TRACELESS PATH

When I rode back in the taxi on my own from Calcutta airport, the Dum Dum airport, it hit me for the first time that it was over between me and Susan. It was early morning and the airport was a long, long way from the centre of town or it seemed like it anyway, as I rode for miles and miles through the suburb slums of the northern half of the city on my own and without her. The previous evening we had gone out to the Dum Dum in good time for her flight to Delhi which had left at 4 o’clock in the morning. Now I was tired from a long night sitting in an Indian airport without any sleep. I dreaded going back to our hotel room, it would seem so devastatingly empty, and sure enough, when I got there it was. All I could do was sit on the bed, smoke a few Marlboro cigarettes and stare blankly at the walls. A Dum Dum Boy on his own in a big, big city. Somehow those cigarettes didn’t taste so good anymore, they just clogged up my lungs, made me feel even more sick and desolate than I was already, but I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. I had to spend another day in Calcutta before catching my train south to Madras. It felt like a very long time and it was one of the loneliest days I have ever spent in my life.

That day I walked for miles and miles through the city streets, awesome in their spread of humanity, shooting film with my camera, taking pictures of strange people and hidden places. It gave me some kind of solace. I walked for hours and hours, right up and into the late afternoon shadows, swallowed up in the vastness and anonymity of a city with so many millions of people living in it. If ever a landscape threatened to eat me up then that was it. That evening I checked out of the hotel in which I had stayed with Susan and moved into a dormitory in a cheaper hotel across the road. There were a bunch of dope smokers holed up there and for an evening I joined them, in fact it was one of those occasions when I just had half a joint but got completely stoned. Wrecked, blasted, on the point of hallucinating. I was lucky that I didn’t have to make any travel arrangements because when Susan was still in town I had booked my train tickets, got the whole deal sorted, at a high tech booking office especially set up for Westerners in Calcutta railway station.

The journey down to the south to meet Thomas was at least on paper a relatively simple one. There was a 36 hour train ride from Calcutta to Madras, then a couple of days in Madras before going down through Tamil Nadu on the train, and finally at the bottom of the country heading across to Kerala. In Madras I would have to decide whether or not there was any point in going to somewhere like Pondicherry which was further down the east coast of Tamil Nadu and supposedly a place worth visiting, or whether I should just stop off in Madurai a holy pilgrimage town in the middle of the state. I was going to leave my options open, decide all that in Madras. Now that Susan had gone I was on my own in the middle of a huge Indian city, with its incessant noise and seeming chaos. It was the thought of travel, the thought of getting further down the line that kept me going. Somehow there was always the hope that it would fulfil all my wildest dreams somewhere in the unseen future. Throughout the whole time I was in India I would spend hours and hours imagining what the next place I was due to visit was actually going to be like, and it always turned out to be different to how I pictured it in my imagination. Not as colourful, maybe not quite as fantastic, but it even so, never disappointing. Eventually I did manage to get out of Calcutta and of course I survived to tell the tale, but it was hard, hard going. It was funny, although Susan and I had discussed she would be leaving me, I had no idea what the emotional impact of that was actually going to be like. It had knocked me to the floor. It blasted me, left me on my knees, standing in the dust of the hard immensity of India and I had to dig deep into my resources to fully recover. Even though I doubted if I would ever fully recover, I toughened up. I had lost someone I was in love with and I knew I had lost something inside of me as well. The hope of youth, I don’t know. Anyway, when all was said and done, I wasn’t so young anymore.

It felt good when the train to Madras pulled out of Calcutta central station to begin its long trip down to the south. It was called something or other express, all long distance trains in India are called expresses, but to be brutally honest the express part of the equation is a bit of a joke. They are not like an express at all, in some cases anything but. I didn’t mind though, not in the slightest. I was happy to sit by the window, my rucksack above me and my eyes fixed on the wonderful and strange landscapes through which the train passed. India, what an incredible country! It also had to be said that I must have picked up some bug from the street food I had enjoyed so much in Calcutta, possibly eating one plate of chickpeas too many. My guts were feeling rough as hell and it was difficult to build up much of an appetite for anything in the way of train snacks. All I could do was drink cup after cup of hot sweet chai at half a rupee a go. I knew that this could be a dangerous sign. If I didn’t eat I was sure to get weaker and weaker, then I might get really sick and have to hole myself up in some dump of a place for days on end in order to recover. That might then mean missing my rendezvous with Thomas on Kovalam beach in Kerala. All in all the journey down to Madras went smoothly however, there were some pretty godforsaken places the train stopped at on the way, rusted stations standing in the dusty heat that had all kinds of hawkers who appeared seemingly from out of nowhere as soon as the train ground to a halt. They all looked so familiar, I was sure that I had seen some of them before but maybe not, maybe just their brothers and sisters. It seemed a pretty desperate kind of life, and of course it was. People waiting for hours and hours for the next train to pull alongside the platform and then the brief hope of making a few rupees before the train pulled out again. Black faces, blistering sun, faded grass, hard lives in amongst the rail debris of India.

I don’t remember now what I was expecting Madras to be like but it turned out to be a big city port on the east coast and judging from the hinterland of industry which the train made its way through, it was obviously an economic powerhouse for the whole of Tamil Nadu. When I got out of the central station it was early evening and naturally the main thing was for me first of all to find a place to stay. I got a cycle rickshaw which eventually took me to a cheap travellers hotel I had picked out from my copy of Lonely Planet. I wanted to play it safe, not begin some adventure in a place I didn’t know and which might scare the shit out of me if I strayed too far. I ended up getting a bed in one of the dormitories which was of course much cheaper than a room, not that I had much choice as all the rooms were full anyway. I was more than a little worried because my stomach was still not in great shape and I had bleak visions of shitting the bed and stinking the fucking place out. What to do? I just had to hope things would be cool as far as my guts concerned. By coincidence I met up with one of the people who had travelled with me and that Danish guy Anders on the same bus from Kathmandu to Varanasi, now nearly a couple of long months ago. We had a brief chat about our experience in the company of that pathological liar and I was relieved to hear him reach the same conclusions as me with regard to the Danish guy’s character and the incredible web of lies he’d spun. At least I now knew for sure that I hadn’t just embarked on some wild hallucinatory paranoid trip during that first night at the Ganga Guest House as a result of smoking too much dope.

I stayed in Madras for two or even three days and I think that I must have had some vague hope that I was going to meet up with Thomas there. Maybe he'd been on a detour and was still in town, hanging out at the Krishnamurti Foundation reading the words of that great master who declined to be a master. I know that we had arranged to meet in Kerala on Kovalam beach, but somehow I thought that I might catch him before he got there and take the crazy fucker by surprise. It would then be great to travel on down further south together instead of being on my tod. The chance meeting didn’t materialise, nevertheless it was a nice feeling walking the hot and teeming streets of a vast unknown city, hoping I would experience the magic of meeting an old friend. It didn’t happen though and for the most part I walked the streets of the old city where the British had once ruled the roost before fading into dust, and I hung around down by the sea, watching the waves of the Bay of Bengal crash upon the shore and feeling more than a little bit lost. However I was able to do some practical stuff like exchange money, book the next part of my train journey and write letters to people back home, so my time wasn’t wasted. I also experienced the smell of the foulest, most polluted river I had ever seen in my life and I thought that when the Indians let it all hang out they really went for it. It was simply impossible not to gag on the stench.

Although it was cheap which was a definite plus, the place I was staying in was full of really irritating people. Loud mouthed Westerners saying how incredible the beaches in the south were, how they were there just for the sun, how primitive and stupid they thought the rest of India to be. There was one bastard who just didn’t shut up, and in the evening sitting in the garden, all I could hear was this guy droning on and on about all his experiences in what seemed to me to be the most moronic Scottish accent I had ever heard in my life. I wished that I had the focus sometimes to step in and take things by the balls; in other words tell the fucker to shut up if he didn’t have anything interesting to say. The reality of course was that I just sat there quietly fuming inside, paralysed and seemingly unable to do anything about it. It was just one of the many countless thousands of times in my life when I have been in such situations, entertaining fantasies of setting things straight but simply not having the guts to do so, although at that moment in time it was possible my guts were not strong enough to be tested anyway. The next stage of my journey down to Kerala was a night train from Madras to the city of Madurai which lay right in the middle of Tamil Nadu. For some reason I really was now convinced that if I got to Madurai I would meet up with Thomas. The conviction was so strong it dissuaded me from taking a possibly interesting detour further down the coast to the town of Pondicherry and the futuristic ashram community of Auroville. This particular night trip to Madurai was memorable for the fact that it was one of the few times I had been on an Indian train which wasn’t completely packed. I don’t know the reason why but it meant that when I got to Madurai early the next morning I felt completely refreshed as I'd had a good night’s sleep on the train without any interference from nosy parkers or crafty fuckers trying to steal my berth.

Madurai turned out to be a heavy duty major South Indian holy place of pilgrimage, dominated by a group of ancient Hindu temples in the centre of the city which attracted pilgrims from all over the country. I booked myself into a basic hotel pretty much on one of the streets next to the temples and then soon was on my way to check things out. I was walking around feeling excited that I would bump into Thomas at any minute and that at last I would have some company, but again it was not to be. Not that it really mattered if truth be told, as much as anything it was just the anticipation of that chance meeting I was holding onto. Madurai was intense and it was also very hot. Walking around for hours and hours feeling like an outsider and sitting in the grounds of strange temples, it felt like I was now a long way from home, a long way from Kopan even, and a long way from any of my friends. The worship of the Hindu gods and goddesses in the temples didn’t really mean anything to me, although I tried hard to get some kind of feeling for it, but there was no real connection. Eventually I just felt sorry for myself, the only thing I had to keep me company was my Walkman and my tape selection which was beginning to sound a bit tired. Playing Van Morrison in the scorching heat of Madurai didn’t really go that well together, and I guess I needed to find a tape stall to buy some good local sitar and tabla music. Something by Ravi Shankar possibly!

One of the advantages about getting further south was the fact that it was now possible to get good coffee. Hot sweet coffee in little metal cups, it was easy to sink eight or so of them during the course of a day, no problem. I ended up staying two days in Madurai, and by the end of the second I was more than a little tired of my own company. I spent a lot of time walking through the maze of crowded streets, sitting in the temple grounds for hours on end, staring at the murky waters of the holy bathing pools, feeling isolated whilst in the middle of countless thousands of colourful people full of life and speaking in tongues I would never be able to understand. There was no one to talk to and the hotel I was staying at was pretty rough, hot and noisy. There was simply no escape from the sounds of the street in my room and I spent a good many hours just lying on my bed, blankly staring up at the ceiling fan pushing the hot air around. On top of that, my guts were still bad and I think that a part of me was now getting close to the point of having had enough of the food, the heat, and the constant noise which all came as part of the India experience. For the first time since beginning my trip I began to dream of cool breezy walks back home with fresh air filling my lungs. If I hadn’t been on such a modest budget I should have just bitten the bullet and holed myself up in a really good hotel, in other words been a bit easier on myself. This would have been the sensible thing to do and it would have given myself a chance to recover, but I just didn't have the bread.

I was very glad that by the end of my second day in Madurai I had booked to get the next train to Trivandrum, a city down on the Malabar coast in the far south west of Kerala and a stone’s throw away from Kovalam beach. I would then be close to the end of my journey to meet up with Thomas again, and for the first time I began to worry about what I would do if he wasn’t there. I had kind of expected to bump into him either in Madras or Madurai but there hadn’t been the slightest sign of him. I guess it was now possible that by the time I got to Kovalam he would not be there either. He might have split the scene to embark on an entirely new adventure, leaving all thoughts of meeting up with me far, far behind him. What the fuck was I supposed to do then? Run back up the whole of India again and search out Susan in Dharamsala? Fuck knows! I was probably just painting the worst possible picture in my mind and it no doubt had something to do with the fact that I was physically low and also pretty fed up with myself. I was looking forward to seeing a familiar face and I was probably trying to protect myself against the worst case scenarios by anticipating all possibilities beforehand. I would just have to wait and see. The best thing I could hope to happen, of course, would be to find Thomas lying there on the golden sands of the beach, his face beaming with delight when he saw that I had made it through.

The train journey from Madurai to Trivandrum took around 6 or 8 hours and when I arrived in Trivandrum it was mid afternoon. Kerala was pleasant, very pleasant indeed, nice and warm but not too warm because of the fresh breezes blowing in off the Arabian Sea. It was a world away from the heat, the dust, and general hard living of the plains, such as the interior of Tamil Nadu where in places like Madurai everything had seemed a little too intense. Trivandrum was clean, relaxed and bright, it even didn’t seem too crowded. I immediately liked it and after Madras and Madurai I felt a mixture of relief and exhilaration. Kerala also happened to be a Marxist Indian state and there were huge billboards of Lenin on the street corners and crossroads painted in bright red colours, which was all a little bit weird in my eyes but thoroughly fascinating all the same. From Trivandrum it was just a simple question of getting the local bus down to Kovalam beach, ten or so miles away. I will never forget the happiness I felt walking on those golden sands of Kovalam with the beautiful waters of the Arabian Sea crashing on the shore beside me. I knew I had made it! All the way back up in Nepal I had agreed with Thomas to meet him a few months further down the road in the far, far south of India and now at least I knew I had fulfilled my part of the bargain. Whether he had managed to do so as well was something I still had to find out. There were plenty of places where it was possible stay, shacks and beach houses, and I finally chose one at the far end of the beach which looked like it had a nice restaurant.

Once I’d completed the process of booking myself in and sorting out my room, which was basic and kind of sandy, I went out to see if Thomas was around. After only ten minutes or so I found him, just like that, lying on the sands doing sweet fuck all, just like I thought I would, and it was a very happy reunion! The last time we had seen each other was back in Kathmandu and since then it felt like I had lived a whole other life, full of feelings I would never be able to adequately describe to him. He was surprised at my physical condition and said that I looked about half my size from when we had parted. He did look genuinely concerned and it was then that I realised just how much my constant bad guts, which had started back up in Calcutta due to all that street food I’d eaten, had taken it out of me. That and of course the devastation of no longer being with Susan. I was weak and thin, in need of rest, in need of decent food and lots of it. It was lucky for me I had come to the very place where I would be able to find such things. Kovalam catered for Western tastes in a big way and what I felt I needed more than anything else at that point was some familiar food without spices which I could eat a lot of. All the beach restaurants offered Western dishes as well as local Kerala food and I knew that after a few months slogging hard on the authentic cuisine circuit, I was due for more than a few plates of chips and bowls of banana fritters. Food to build my strength up again, kind of trashy food if truth be told, but that was fine by me.

There was no doubt Thomas looked like he had fared better than me on his travels, in terms of physical health at least. His hair was as blonde as ever, his body was now deeply tanned and his eyes were shining. He had certainly not lost any weight, in fact if anything he had put some on and judging from his appetite which was in evidence later that evening, it was not hard to see why. On his route to Kerala, Thomas told me he had spent time in Calcutta doing voluntary work at Mother Theresa’s and he said he had also spent a while in a place called Mahabalipuram down on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, just up the road from Pondicherry and the Sri Aurobindo ashram. He had checked out some Hindu gurus and spent a lot of his time reading Krishnamurti, but he hadn’t fallen in love like I had done and even if I did look like a complete fucking wreck I wouldn’t have changed that experience for the world. He had now been in Kovalam for about a week and by all accounts he had just sat on the beach, swam in the incredible waters of the Arabian Sea and smoked more than a little bit of finest Kerala weed. Nothing wrong with that! I managed to have a swim in the sea before the evening and already I was beginning to feel like I was on the road to recovery. To bathe in the clean and beautifully warm waters of Kovalam was like a dream come true for me, diving into the waves and letting them all wash over me was bliss.

Thomas was settled in a place he shared with another German, a young guy called Gregor. To put it bluntly Gregor was a nutcase of a taxi driver from Munich barely over five feet tall whose outrageous behaviour even embarrassed Thomas, but as I was to find out over the next few days he was prepared to make excuses for Gregor to quite a ridiculous degree. Gregor was younger than us, he was totally into getting smashed off his face on weed and to that end he spent all his money on the local stuff, then sat down and smoked huge piles of it. To my mind Gregor's humour was not sick in a good or funny way, but sick in a cruel and irritating way and on more than one occasion during our stay in Kovalam I had to express my surprise and disappointment in the strongest possible terms that Thomas could bring himself to hang around with him. Maybe it was because they were both German, but Thomas indulged Gregor, let him off the hook, and he was especially impressed by the fact that on his way to India, Gregor had been one of the very few Westerners at the time to visit the Arab state of the Yemen. This definitely qualified Gregor as an explorer in Thomas's book and despite the fact I told him the end result was that Gregor was still a total asshole, he was reluctant to criticise him too strongly. He seemed to look upon Gregor as just a young German guy mouthing off a bit too much but who was basically alright. Looking back, in hindsight I now suspect that the reason Thomas held off laying into Gregor too hard was because he was able to have a good supply of free weed if he hung around with him. Gregor was buying huge amounts left right and centre then smoking it like there was no tomorrow, whilst being happy enough to share it round at the same time.

The restaurant at the place I stayed specialised in cooking original Kerala fish curries and despite the fact I was supposed to be vegetarian, Thomas and I ate one there every day. They were more than excellent, they were fucking superb in fact, and served up in big helpings as well. After the loneliness I had felt on the long journey down to Kovalam it was now just great having a big meal with a good friend, then sitting around for ages whilst talking quasi philosophical bullshit which had a decidedly Eastern flavour and drinking hot sweet tea. And all the time in the background there was the sound of the waves crashing on the beach of Kovalam lying beside the Arabian Sea! This for me was the good life for sure, and for once I felt like I had earned it. Most of the people staying at Kovalam had come purely for the sun and for lying on the beach all day. They were a completely different kind of person from the Westerners I had been in contact with in Nepal and North India. The majority of them weren’t big India travellers as such, some might have been to Goa, but that was about it. They simply weren’t interested, just flew straight into Trivandrum and were in India for only a couple of weeks, staying on the beach the whole of that time. All they wanted was the sea and the sun and at Kovalam they got both those things in generous quantities. Fair enough really, at least they knew what they wanted and were happy enough because they knew that, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they would hate some of the places I had already ended up in during my trip. In comparison to them I was a bit of a wanderer, in a small time way, full of dreams and restlessness and probably not half as sure as they were about what it was they wanted from life. I realised that apart from Thomas, it was now going to be extremely unlikely that I would meet any of the people I had shared my time with during the month long meditation course I'd taken at Kopan. We were now in a whole different world and it felt that I was a long way from the mountains and The Buddha, which was more than a little bit sad, but at least we were supposed to heading down to Nilambe where Godwin awaited us.

Kovalam was really a break for us before we went across to Sri Lanka and for me especially it was a time to build up my strength again after the rigours of the journey so far. Consequently we did a lot of lying around in the sun, smoking weed, body surfing in the waters, and usually once a day going for a long walk around the coast. Some of the waves down there were pretty huge and at the right time of year Kovalam was frequented by some serious surfers who were on the circuit, whatever that circuit was. I remember one time I went in the water, badly misjudged a crashing wave, and as it tumbled me over beneath the surf I realised the weight of the water was powerful enough to crush my back. A bit of a scare! I was stoned at the time as well and it bought home to me the dangers of going in for a dip when I was off my face. All in all though the waves were pretty fucking tremendous and there was nothing to beat the excitement of wading into the waters, seeing some real high rollers up ahead and diving right into them. Guess the only negative about this period of recovery was that I was beginning to smoke marijuana again, even if it was in quantities which, when compared to days gone by, were relatively modest.

When we were on the beach it was usually me, Thomas and Gregor, and often Gregor would prove to be a real irritation, well, to me at least. One time I stood up and left in disgust after he threw some sand in the bowl of a begging leper who plied his trade along our particular stretch of the sands. It was just well over the top! The beggar stared at him in disbelief and uttered curses before hopping off. Gregor was also a cheeky little fucker with the women who came along and sold fresh fruit, as he enjoyed letting them cut up his fruit and then holding back payment of his pineapple or whatever the fuck it was he was buying until they were seriously wound up. He just loved it and he really didn’t give a fuck what me, Thomas, or anyone else for that matter, thought about him. He was just into smoking a hell of a lot of weed and being a complete and utter little bastard along with it. In some ways it might have been the case that Gregor did have a truthful take on things and just mercilessly played his hand. The begging leper for example was simply astounded when Gregor threw the sand into his bowl and likewise I was beside myself with outrage over what he had done. The convention was obviously to give the beggar some coins along with a look of deepest pity. As a consequence of this there was indeed an arrogance to the beggar, a lazy sense of expectation every time he rolled up to us along the shore that he was going to get something. Gregor throwing sand into his bowl was appalling on one level but on another, although I would never have admitted it at the time, it was brave and really quite funny. It was seemingly such a disgusting thing to do, but on a deeper level, whether Gregor was conscious of it or not, it felt like it was some kind of wake up call. It is something I have always remembered, a powerful moment and totally unlike the countless times I had dropped coins into Indian begging bowls whilst making hardly any eye contact with the people at all, in fact if truth be told just wanting to get them out of my sight. On a deeper level it was possible that Gregor was just being more honest by throwing sand into the bowl and staring right back into the leper’s face to see what he was going do about it.

There was a guy called Kennard who came to the restaurant each evening to collect a bag of boiled vegetables which he then took away and ate in his room. Along with his bag of boiled vegetables he also carried a huge ghetto blaster which might have made the constant travelling he did rather difficult. He was a scary guy, really quite frightening to look at because he had no teeth whatsoever, despite which he liked to smile a lot. He spent all of the day on the beach but he hardly ever went in the water, and he wore a pair of tiny thongs which left virtually the whole of the cheeks of his arse on display. He would walk up to Kovalam village at the top of the cliffs above the beach and the locals would really get wound up at the sight of him. Throughout India it was sensible to show at least some sensitivity to the dress codes but Kennard had no shame, absolutely no shame whatsoever in that regard. He wandered through the village each day, smiling toothlessly and wearing just a pair of thongs wedged into his crack. Kennard had come to India from the United States and he told me and Thomas that he had lived on tropical beaches for the last ten years of his life. On this trip he had spent a few months in East Africa and about a month so far in India, virtually the whole of that time in Kovalam. He didn’t think much of it and he had no desire whatsoever to see anything else of India apart from Goa. He would simply stay in Kovalam until it was time to go on up the coast. Beaches were his thing, he was heavily into beaches. The light and the glorious warmth of the sun, the roar of the crashing waves, that was all he was into. After Goa he told us that he would go back to the States and eventually down to Mexico where he said he also spent a lot of his time. I don’t know what kind of money he lived on but he talked of having received compensation from bad dentistry and judging by the completely fucked up state of his mouth he must have received quite a bit.

Thomas couldn’t work out whether Kennard was gay or not and I think at one point he even thought of trying it on with him, but even Thomas was put off by Kennard’s strange appearance. He really was a weird looking dude, like no one I had ever seen before or since, but he was also incredible to talk to. He spoke slowly but very clearly in a lazy American drawl that was from straight out of the southern states and he always made it seem like he had all the time in the world to talk with you, which he very probably did. He had a really strange diet, boiled vegetables and pretty much nothing else. He never drank alcohol or took any drugs which in a place like Kovalam was quite exceptional if you were there as a long term resident. He said that he used to take a lot of acid and I could easily see that when he said he took a lot he meant it. He looked like a space traveller of the first order, like something from another planet, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if on some occasions he had gone pretty far out into unchartered territories of the mind. Now his life comprised of going from one tropical beach to another, hanging around on the sands for hours and hours and hours wearing just a crazy pair of thongs and a baseball cap. Not even doing that much swimming. Needless to say he had an absolutely unbelievable suntan.

Between times getting stoned, feeling disgusted with Gregor with his sick Bavarian sense of humour, and swimming around in the glorious surf of the Arabian Sea, me and Thomas also made the practical arrangements that were necessary to get over to Sri Lanka. There was a flight between Trivandrum and Colombo and it was outstandingly cheap for the 45 minutes or so that you spent in the air. It only took a couple of trips into Trivandrum for me to get things booked up. As usual there was a real fight at the airline office to make sure you got served when it was your turn because the locals were razor sharp when it came to pushing in right at the front of the queue. Thomas had in fact already got his ticket for Colombo before I had arrived and by the time I had successfully booked myself up he due was to fly across to Sri Lanka a day or two ahead of me. It was quite exciting thinking about what was to come. We really let our imaginations run wild over what Sri Lanka was going to be like, after all there was a lot trouble over there at that time, with the Tamil Tigers in the north and the Sinhalese JVP in the south of the island. Both groups were heavily into killing people and blowing places up. They were either seriously evil terrorists or true freedom fighters, depending on which side of the fence you were on. It was going to be heavy at times, we were pretty certain of that, but we had now got to the point where there was no turning back, nothing was going to stop us from going to take a look. And of course we had Nilambe meditation centre in the middle of the island for us to head to, hopefully for an encounter with Godwin, the meditation teacher who ran the place. We felt like big adventurers. We felt like we were boldly going into the unknown although that of course was obviously a load of rubbish because people went there all the time. Nevertheless, going to Sri Lanka for me and Thomas represented a trip into something strange and exotic, a place with a bit more of an edge to it than India, and India was overwhelming enough.

As the time got closer to depart we became more and more excited and more than a little bit restless. After well over a week of life on the beach with the sun gods and goddesses, we had both grown bored of it and were ready for something new. Thomas of course was fit already but I also now felt good and fully recovered from the rigours of my journey down to meet him. We had begun exploring some of the places just along the coast from Kovalam by this point, and the further we walked the more deserted the beaches became. They seemed quite wild and lonely places, where huge coconut trees were swaying in the breeze above empty stretches of sand with just a couple of ancient looking fishing boats on them. One time we came across a bunch of local fishermen pushing their boat back up on the shore and far from being idyllic it looked like it was a hard life to live, physically punishing and all for what almost certainly was very little in the way of return. When Thomas flew off a day or so ahead of me I was left with no one to talk to apart from Kennard and suddenly Kovalam, which had seemed so blissful barely a week ago, now felt pretty empty and boring. I was more than ready to leave, even little Gregor had moved on, no doubt to disgust more travellers further on up the road during the course of his strange, strange trip.

My flight from Trivandrum to Colombo turned out to be a real killer. It was over three hours late leaving Trivandrum airport and whilst waiting we were all marooned in a boiling hot departure lounge which had no safe drinking water and an awful lot of hungry mosquitoes. Needless to say the place was absolutely packed. Everyone was there to get the same flight and I wondered at times whether there would be enough room on the plane for all of us to get on it. I hung around waiting in the departure lounge with a gentle giant of a Swiss guy called Urs who just chained smoked cheap Indian cigarettes the whole time we were there, but displayed through his broken English a great sense of humour. We were supposed to arrive in Colombo mid evening but by the time the plane eventually landed it was close to midnight and it was with a great feeling of relief that I walked out of customs and immigration to see Thomas. He had taken the trouble to ride out from Colombo and had been waiting there for three or four hours.

The whole Sri Lanka scene immediately felt different to India, very different indeed, definitely an island, and definitely one which had a lot of trouble going on. There was some seriously heavy airport security for a start with gun totting soldiers by the dozen walking around eyeing everyone with suspicion. Just by riding into the city from the airport it was apparent how much more influenced Sri Lanka was by the West than India. Better roads, more cars and loads of Coca Cola signs. The air was also different; fresher, sadder, wilder, making you feel more vulnerable, an island air full of the strangest spices. But what was most noticeable to me was that for the first time since arriving in Asia there was an absence of the Om, Sri Lanka simply didn’t have the Om Vibration. No matter, we had made it south and onto the Emerald Isle where Nilambe Meditation Centre awaited us once we got to Kandy.