This is the first of a short series of pieces on a trip I made a couple of years ago to the pilgrimage town of Tiruvannamalai in the state of Tamil Nadu, South India, 2019. The write ups are in dairy form, sometimes with double entries for a single date due to notes taken at the time either in my Yuva notebook or on the memo pad of my Samsung phone.
On one level this fourth visit of mine to Tiruvannamalai saw me miss my target in failing to stay in Ramanasramam despite the fact I’d booked a room there. Guess it was a case of arriving in town too early and then subsequently running out of steam, which I think was mainly down to the heat and a difficult first couple of days upon entry. On another level however it was a trip which was more than worthwhile by way of visiting Athithi Ashram for the first time, where I enjoyed sitting in the company of Swami Hamsananda for the duration of his daily satsangs which took place each morning from 9.30 onwards in the ashram meditation hall. A devotee of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi who had lived in Tiruvannamalai for over the last 40 years, Swami Hamsananda opened me up to bhakti – devotion and surrender – to that Other Power by way of having total faith in Bhagavan.
A week or so before I left for Tiruvannamalai I had a long conversation in the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe with my old friend Anita who had just returned after staying there for a couple of months. We had both made a trip to Tiruvannamalai together in 2017, when we had stayed for a few days in Ramanasramam before heading further down south to the ancient temple city of Madurai located in the heart of Tamil Nadu. This was in order to visit the birth place of Ramana Maharshi which was located in the village of Tiruchuzhi and to visit the place of his self-realisation which was in the city of Madurai itself. During the course of our talk Anita wrote down the following on a piece of paper and handed it to me –
Swami Hamsananda
Athithi Ashram
11 G/1 Manakula Vinayagar Street
Sri Ramanasramam PO
Tiruvannamalai 606 603
16/2
Here we go again, time once more for the Mysore to Chennai swing back shuffle ride. What I mean by that is a car journey to Mysore with Sonam Tashi then the 2.15 pm Shatabdi Express from Mysore to Chennai with just one stop along the way, namely Bengaluru mega city of the south, not quite as mega as Chennai maybe, but gettin’ there, no doubt about that. Looking at a 9.30 evening Chennai arrival, then it is a case of running the gauntlet of Chennai central railway station to the pre-paid taxi stand and booking a cab to the New Woodlands Hotel in the Mylapore district of town. Should get there by 10 if all goes well, the hotel that is, then it’s just a question of going to the reception and checking into my single non a/c room as booked a couple of weeks ago back in London on Booking.com. The next morning there will be the booking of a car from the New Woodlands travel desk for the 3 to 4 hour ride further south into Tamil Nadu, to the temple town of Tiruvannamalai, location of Ramanasramam. Yes, you might be right in thinking that I have done this deal before!
Flaked out last night after going to a 900 rupee per head buffet meal at the swish Purple Palms, a resort to the west of Kushal Nagar on the way up into the hills of Coorg. Khangla Metok and I had gone with Sonam Tashi, the three of us being the guests of Khen Rinpoche, the abbot of Dzongkar Choede Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Hunsur, home of the most popular lama dances in South India. Purple Palms had been packed with punters so we’d sat outside in a quiet corner of its pleasant gardens, moon shining high in the sky above us and with a table to ourselves. Read a bit on my Kindle when I got back to the house from Purple Palms, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer I do believe, an excellent book of high mountain drama, before crashing out. I was in bed for something like 8 or 9 hours before eventually getting up at 6.43 am this morning, when it was then a case of going straight into the shrine room for my meditation which took the form of a 108 on the in breath and the out breath observation. Yesterday was a tiring day, final one before hitting the road, tying up various bits and pieces, along with all the usual thoughts and expectations which follow in the wake of the trail I will soon be setting out upon. Flaked out early then, but at various points throughout the night there were the settlement dogs barking, so I slipped in and slipped out of that ole’ flat earth consciousness, which meant a few strange dreams thrown into the mix as well, before I finally hauled myself out of the sack in the early morning light.
Now in the train and writing these words on my Shatabdi Express ride. Just as well I did a double check on my ticket because initially I went to the wrong carriage – C3 37 instead of C2 37 – and those things can make all the difference somewhere further on down the line when you find that you have to scramble for your luggage in order to shift. Train emptied somewhat at Bengaluru which was a bit of a surprise, usually it is the opposite as that is where it fills up for the second leg, the 5½ hours to Chennai, but not his time around. The unexpected emptiness of the carriage enabled me to shift a few seats back so as to get more leg room which, needless to say, was a bit of a bonus, especially when you’ve got more than a few hours of an inter-state journey still to go. The Shatabdi Express is great in terms of delivering a fast, smooth ride and if only they’d turn the a/c down a little bit in order for the temps to be not so quite shiver me timbers then that would be wonderful. Especially since as I write this, we are now past both Katpadi and Jolarpettai Junctions, reaching ever further into the dark of south India and where the sun has gone down an hour or so ago.
17/2
Writing these words in Chennai. First did this trip 8 years ago, no sorry, 7, as the first one was back in 2012 and now we are in 2019. It takes me across south India west to east, from the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe to Mysore, then Mysore to Chennai with a late evening arrival in Chennai central on the Shatabdi Express, before a taxi ride from the railway station to my hotel. For the last 3 trips, including this one, I have stayed in the New Woodlands Hotel in Mylapore which has rooms on offer at various levels of quality. My reason for always staying in Woodlands is that it has a very good travel desk from which I can easily book a car to take me down to Tiruvannamalai. This time around I have one ordered for 10 the next morning with the hope of arriving in Tiruvannamalai early afternoon or mid afternoon at the latest. It is all pretty familiar to me by now, I mean I have followed this same pattern for my last three trips – 2016, 2017 and now this one in 2019 – and it has always worked out well enough. The first trip I made to Tiruvannamalai back in 2012 was slightly different in that I stayed the night in Chennai at a place called the Himalaya in Triplicane, the Muslim quarter of town and not too far from Chennai central railway station, as on that occasion Woodlands had been fully booked, but even so I had still used their travel desk the next morning.
So this is my life, this is what I do, I mean not all the time of course, but at least for part of it, pretty much each time I come out to India, or certainly it has been like this for the last few years. Guess I am making the trip to Tiruvannamalai primarily in the hope of doing some quality meditation and to find inspiration for my spiritual practice by way of being in the place of the guru Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. From Friday 22nd I will be staying at Ramanasramam for 6 days and nights until Thursday 28th when I return to Chennai so as to get the Shatabdi Express the following morning to take me back to Mysore on March 1st. Before my 6 days in the ashram I have 5 days staying at the Athena Hotel, a mid to supposedly upper-range place in Tiruvannamalai booked mainly because it was one of the few which still had rooms available. The reason for all the hotels being booked, and all the ashrams too, is because it is a full moon on the 19th of the month when the town will get loads of visitors, people in the form of pilgrims and devotees of Lord Siva who will do the moonlit walk around the holy hill of Arunachala. So we shall see how the Athena Hotel stacks up, see how convenient or not its location turns out to be in regard to Ramanasramam. Hope it is not too far, hope that the 1 km distance from town as per the description given on Booking.com is correct and that the reality is not they have pulled a fast one and that it is stuck out in the middle of nowhere, in regard to which there is the distinct possibility. In other words I hope I will be able to walk Ramanasramam without too much in the way of hassle because if it is hassle then it could be a bit of a drag, a downer, a bummer. Well I shall just have to wait on that, see what the situation is when I get there.
Hopes and fears! Trips are so often predicated on these two things, which can be more than a little bit tiresome. Tuning into one’s inner voice, discovering you are still wanting the best for yourself and trying to push away the bad. The dualistic dialogue of the unenlightened is what I guess you might call it, rather than a simple acceptance of what is, whatever is handed down to you by those invisible forces we will never catch sight of. Travelling solo, on my own, just myself, and if I so wish I can keep all contact down to a bare minimum, hardly need to raise myself above or beyond the basics of interaction in order to get things done, really don’t have to do any more than that. Solitary bird, flyin’ high in the sky. If that is what transpires then we shall see what I have to say about it, but sailor boy lost might also kick in too, find me getting into conversations with others merely for the company. Hope not, it would be nice to go beyond that, inhabit the realm of the confident alone and to be happy there, to rest easy.
Decent enough night’s sleep considering the standard of room I’d booked, which was a cheap one, for my one night stay in Woodlands. Had to keep the blades of the ceiling fan spinning at a pretty fast clip so as to stop the mosquitoes from landing on me and taking a bite, but apart from that there were no complaints, not that that is a complaint, more an observation since to complain about mosquitos in India would be a bit of a nutty thing to do. Still, it is time to face the fact I might not be the person I crack myself up to be, at least not in the sense of how I would like others to see me. Guess reality comes crashing in from time to time, dumps me back at square one as a consequence, like I’m starting all over again, seemingly never ridding myself of this pollution. Heat confusion talkin’ here, or maybe something deeper whilst above my head the ceiling fan keeps on spinnin’.
18/2
Yesterday went something like this –
250 rupee breakfast at Woodlands in their Vrindavan restaurant. Paid for in cash because it was not included in the booking I’d made through Booking.com which at the time only had OVO rooms available. Bargain basement deals, from which you just got the raw statistic of a place to stay for the night with no extras.
The car ride from Woodlands to Tiruvannamalai came in at 4800 rupees and with a healthy tip to the driver for a no messin’ delivery it meant I didn’t get much change out of 5500 at the end of it all. So be it, I wanted to get there quick and for that to happen there was a price to be paid, quite literally. It took 1 hr 40 mins from Woodlands jus’ ridin’ through southern Chennai until we got to the toll booth and the highway, more or less all of it on the slow crawl due to the intensity of the traffic. Further down the road, over 2 hours into the journey, there was a stop for delicious plain dosas, but apart from that it was on with the show, speeding through the countryside of Tamil Nadu in order to reach my destination. My arrival in Tiruvannamalai was different this time around due to road works which meant we had to hit the dust tracks by the railway line in order to get over to the other side because the usual route was blocked, but it was little more than a minor diversion, nuthin’ to get too excited about. Unfortunately this didn’t stop it from being the case that the Athena Hotel did indeed turn out to be some way out of town, definitely more than the 1 km walk from the centre as indicated on Booking.com. So it was a realisation of my worst fears, with the distance more like 3 km if I were to hazard a guess, and therefore something of a bitter disappointment.
Predictably enough I experienced an initial feeling of crushing disorientation over this, with my main thought being just how was I going to make it to the ashram each and every day without gettin’ run over, because the road the hotel was on was busy. Miserable thoughts if truth be told, and it took me a little while to steady myself, to get back on track, to come to terms with the reality of the situation, which was that I’d stiffed it and booked a duffer of a place in which to stay. Guess my arrival at the Athena Hotel was mid-afternoon, something like 2.30, and I soon had to fight those worries of how was I going to stand it there for the next five days, how was I going to make it to the ashram without breaking a leg due to being so far out of town. Goes to show that I have to accept these things sometimes just go with the territory, in the eyes of the bigger picture they are nothing, absolutely nothing, despite my feelings of quiet rage over having ended up in the Athena.
19/2
Mid afternoon and this Athena Hotel is doing my head in! Room cleaned after being out for the morning? No chance, still not done at the third time of asking, meaning service here is the pits! Things like this can be a hack off when forkin’ out the bread I’m forkin’ just to fuckin’ stay here. I will just have to see how things are when I get back after another excursion, in the meantime here is the order of my day so far whilst I take a pit stop in this pit of a room and write these words.
After visiting Ramanasramam first thing and wandering around its temples a little while, I had located Athithi Ashram by 9.15 and was sitting with Swami Hamsananda. In other words I was there for his morning satsang in the ashram meditation hall, thanks to Anita who had pointed the way to him for me when she had got back to Bylakuppe a few weeks ago. Sat with Swami Hamsananda, listening to him and meditating with him from 9.30 until just gone 12. Enjoyed his talk, it helped to clear some lingering questions I had, questions related to doubt and confusion as to the path I was on. Good to be able to sit there and listen to a man who had complete devotion when it came to having Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi as the ultimate guru in this life.
It began to make sense to me, the extent of the guru’s presence through space and time, how it can be just as real now as when he was alive so that I was able to relate to the presence of the guru beyond such limitations as the physical body. Maybe it’s the place I’m in, simply being in Tiruvannamalai and right in the heart of it, at the foot of the holy hill Arunachala where devotion is just a question of faith and surrender. It was explained to me in a way which made perfect sense and I was so glad to get it from a living person in the form of Swami Hamsananda, not just from books, because it felt like the human connection had been a long time in coming. When the talking stopped it was time for meditation, where I sunk into a state which I had been waiting for, but up until that point without exactly knowing why.
Ate lunch at the Athithi Ashram after falling into conversation with one of the devotees who were there with me listening to Swami Hamsananda, and it was after lunch when I headed back to the Athena Hotel, where I succumbed to those feelings of anger and irritation expressed above by way of not having my room cleaned. But really, was it too much to ask considering the amount of money I was paying, which was close to 4000 rupees a night? Sometimes the reality of the situation just stinks! Before that however, a good thing happened by way of me going into a shop next to the Ramana Maharshi Supermarket from where I picked up a copy of Living By the Words of Bhagavan which was written by David Godman. It was a book which once I got back to my still not cleaned room in the Athena Hotel, I immediately began to read.
Up until that point my only reading material on this particular trip has been an Osho book I picked up the other day from Sapna Book House in Mysore, thinking it might be a bit of fun. Well, I have been slowing down on that one because over 400 pages of words from the man once known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh might well have turned out to have been more than what I had bargained for, way, way more. In other words, I’d had enough of it. After an afternoon reading Living By the Words of Bhagavan in my room, I walked down to Ramanasramam in order for me to sit in the Main Temple on a window ledge where I did a 162 breathing meditation with a break in the middle to take a breather, so to speak, before continuing with the practice.
20/2
Shifted places yesterday and glad that I did so. The Athena Hotel had been getting me down, soulless comfort on the edge of town with dreadful service and all for what was actually quite a lot of money. I had done a couple of walks back to it early evening time from Ramanasramam so as to save on shelling out the hundred rupee fare it would have cost me to return by rickshaw, a price I could not seem to get any of the drivers to divert from. Thing was they had me by the balls considering the awkward location of the place I was staying in, and the fact was that it was a long walk in the dark, easily taking 45 minutes. To have speeding vehicles coming up behind me with their lights on full beam was not the most relaxing experience in the world, no doubt about that, and all with the outside chance I might get flattened by something moving fast, tearing into the back of me before then being left for dead. Very, very dead.
I was supposed to be staying at the Athena Hotel until 22/2 but checked out 19/2 with three days to spare because I just couldn’t handle it. Something about it was getting on my nerves, and I guess I had never really recovered from the distance description lie of theirs on Booking.com which had got things off to a bad start. Only 1 km outside of town? Come on guys, you’ve gotta be having a laugh! Only it wasn’t that funny. But it wasn’t only the distance which had got me down, there was the general ineptitude of the people who worked in the Athena as well, which at times I found to be borderline staggering. The worst aspect being that they didn’t even bother to clean my room after I’d left in the mornings to go down to Athithi Ashram, something which I think I might have mentioned once or twice before because it seriously did my head in.
Best thing about staying there had been sitting on the couch in my room reading Living by the Words of Bhagavan which was turning out to be a really good book, all about the life of one of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s devotees by the name of Anamalai Swami who was living and working at the ashram whilst Bhagavan was alive, being in charge of many of the ashram construction projects. Still, I have to say the Athena people were pretty decent about me leaving early which was a bit of a relief, otherwise I would have been looking at a bill of 23,000 rupees if they had wanted to be difficult. Maybe they were just sick of the sight of me and listening to my complaints, happy to let me go. Oh yeah, might well have been that! Turned out I just had to stump up 9800 rupees for the 2 nights I had stayed there, along with the 2 breakfasts I had eaten in a rather dull dining room with all the other guests, who were mainly on the tourist trail and just passing through.
Getting on the path to take me out of the Athena Hotel saw me proceed in the following manner. Initially after going to the Athithi Ashram to sit with Swami Hamsananda yesterday morning for a satsang comprising of swamiji talking followed by meditation, I’d tried calling in at a guest house located in an area called Ramana Nagar. No one seemed to be available for me to speak to, so after hanging around on a forecourt with no bell to ring I left. Even though I could hear voices from somewhere inside I just couldn’t get their attention, so it obviously wasn’t meant to be. Then I came across a place called the Aishwarya Residency where after a conversation with the guys on reception I was led to believe they had rooms available. So, rather rashly, I decided on the spot, but without exactly telling them, that I would go back to the Athena Hotel in order to check out before swinging back down again to come and stay there. To that end I hired an auto rickshaw for a 200 rupee round trip and after jumping in the back of it I was soon on my way.
Once my checking out of the Athena Hotel was completed I was soon back at the Aishwarya Residency, where at this point it seemed like there had been some kind of fundamental misunderstanding over what had previously been spoken, because I now discovered they had no spare rooms after all. This new situation which I found myself in somewhat disconcerted me because I had all my luggage but no rickshaw on hand to take to me some place else. By this point I had dismissed my driver after paying the fare, even giving him a little tip on top of it, which was completely unnecessary but there you go, these things happen. The Aishwarya guys told me a room would be available the next day and they proceeded to show it to me, which was probably just as well because my gut feeling when I saw it was that it was more than a little depressing, a real stinker. I decided to take a pass on it, despite their protestations and assurances they could find me another place for the night before checking me in there the next day. Some other place, only to then shift into that? No, no way, better take my chances somewhere else, which meant I walked out of the Aishwarya and into the bright light of the afternoon sun pulling my case behind me.
Soon I struck lucky because I walked round the corner to where the Arunachala Ramana Home was located, a place which I guess sounded a bit old age but had rooms available and also at a pretty good price. The deal was cash in advance, 800 rupees a night with no breakfast included, making it 2400 rupees for 3 nights. Simply could not go wrong with that as far as I was concerned, so after choosing one of the two rooms I was taken to look at, I went for it. Things were plain, functional and clean, a step in the direction of Ramanasramam in other words, which was where I would be heading in a few days time once the start date of my booking there kicked in. After getting my room in the Arunachala Ramana Home sorted out and paying the money for it, I went for a walk into the middle of town because there were a few things I needed to buy now that I had relocated. First I picked up a pair of chappals for 100 rupees and a towel for 160 rupees from a well stocked shop on the Big Bazaar Road lying close to the Arunachaleswar Temple. On the way back I called into a little shop next to the Agni Lingam and bought a bar of soap and a box of matches, then finally from the Ramana Maharshi Supermarket I bought some Himalaya shampoo, all of which would set me up for my little stay by way of taking the edge off my new and somewhat more austere surroundings.
Tiruvannamalai: Giri Pradikshina Around Mount Arunachala
TracelessTrails 
3 thoughts on “Tiruvannamalai: Outside the Ashram”