Look for the theme.

Last Wednesday, my last day of Mysore-style practice, I stood up from an Urdhva Dhanurasana drop-back for the first time without Saraswathi's help. While she stood by I did it two more times and she commented, "Aaaah. You do good today." The next day I slept through my alarm for 5 AM led class, missing my last day at the shala. At least I ended on a high note.

On Friday, I left for Ooty, 5,500 feet above and one state south of Mysore. I spent a night in the YWCA there with some fellow yogis. Friday was a moon day and Saturday is the usual day off so they had a rare opportunity to leave for two days in a row. We would have left on Thursday after practice, but that was election day in Tamil Nadu (the aforementioned southern state) and the Karnataka-T.N. border was closed because of some kind of protests or riots. The weather in Ooty reminded me of San Francisco. Our first day there was cool and cloudy. It couldn't have been less than 65 degrees, but all the Indian tourists from the hot, jungly cities were buying earmuffs and gloves from street vendors - more for fashion than warmth I think.

Here's our view from Y:



And a shot of the Ooty Botanical Gardens:



We found this guy in a quiet corner of the gardens:



This is Charing Cross, Ooty's downtown:



And then there's this:



The other yogis and I split on Saturday when they went back to Mysore and I went on to Coimbatore, a big, low, steamy city at the foot of the Nilgiris. There I spent a sweaty night in a cheap hotel where the grumpy desk clerk told me there were only doubles for 500 rupees. He sent me off with the doorman to see a room. When I pulled up the blanket to look at the sheets there were some dark yellow stains streaked across the bed in a way that suggested either the word "projectile" or "explosive." When I pointed this out to the doorman, he grumbled something in Tamil and said "No" a couple times. It seemed like he was trying to convince me that the stains were not there. After he escorted me across the hall to a 250 rupee empty single with clean sheets, we went back to the front desk where he explained the stains to the clerk who reluctantly checked me into the single, seeming disappointed that he hadn't been able to bullshit me out of 5 bucks.

In the morning I boarded a commuter train to Kodai Road where buses stop on their way up to Kodaikanal, another high-elevation town in Tamil Nadu's Western Ghats. True to India Time, the train departed 20 minutes late and arrived about two hours late. I started out with a whole bench to myself, so I laid down for a nap but woke up about half an hour later when a group of men sat down more or less on my legs. The train gradually filled up during the nine hour trip until I was standing up shoulder-to-shoulder with other passengers for the last thirty minutes. There doesn't seem to be any wait-for-people-to-exit-before-you-board etiquette here, so while trying to push my way past a bunch of people boarding, one of my legs found its way between the train and the platform. As soon as I walked out of the train station, a taxi driver started following me around, telling me all the buses up into the mountains leave in the morning. He said the only way to get there in the afternoon was to hire a 300 rupee cab to another bus station or a 1200 rupee one all the way up to Kodaikanal. I ignored him and walked to an Indian Oil gas station nearby where the attendant helped me flag down a passing bus that cost only 40 rupees. Getting off the bus was similar to exiting the train, but this time there was a conductor yelling at and slapping the people trying to rush on before I could exit. I was holding my big backpack in front of me and used it as a sort of battering ram to push through the crowd. I think I was being a little more aggressive than I needed to be. India is starting to get to me.