Hey, I'm Chris from Toronto. I just graduated from university a couple years ago - BFA in film production - where I spent every waking moment of every day making films, working on set, watching movies, talking about movies, and generally not having a minute of spare time for anything else. I wanted to get away for a bit of an adventure though before I got too entrenched in the industry and started to settle in. So I've been wandering around the world for the last year and a half or so, and when I finally made it here to Koh Tao something clicked, and I decided I'd finally found somewhere to settle down for a while, and a job I'd be excited to do. |
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Catch Up Time!
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Kashmir
Once the security checks were finished and we finally emerged on the other side though, it wasn’t the barren landscape pockmarked by war that one might expect. My first thought, actually, was ‘It’s the shire!’ One of the most gorgeous places I’d seen in my entire trip to
The barbed wire, machine guns, soldiers, only make things seem more fragile, immediate. The much photographed
When I arrived in Srinigar, the capital of the state, most of the city had been shut down. There’d been a city wide strike lasting more than a week already after the rape and murder of two Kashmiri girls – supposedly by the Indian army. The only thing I could see of most it was from the inside of the richshaw. The driver didn’t think it was safe for me to go outside.
If that wasn’t enough prices all seemed to be set for proper Western tourists with actual money – not poor backpackers like myself – so after splurging and renting my very own houseboat where I spent a day recuperating from the long bus trip, I caught the first bus I could out of the valley and up onto the Tibetan Plateau.
It’s not the sort of place that makes you want to stop in your tracks and settle in for a while by a long shot, but it’s definitely one of those places that would really be a terrible thing to miss.
The Blog Continues
Monday, August 3, 2009
Jammu
When you’ve been sitting in a backpacker town like McLeod for a month and have find yourself repeating the above statement more than a couple of times a week, you’ve come across a fairly good sign that it’s time to move on – if only for a short expedition.
And what better way to seek out a bit of adventure than a trip through Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh! The minute I stepped off the bus after my seven hour trip to Jammu every single thing that I saw seemed to scream out at me “Yeah, you better believe you’re still in India.” Not a single white person in sight for the next two days. There’s not even a map of the city in my Lonely Planet book so I have no idea where I am or where to go. Perfect!
After escaping my rickshaw driver’s attempt to stick me in an overpriced hotel, I leave my bags in a more reasonably priced place and head out onto the street. I’ve only got one afternoon here, and I’m gonna make it count.
A policeman on the street who can’t seem to believe his luck at meeting a Westerner fills me in on how to get to the station tomorrow morning and recommends the best spot to eat in the market (later that night I was able to confirm him to be a man of discerning taste). I then spend the next couple hours wandering through the endless sea of stalls and shops selling everything from the coolest imitation Western fashions to air conditioning units, to new sets of teeth.
On my way down, I notice a small looking entrance to what looks to be a temple, but I decide to pass it by since I’ve already been to too many Hindu temples to count, this one doesn’t seem anything special, and you have to leave all bags and cameras in a store room – Jammu gets more than it’s fair share of terrorist attacks from Kashmiri separatists and radicals from Pakistan.
As I passed by the second time on the way home, something made me slow down for a second though. I recalled reading Paulo Coelho’s list of advice for a meaningful travel experience. Number 9: A journey is an adventure. It’s far better to discover a church that no one’s heard of than to go to Rome and feel obliged to see the Sistine Chapel surrounded by two hundred tourists.
Alright, let’s give it a try. This is the self proclaimed city of temples after all. And what ever happened to my decision to have one excellent night in Jammu? I step through the dingy entryway into a small room and walk through a door in the back corner. It feels like I’ve just walked through the wardrobe door into Narnia!
I’m standing in a courtyard the size of an entire massive city block. It’s surrounded by outward facing shops along the perimeter which protect it from the view of passers by on the street. The spires of the temple are covered in coloured lights and the moon hangs in the sky right over the central courtyard. The courtyard is full of Indian pilgrims sitting under the trees and wandering from room to room, but it’s nowhere near as busy or frantic as any other temple I’ve seen.
Dimly lit rooms with mysterious statues of strange gods performing unintelligible feats and walls painted with mystical symbols. Strange rituals performed with peacock feathers, lingams, necklaces of flowers, and other things I can’t quite understand. Walking around the temple between alcoves, each dedicated to and containing statues and images of a different god, a sense of mystery and adventure surrounds each new discovery.
An hour later, I walk out of the temple complex, necklaces of flowers around my neck, marks on my forehead, and no idea where I’d been (no map after all), what it was called, and without a single photo. It sunk away back into the night as I walked away for dinner - as mysterious and unexplained as ever and without any idea of where I’d been. Talk about romantic!
Thank you Paulo Coelho! The rest of you tourists can keep your Taj Mahal, I’ll take my unheard of inner city temple complex any day!
May 2009 Revelations
Sometimes we experience moments so powerful, so real, so intense that our hearts feel like they’re going to overflow.
Immediately we start grasping. How can I explain what I’m feeling?
But the more we try to describe it, pin it down, examine it, the more it eludes us. The clutter of words that we surround it with seems clumsy, painfully inadequate. It only pushes us further away from the experience.
The only way we can do it justice is with silence.
Some things are meant to be known, not understood.
Shown, but not explained.
The most important thing you can learn to do is stop thinking.
Breathing meditation:
Inhale the world.
Exhale yourself.
What is he rambling about this time?
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On a More Practical Level
Ten minutes later as I’m lying half naked on one of the beds watching one of my fellow male participants rub oil on another hairy man’s chest, I say a silent prayer of gratitude to the massage lesson gods. There’s a Texas (massage?) oilman looking out for me somewhere (Sorry, inside joke. If you read our Ryersonian article…)
After learning some very simple, relaxing massage techniques and practicing them on our partners we move on to a few more dubious sounding parts of the traditional Tibetan massage. We’re taught to locate our partner’s top four chakras and instructed to just touch a finger to them without pressing at all and just hold it there for 3 sets of20 seconds.
Alright, now the bullshit hits the fan, I think to myself. A minute later our teacher is over at our table showing how it works on me. “You have asthma” he tells me from touching my lung chakra. “You’re gonna wanna hold your finger here for about a minute every day and it will start to get better in a couple weeks.”
So if any of you want to sample a bit of Tibetan massage from someone who’s spent ten days getting fully (alright, barely) certified in the practice be sure to pull me aside for a couple hours next time you see me.
And the Verdict Is...
Alright, I know a few of you have been asking what I made of my time at Tushita at a whole. Difficult question to answer. One night after chanting mantras in the gompa, I felt such a wonderful body of energy hanging in the room that I couldn’t bring myself to leave for half an hour after it ended. Another day I felt as though I was being brainwashed, and rebelled against the experience with every fiber of my being. In short, I found much of it amazing, and much entirely distasteful. Everything that you need for an intensely meaningful experience. I may not have learned from it exactly and exclusively what they meant to teach me, but learn from it I did.
It planted the seeds of a lot of interesting ideas in my head and helped strengthen my belief in some concepts I’d been playing around with a while. I was surprised to find that lots of it is remarkably similar to Christianity – it share many of the best and the worst characteristics, and there’s a surprising number of overlapping ideas. As a zen master might say - different fingers, same moon...