lights on in the toilet and living room at night and thus wake up early and go to bed early. It feels really healthy. We have also been given vegan toothpaste powder (yuk!), shampoo, and soap, to use during our stay. There aren't too many mosquitos here but on the first day Jesse got three ticks, and apparently there are three cobras living in camp! We have seen two in Auroville but none in camp. Very big and very freaky!
We are getting on ok with the vegan food but have to leave for chocolate and pasta occasionally. Thus the most danger to our health is going out on the scooter we've hired, especially when we have three people on it. The scooter is good, except the petrol gauge doesn't work, (we have ran out of petrol twice, once on a random road in the dark), and the light only works when we are revving, thus when we slow to go round corners at night we are plunged into darkness. The scooter is really fun though. We went to a hippy, straight edge (no alcohol, drugs etc.) party last week, that was really fun, we danced the night away, (the point seemed to be to look stupid and not care).
Everyone is really nice in the community, there are about forty adults and ten children. It is really international though our best friends are a couple from Brighton! We are having a brilliant time here and it will be really hard to leave, but we may have to some time next week as we only have a month left. Next we plan to head to Kanyakamari, the southern tip of India.

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