Account of a trip made with my brother in law Sonam Tashi to the Mallilli Falls in the Coorg Hills, around 30 km to the west of the Coorgi town of Somvarpet.
The trip to Mallalli Falls took place the day after our ride up to Mandalpatti. Somvarpet was the town we were heading to and it lay approx 30 km north east of Kushal Nagar up in the Coorg hills, then from Somvarpet it was another 27 kilometres to the Mallalli Falls, heading more or less due west. In the Notes page on my iphone I tapped in the following –
Somvarpet, next place to go on a 2 day sleigh ride through the hills of Coorg. Never gonna tire of the feeling which comes over me when I go hill hikin’ from outta different temperatures where the land doth change. Sunticoppa, halfway up the pipe to Madikeri we could have gone and then got the SH8, but no, Sonam Tashi had other ideas and took us on a road which lay on the east side of Kushal Nagar. Coupla days hill rollin’, stepping out upon a different scene away from the heat haze of the plains where the red soil of Karnataka contains the tales of a 1000 million stories all bled out beneath the sun which we will never get to know. But it is just that I know it will soon stop happening – this goin’ here an’ goin’ there – because Sonam Tashi shifts back to Kollegal tomorrow, the place where he is now stationed as Chief Settlement Office and about four hours drive away from Bylakuppe. It is then that I will have the time to sit back an’ do more writin’ so as to keep up with all this stuff I have set myself the task of reporting on.
Account of a trip taken with my brother in law up into the hills of Coorg where we were heading for the Pushpagiri Wildlife Sanctuary within which was Mandalpatti, a place from which to view the Western Ghats in that region of Karnataka.
The last couple of days me and Sonam Tashi have been hittin’ the road and driving up into the hills of Coorg. First day of the two saw us go to a place called Mandalpatti in the Pushpagiri Wildlife Sanctuary which is in the Pushpagiri Hills to the north east of the hill station town of Madikeri, the administrative centre of the Coorg district of Karnataka. Second day was a swing across to the town of Somvarpet some 30 kilometres east of the Coorg town of Kushal Nagar and from there to make our way to Mallalli Falls, once again in the Pushpagiri Hills, only this time at the other end of them to where we went the day before.
To mark the announcement that Bob Dylan will be resuming his Never Ending Tour, by way of playing shows across the world from 2021 to 2024 in support of his Rough And Rowdy Ways album released in 2020, I have pulled a few more Bob tales out the bag from way back when.
The doors to the CIA opened at 6.45 which was a little earlier than I had expected but nevertheless most welcome. Suddenly Welsh security people were scurrying around and making themselves look busy, talking into their mobile phones with a gravity which made you think there must be a killer on the loose or that they had suddenly been charged with looking after a nuclear bomb. Stern warnings were given to people in the queue that no photographs were to be taken in any shape or form whatsoever once inside the arena. If this rule was transgressed people ran the risk of having their equipment confiscated and never returned, all of which was at the express request of the artist. Needless to say they would also be pulled out of the crowd and kicked out of the arena as well. That was Bob for you, there was no getting away from the fact he could be most mightily touchy when it came to what he saw as invasion of his privacy, something which extended to whatever the stage he was performing on in whatever country throughout the world.
To mark the announcement that Bob Dylan will be resuming his Never Ending Tour, by way of playing shows across the world from 2021 to 2024 in support of his Rough And Rowdy Ways album released in 2020, I have pulled a few more Bob tales out the bag from way back when.
June 2004 and two Bob shows are coming up. It seemed like it was not so very long ago that I had finished writing up Three Bob Shows which covered the three bob shows that I had been to in 2003; Sheffield, Birmingham and London in that order. Great shows, naturally, although I have to admit that I did get into a couple of scrapes along the way, which led me to believe at times I was getting a bit of beating from the gods and that I’d better learn to stay on the right side of the road. Enough of that for now, suffice to say that I just about managed to come out of it with the sun still shining brightly over my shoulder as far as my love of Bob was concerned and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.
The last 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.
22/2
Got up today at 6.18 and by 6.45 I was enjoying a large glass of chai at the Ramana Drinks Stall opposite to Ramanasramam on the Chengam Road. There were just a couple of other people there sitting on the plastic chairs by the side of the road, no doubt slowly getting themselves together for another day in India. For me there was no conversation as after I’d finished my chai I took a walk up the holy hill of Arunachala to Skandasramam where I arrived by 7.25 to find it pretty empty and that was probably because the gate was still closed. A lone attendant informed me that it would open at 8.15 which meant it was just a question of waiting if I wanted to go inside the cave. There were hazy views of the temple town below as I sat and enjoyed the feeling of being in a relaxed state of mind, glad to have made the effort to walk up there. Since there was just the two of us I had a conversation with the attendant about the Giri Pradakshina which he told me brings in 2 to 3 lakhs of people to Tiruvannamalai each month on full moon day, with a lakh being 100,000, meaning in other words that the town got pretty busy. The full moon in April this year would bring in even more people due to it being a bigger one than usual, bigger moon that is, which might mean up to a million pilgrims, quite a lot in anyone’s book. The most popular time for Giri Pradakshina is during Karthikai which falls in December when between 2-3 million people come to Tiruvannamalai for the 10 day festival. It culminates with a beacon being lit on top of Mount Arunachala where 3500 kilos of ghee gets burnt in a huge cauldron, taken up the holy hill by priests and volunteers from the Arunachaleshwar Temple at the bottom of it in the centre of town. The other big occasion in the religious calendar of Tiruvannamalai is at the beginning of March and it is called Sivaratri, a festival which is popular throughout the whole of South India, marking as it does, among other things, the start of the hot season.
This is the third 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.
Breakfast this morning 21/2 was a coffee from the drinks stand opposite Ramanasramam plus a banana I had bought the day before and which I ate standing by the roadside with a glass of hot sweet coffee in my hand watching life go by on the Chengam Road. When I’d finished I took a walk across the road to the ashram where after a little while I ended up in the Ashram Book Depot and bought a few books. It was as if I suddenly realised it was going to be my only chance to buy some quality Ramana Maharshi reading material on this trip and it was important for me to chose some from the selection on offer in the Depot because in the wider world quality Ramana Maharshi books could be pretty hard to find. These are the ones I came away with –
This is the second 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 that first evening of my stay at the Arunachala Ramana Home I walked out mid evening and did the Girivalapathai or Giri Pradikshina, the circumambulation of Arunachala, because it just so happened to be the night of a full moon. The Girivalapathai around the holy hill, Mount Arunachala, was 14 km in length, taking 3 hours and clocking up a pretty impressive 21,000 steps on my mobile phone step counter, setting off from the Arunachala Ramana Home at 8pm and getting back by 11 pm. It was simply something which I had to do. In my projected plans for the trip to Tiruvannamalai it had always been in the back of my mind to do it this year and I guess it was one of the reasons why I’d arrived in Tiruvannamalai a few days before my booking at Ramanasramam begun. Just needed a kick to get me out the door so to speak, because after the rigours of the day with all my shifting from place to place and what not, I was beginning to feel a bit lazy, but when that kick happened it meant I was soon up and running. Well, not exactly running but at least walking very fast. Now it has to be said the vast majority of pilgrims on the circuit were walkin’ barefoot around the holy hill and if I had realised before beginning that was the way it was done I might well have joined them and not worn my pair of New Balance shoes. Instead of having to watch my step, it felt like I was walking on air, so soft so comfortable so springy they were, those shoes, with it probably taking me a good hour to realise what was going on and that I was odd man out. By then it was too late for me to turn round and go back to start again, and I also didn’t have a bag with me, but that was OK, as after all wasn’t I odd man out anyway, considering the fact nearly everyone else doing the holy circuit were Indians and Tamils at that? Well yeah, on one level maybe I was, but on another, not really.
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.
A week or so before I left for Tiruvannamalai I had a long conversation with my old friend Anita who just returned from there after staying 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 down further 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 in 1879 in the village of Tiruchuzhi and the place of his self-realisation in 1896 which was in the city of Madurai itself. During the course of our talk she 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
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. The trip 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 at Chennai Central on the Shatabdi Express, before a late night 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 at various levels of quality. My reason for staying in Woodlands is that the hotel has a pretty good travel desk from which I can painlessly book a car to take me down to Tiruvannamalai. This time around I have booked one for 10 O’ Clock the next morning with the hope of getting to Tiruvannamalai by 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 for me. 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.
So this is my life, this is what I do, I mean not all the time of course, but at least part of it, pretty much each time I come out to India, or certainly it has been like this for the last few years. I am making the trip to Tiruvannamalai primarily in the hope of doing some quality meditation and finding inspiration in 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 those 6 days in the ashram I have 5 days at the Athena Hotel, a mid to upper-range place in Tiruvannamalai booked mainly because it was one of the last few which still had rooms available. The reason for all the hotels in Tiruvannamalai being busy, and all the ashrams too, is because it is a full moon on the 18th of the month when the town will get a lot of visitors, people in the form of pilgrims and devotees of Lord Siva who will do the moonlit walk around the holy hill Mount 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 that they have pulled a fast one and that it is stuck out in the middle of nowhere. 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 that could be a bit of a drag. 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, wanting only the good and to push away the bad. Dualistic dialogue of the unenlightened is what I guess you might call it, rather than the simple acceptance of whatever it is you are given by invisible forces we never catch sight of.
I’m travelling solo, on my own, just myself, and if I so wish I can keep all contact down to a bare minimum, need hardly have to raise myself above or beyond the basics of interaction in order to get things done, 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, 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 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 at Woodlands. I 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. 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 am starting all over again, seemingly never ridding myself of this pollution. Heat confusion talkin’ here, or maybe something deeper whilst above my head that ceiling fan still keeps spinnin’…
Second of two posts today, 24th May 2021, to mark – on my blog – the 80th birthday of the incomparable recording and performing artist – Bob Dylan.
Happy Birthday Bob!!!
This one is a write up of the third of three shows I saw Bob play back in 2003. Whilst the first two were run of the mill arena shows, one in Birmingham and one in Sheffield, this one was always going to be special – a return to the legendary Hammersmith Apollo in West London. Sure enough, Bob didn’t disappoint, pulling some stone cold nuggets from out the bag, including a song which he hadn’t played in 26 years. Nice one!
So now it was a case of two down one to go as far as my Three Bob Shows for 2003 were concerned. There was a whole two days in between the Birmingham NEC show which I had been to on the Friday and the Hammersmith Apollo show on the Monday. That was a long weekend to get through in other words, a very long weekend indeed when I knew that Bob was in town, playing places like the Shepherds Bush Empire which would no doubt be packed to the rafters and full of adoring fans. This time I was going to see Bob with Duncan “Dunc” Hutson one of my partners in crime at Wise Words, the small distribution company specialising in books on Buddhism, which I helped run as well as being co-director of. Dunc had come to see Bob with me once before, the first of the two London Docklands Arena shows in May 2002 and at the time he had been suitably impressed with what he had witnessed. When I told him a couple of months ago that Bob would be back in London in November he jumped at the chance to come along with me to see him again. Therefore on the Monday I finished early at Wise and arranged to meet Dunc round my place in the late afternoon for him to park his car before we took the tube down to Hammersmith from Woodford.
First of two posts today, 24th May 2021, to mark – on my blog – the 80th birthday of the incomparable recording and performing artist – Bob Dylan.
Happy Birthday Bob!!!
Following on from my overview of Bob shows from the 1990s and also shows in the period 2005 – 2009, this post covers me seeing Bob Dylan live at the Tempodrom, Berlin on two dates in 2013, the Royal Albert Hall in London 2015, the Cardiff Interantional Arena 2017 and finally Hyde Park, London 2019.
It was to be just over two years later at the end of October 2013 when I next saw Bob by way of going to two shows in Germany on October 24th & October 26th at the Tempodrom in Berlin. Just so happened that I was over there paying a visit to my old friend Thomas Deilecke, otherwise known as Toby Ruft and who takes a leading role in some of my Indian writings which appear on my website Traceless Path, specifically in a novel on there by the name of Tiger Trails, but also in a number of shorter pieces found in a section called Om Reflections. But I guess this is something which I might have mentioned before! The tickets for the shows had been bought well in advance of my visit and I guess they were the main reason why was I was making the trip over, not solely of course, because it was great meeting up once again with Thomas but Bob was most definitely in my sights, no doubt about that. He was actually playing an unbroken three night stint at the Tempodrom, a concert hall in the middle of town built in the fashion and shape of a circus tent and we had tickets for the first night and for the third. Now it has to be said that the night of my first Tempodrom show was also my first day in town, having landed at Berlin Tegel in the early afternoon and gone straight with Thomas to his flat in South Berlin in order to dump my stuff and have a late afternoon meal with him and his wife Beate who would also be coming to see Bob with us. There was no question that I was very excited over the prospect of seeing Bob not once but twice in Berlin, which meant we all arrived at the venue pretty early as we had standing tickets and I wanted to make sure we had a good position down on the floor.
TracelessTrails 