80 Traveling India 4 (Practical Tips)

So many on the path to awakening are curious about traveling to Tirivannamali and India. Many would like to go but are not sure how or what to do once there. This series is designed to give you a starting place by describing the spirit and culture of India. William has been to India 14 times averaging 12 weeks per visit. He also explored spirituality in Bhutan, Thailand, and Brazil. He gives a general description of travel in India in parts 1 thru 3 and practical tips for travel in this part 4.

Transcript

Hello,

This is William Cooper.

Welcome to Awakening Together,

Relaxing into Happiness.

I trust you're doing well.

Okay,

We've just had a series of podcasts on India,

Giving you a taste of what it's like to travel to India.

Now I'm going to give you some travel specifics.

If you're going to start somewhere,

That's usually what stops people.

They don't know where to begin.

India is a big place,

So let me give you what I would do,

Having been there 13 times.

This is centered around me,

Of course,

My experience and the friends that I have.

So talk to other people.

You may get other perspectives,

But here's what I would do.

I would fly into Chennai,

India and I would take a taxi from Chennai to Tiruvannamalai and stay at the Ramana Ashram.

It's best to line up your taxi ahead of time and have it come from Tiruvannamalai to pick you up and then take you to Tiruvannamalai.

The taxi ride is about $60.

Go on the internet and look up Shanti Travels,

Shanti Travels,

S-H-A-N-T-I-Travels.

Com,

I think,

But just Google Shanti Travels and you'll get it.

They're very honest and there's no funny business.

Not that there usually is,

But just let's get a place that's well known and I've only had good experiences with.

Send them an email and tell them that you'd like to get a taxi from Chennai to Tiruvannamalai.

They probably will ask you what size taxi you want and small to medium is fine.

Medium you can sleep in the back seat and that's the one that probably will cost $60.

They'll ask you if you want to pay extra for air conditioning.

Generally most flights land at about midnight or two in the morning so it's relatively cool outside then and unless you're really sensitive I would just say no air conditioning needed because you'll be traveling at night.

They'll pick you up.

You'll probably just sleep in the back seat because you'll be getting in at two.

You can ask them about any details through email.

Their English is very good.

When you land you'll go through customs which really isn't searching bags or anything.

It's just looking at your passport and stamping your visa.

You do need a visa.

You can get an electronic visa that I think is around a month,

30 days.

You can get that on the internet and it depends on how much time you have.

Remember jet lag is a factor for some people.

For others it's not but if it is generally they say for every hour of time change expect about a day of jet lag.

So for me the time change is 11 hours and that gives me 11 days of jet lag and I find that's pretty accurate.

So if you have a very short trip you're going to have to really motor through the jet lag if you have it.

So I like to go for 12 weeks.

Now that is way too long for most people.

So just do what you can even getting a taste of India one time will open a lot of doors inside and you'll have a perspective and decide do you want to go again.

Most people that go to India once go more than once if that'll tell you anything.

It's really quite compelling.

So in the United States we're very lucky we can get a 10-year visa.

You get that by contacting your local consulate and you can also find visa people that you pay a little extra fee and they go to the consulate for you if you don't live in that city and they have a service that maybe it costs $50 over and above the price of the visa.

Let's say the visa cost $200 and then you pay them $50 and they do all the legwork and send you back your visa.

You have to send them your passport and they send it back and it'll have the visa inside.

If you want anything longer than that 30 days it needs to be one of those kind of visas that requires your passport.

I would recommend get a 10-year visa because they're almost the same price as all the other visas and you've got 10 years.

Now what that means is you've got 10 years you can go unlimited access to India for 10 years but you can only stay for six months per visit.

After six months if you want to stay longer you just have to go out of the country for a millisecond and then you could come back in and now you have a new six months.

So often people down south in Tiruvannamalai will go to Sri Lanka because that's a very quick and expensive trip and then fly back to Chennai and then back down to Tiruvannamalai and stay another six months.

But that's what I would recommend is a 10-year visa.

Now with COVID you just want to check and see what the current things are.

Do you need a COVID test?

You didn't used to need one.

What kind of visas apply now?

You might want to contact the embassy or just go online and google some things because things are changing all the time with COVID and I'm not sure exactly what it is now.

I do have an update and some good news for you.

I just went online recently.

We've decided to go to India this January,

February and part of March and I found that you can now,

If you live in the United States,

Obtain a five-year tourist visa online.

It's $80 and fairly simple.

You apply the next day approximately.

You're approved and you print it out and you've got your visa.

That's it.

Much easier than sending your passport in and doing all that.

It also seems to have the same conditions where you can stay six months at a time and then go out for a second and then come back into India for another six months and you can do that as often as you'd like for five years.

Or you could just go back to the United States,

Wait a year or two and come back.

But as long as you've got that visa for the five-year period,

It's unlimited entries into India.

You go to www.

Indianvisaonline.

Gov.

In,

Search around a little and what you're looking for is something like online e-visa maybe it is.

If you live in another country,

I'd suggest you go online to the Indian Embassy in your country and see what they're offering online for you.

They may have done this online or some version of it visa for your country as well.

Very good news and I'm so happy to be able to pass it on to you.

Something else that I would recommend is when you get there,

Stay at the Ramana Ashram,

Google Ramana Ashram,

R-A-M-A-N-A Ashram and when you pull up their website look around and you'll find some tab on how to stay there like accommodations or visiting or something like that.

And it will say that you can stay three days.

Well you definitely can do that.

You send them an email and tell them when you'd want to stay but if you tell them that you really would like,

Tell them that you've read Paul Brunton's book In Search of a Secret India.

You should read that first anyway but if you've read that even if you haven't just tell them that you want to stay at the ashram a week or 10 days and they might let you depending on the availability.

It's a wonderful place to stay so don't go by the three days that they have on the website.

Ask for 10 days and if they don't have 10 days they'll say I'm sorry you can't stay 10 days but how about five or how about seven.

You'll probably do better than three and the advantage to that is again you'll have a jet lag and it'll give you a place to put your feet down.

You'll have three meals a day.

They're doing spiritual practices.

You can go or not go.

You'll have a nice clean room.

It helps you orient to India because India is a powerful place and you don't want to figure out about places to stay right off the bat likely.

So stay at the Ramanashram.

So here's what will happen.

You'll get off your plane.

You'll go through customs.

They'll stamp your visa.

You'll go down to pick up your bag.

Now there'll be a lot of baggage carousels and it will be pandemonium.

There will be thousands of bags and nothing will be marked right and you won't know where your bag is and the fact is your bag wouldn't have come out yet anyway.

But about an hour later on some carousel you'll see other people on your airplane just looking around kind of desperately and slowly you'll see bags coming out on the carousel and eventually you'll find your bag.

I've never lost a bag.

Now I'm sure somebody has but I never have.

Even though you will be highly confident you are going to lose your bag.

You will think you will and for that reason have a carry-on with like a little change of clothes and toothbrush and all that just in the unlikely case you do lose a bag.

They'll drive it to you down in Taravanamalai at the Ramanashram but just have a little backup so you don't have to stress out and also when you get to India you can buy Indian clothes.

They're very inexpensive if the worst happens and you do lose your bag.

Down south they wear dotties often and those look like sarongs and depending on what platform you're looking at this podcast through the cover shows me with one of these dotties on and that's normally what I wear in Taravanamalai and those are very inexpensive of course.

You get about three or four or five of those.

Now you generally wash your own clothes.

They provide buckets and you just go to the grocery store and get a little soap and you'll fill it with water and you just kind of wash your clothes up and down in the bucket and then you ring them out and there'll be lines for you to hang your clothes up.

If you really just can't do that or don't want to do that you can find somewhere on the street some place that washes clothes.

So just ask around if you want somebody else to wash your clothes.

The problem is sometimes it rains and there's funny weather so the clothes they wash occasionally can get a little moldy and it's a little out of your control so you might give them clothes that are white and they might come back yellow.

You're never quite sure.

If you wash your own clothes you've got more control and so that's probably something you'll want to do.

When you stay at an ashram or a guest house they don't give you washcloths or soap or things like that so have your own soap,

Have your own washcloth,

Have your own towel.

They might give you a sheet,

One sheet.

If you want a sheet over you bring one.

Maybe just a little ornate cover to a light sheet because it's kind of warm down south.

If you get extra cold you're going in winter you can ask for a blanket.

They might be able to scratch up a blanket for you or you could buy one.

They're very inexpensive just somewhere on the street.

Ask where you could buy one.

How do you get around?

You could either rent a scooter and just drive that yourself.

That cost maybe say two or three dollars a day plus you put in your own gas of course.

There's no insurance.

There's no anything.

You're just out there but I would not recommend that until you've been there for a number of years because the traffic is very intuitive and it goes backwards from what we're used to in the United States.

It's like how it is in England or something.

It's reverse but also they're not really rules.

You might say,

Well I'm in my lane but a bus if he wants to pass somebody he'll just get in your lane and the unspoken rule is you just want to stay alive so all the smaller vehicles veer over to the side.

You might even go into the dirt off of the road just so not to be hit by the bus or the truck.

You don't argue.

You just get off the road.

Also everybody is watching everybody else.

They're not thinking well there's this rule and everybody needs to stay on this side and I trust they will and they'll stop and they'll do the right thing.

No you don't do that.

You just drive according to how everybody else is around you.

It's very intuitive.

It's more instead of like in the West it's like an army walking in lockstep.

In the East it's more like a school of goldfish just swimming and when a shark comes they scatter and that's how you drive and you look out for the other fish.

So everybody's looking out for you.

You're looking out for everybody else.

It turns out to be much safer than it seems because it's very intuitive and you end up being very aware.

You don't go into your hypnotic trance just relying on everybody following rules.

You are very intuitive.

So it turns out very safe but I wouldn't do it right off the bat.

Meditate some and because in the West we're very locked up inside in general.

Maybe you aren't but I was and people I know and we're just too tied up and too reactive and we probably get ourselves killed instantly which can happen.

So how would you get around?

They have rickshaws everywhere they're very inexpensive.

They're little yellow vehicles on three wheels,

Two back wheels,

One front wheel kind of looking like a closed-in motorcycle in a way with a bench back seat and it'll fit like four people in there maybe if you press but I don't know what could I say it would cost per kilometer.

Maybe I'm probably going to be way off here but let's say it costs 30 cents a kilometer.

I'm not sure.

It's inexpensive.

You could go downtown from the ashram for instance for probably a dollar fifty and they're everywhere you can flag them down or they're just waiting in a row you just walk up and you ask you can bargain with them how much would it cost to take me to the Shiva temple and he'll say one thing and if you're new you'll probably agree with it which is fine so what you lose fifty cents.

You go and then after a while you learn what really what the price is and that's what you ask for next time like okay no they'll say a dollar fifty and you say no I'll give you a dollar or they'll say two dollars you say no how about a dollar fifty and they'll go okay they're all in a good mood they're not it's not cutthroat it's generally it's just how they do things so you're expected to bargain a little bit but you don't have to.

So let me get back to the airport you found your bag okay after an hour of desperation or two hours you found your bag now you're going down the corridor it's clearly marked and you're suddenly finding yourself going outside and there are literally five hundred a thousand people behind a fence and they're all waving signs and it's pandemonium and you just feel a bit panicked like how now how do I find my taxi driver this will never happen I can't do it.

Well you will find the taxi driver and they will find you they'll have a sign and it'll have their your name on it and it'll say welcome or something or it'll just have your name and they will be waving they really will find you and they have every single time and they get there early so you say your flight gets arrives at two they know it'll take a little time for your baggage and all that but they'll be there and they'll pick you up what if they didn't you arrive in Chennai and they didn't pick you up well just get a local taxi and ask them to take you to a hotel they've got some real nice ones now these hotels can be way more expensive than the guest houses in Tara Vanamalai they might cost a hundred dollars but you'll have a nice place to stay and then get a taxi from there just get a tax or get a local taxi and ask them to drive you to Tara Vanamalai it won't be fifty or sixty dollars it'll probably be a hundred dollars but still they'll take you there so you'll work it out you're not stranded everybody's nice it'll work out if you just want to stay in Chennai for a day or two check out the Beverly hotel it's fairly inexpensive and very nice and they serve breakfast with your room generally I'm gonna say it's forty dollars a night but I'm not quite sure maybe it's fifty I'm not sure but you could stay there another thing at Chennai by the way is if you're a Christian and you want to go to where doubting Thomas lived you could stay in Chennai for a day or two and ask a taxi driver to take you to Thomas's cave that's near the airport you can there's a chapel and then down underneath there was a cave where he used to hang out and if people were trying to chase him or kill him or something he especially hung out there very powerful there and also there's a Catholic Church that's built down by the ocean where his remains are and you could go there too that's less powerful you can go to where his remains are in the basement it's still powerful but not as powerful as the chapel the chapel behind the their pews and down in the cave is underneath but in the back behind the let's call it the pulpit up on the wall you'll see a framed relic and that's a little piece of his bone and you can touch the glass and it is extremely powerful he after Christ died he went to China to Kerala on the other side of India started a lot of churches there and that's a big Christian area it's both Hindu and Christian but a lot of churches there eventually he was persecuted and fled over to Chennai on the other side of India where he lived for a long time and it was eventually killed but it's a very powerful cave one place in the other podcast that I didn't tell you about is a lot of people like Amaji she comes to the West when there's not COVID very powerful and she has an ashram in Kerala so you could look up her ashram just google amma.

Org and you'll find that and go when she's there you can stay at that ashram and I've never been but really thousands of people I could be very crowded there she's very powerful but she'll have all night long spiritual events and they're powerful they might wear you out but they're powerful so she goes around Europe and the United States around the world really I saw her in Tara of Anomaly she came there and there were probably 30 to 50,

000 people and it was quite wonderful but you could go to her ashram or go somewhere where she is it's easier to see her in the West there are less people and it's free also at the Ramanashram by the way they do have people that come and speak in January there's a guy named Nakchor and he's very good people love him and it fills up their auditorium Krishna Das comes and sings there about once a year and most people tend to like to go there anywhere from the end of December through around the end of February after that it starts getting hot and before then it can be rainy although they have a big festival usually the end of November called Deepam where they light the top of the mountain on fire that symbolizes the light that comes out of all and it's a huge deal and hundreds of thousands of people come and it's giant it's that's worth going to but if you have a limited amount of time I would the weather is really good from December 15th generally to the end of February because it's winter time there but it's South India so in Fahrenheit the loads are probably about 70 maybe 68 and the highs might be let's say 80 and then just slowly trending up by the end of February might be 85 but then after that it really swings up in in March so that's a good period of time but now the ashram is gets crowded because everybody likes to come and people come from all over the world every nationality and there so it's so many Indians and so many spiritual people because you don't come to a Tara of anomaly unless you're deep into your spirituality generally so you meet a lot of interesting people a lot of Western teachers come there and bring groups of people all their followers so you have a lot of that going on too as a result it's better to make your reservations at the ashram is in as far in advance as you can I think they want at least a month maybe but I would do it as soon as you know you're going to India and you get your plane ticket make your reservation if they don't have a space available when you want you said for you're saying I want December 15 through the 25th or something then just get a guest house when you get there ask your taxi driver about a guest house he'll guide you they're all over the place or ask him for a good hotel they cost a little bit more but maybe for the first day or two you want that and ahead of time ask the ashram when a date is available and then check into the ashram maybe once you've been there for a while and then they have an opening but they'll probably have an opening if you put in your request at least two or three months ahead of time they might have one if you did it three weeks ahead of time it's hard to say another little trick is if they don't have an opening and you're flying into Chennai maybe go to the Beverly Hotel and stay there for a few days go to Thomas's cave and go or goes to some temples in Chennai it's a big city ask where some good places are there's another hotel further away in Chennai that's nearer to Thomas's Chapel at the at the ocean and that's called the Woodlands Hotel you could stay there that's and it might even be called the new Woodlands Google that one you could stay there it's pretty nice not quite as nice as the Beverly it's cheaper a little bit cheaper I think you buy your own breakfast there but that's an option too if you want to inexpensive options if you happen to want to stay in Chennai for a while then ask them to send you a taxi from Tiruvannamalai ask Shanshi travels to send one to your hotel on next day and they could meet you at the hotel and then take you down to Tiruvannamalai to the ashram when your reservation starts if you couldn't get one on the night that you arrived another good reason why you want to do it though on the night that you arrived because if the taxi picks you up you can sleep in the backseat of the taxi and it's a three-hour drive and then by the time you wake up he's pulling into the driveway of the ashram you wake up that's about when breakfast is served at the ashram and you can check in get breakfast or if you get there right when breakfast is being served just go and ask hey could I have I'm staying here could I have breakfast and they'll say yes and go in have breakfast and then go to the office and check in I mentioned in another podcast be careful of monkeys they have a lot of monkeys in Tiruvannamalai hold on to your stuff it's not horrible but just be mindful that's enough if you're mindful it's great now in the evening they have lots of chanting and singing at the ashram there's meditating pretty much all day long you can go to the caves plenty to do the food is great and it's a sheltered environment they have these speakers that may be speaking while you're staying there or maybe speaking while you're at a guest house and then they have gurus from all over the world perhaps you've heard of Mooji he comes to Tiruvannamalai I met him there before he was famous really nice guy from Jamaica he has thousands of people that follow him anyway he comes to Tiruvannamalai just like Amaji or almost anybody else you can think of they come to Tiruvannamalai so you'll have constant things to do you'll have and most of the things are free you'll have classes on the Bhagavad Gita or meditation groups or emotional groups or awakening with the gurus or and it's not as new agey as it I'm making it sound probably it's not like a three ring circus these are very sincere people and they meet in little niches and places and you just find out about it and you show and it's often a small group very sincere very deep in their spiritual practice it's just that there's a lot of them all over the place so if you want a lot of spiritual nourishment there's tons of it everywhere also there's a lot of these ashrams and temples I'm going to just make up a number a thousand in Tiruvannamalai which is a small place so you can go and sit there and these things radiate energy some more than others but some of them you might just want to sit there for hours or a day some of them feed you some of them have lunches or dinners and they feed you and anybody else that wants to stop by it's hard to go hungry in India you know that's kind of a little contrary to what we hear in the well they're so poor and starving yeah but everybody's taking care of each other and if you want to eat somebody's going to feed you and even you as a westerner that don't need to be fed they're going to want to feed you they're just that giving that generous so there's a wealth in India it's a very generous place there's a wealth if you need medical care often there's medical tourism you can go to a dentist for instance and get a filling for like seven dollars or get a checkup for like five dollars get a crown for seventy dollars maybe a hundred dollars you could be a porcelain crown that probably is a hundred dollars you get a good dentist so as long as it's not overly complicated dental work like some around the corner under this and under that and all this you need the best surgeon in the world to do it as long as most dentists in the United States could do it you can get a very good dentist in India in Tarif Anomaly to do your dental work and if you need dental work the savings would probably pay for your trip you can get all sorts of x-rays and MRIs and all that for very inexpensive if you have medications you need in India you don't have to go to the doctor to get a prescription you just go to the pharmacy and tell them what you need and the pharmacist gives it to you and the cost of the medication and it's no questions asked it's just what do you need they just trust that you know what you're doing if you had need advice the pharmacist can give you advice no don't do this or have this with dinner or do this or do that they have free clinics with doctors there the ashram Raman ashram has a clinic or if you pay to go see a doctor in Tarif Anomaly the bill probably is going to be about five dollars or something like this a MRI is going to cost you you go to a separate place to get something like that if god forbid you need one and that's probably going to cost you seventy dollars or fifty dollars or something like that but not hundreds the price of medications are let's say if a medication here in the united states cost two dollars a pill it probably is going to cost maybe a nickel a pill five cents a pill or maybe ten cents a pill mostly maybe twenty cents a pill but probably not same medication they make it in India they send it to the united states it's the same thing it's just much less expensive so if you have expensive medications India is a good place to stock up on it do they check on it in customs not really no they might when you come back into the united states i'm talking about they might ask a question but generally in the united states now they have electronic things and they just are more interested in the total dollar value of things that you buy rather than what the things are so they don't even really ask you anymore they used to ask me and i would just tell them and if i wasn't supposed to have it they'd say oh well has your doctor in the united states given you a prescription for it or do you have a prescription for it i suppose you could have an indian doctor's prescription and if you did it was fine and if you didn't they would give me a small lecture like you need a prescription and then wave me through like don't do that again so they don't really it's not very strict on medications they know what's going on and they know it's kind of crazy to not be able to import the same stuff you buy here so that'll save you a lot of money if you need medication as far as changing money oftentimes the best way to change it is you find a little you find ask the taxi driver where to change it or maybe at a restaurant they'll change it for you or where you would rent a scooter they also change money it's these little tiny hole-in-the-wall places they'll give you the best exchange rate or just ask around when you get there where's a good place to change money the worst place of course is at the airport but if you need a little money when you arrive you might change it at the airport or just tell the taxi driver hey i don't have any money i have dollars or whatever your currency is and they'll work it out they'll find out you could go to a restaurant on the way and they'll change it for you and you give it to the taxi driver or he'll figure it out for you as far as oh and in changing money 100 bills you get a little bit higher exchange rate than any other form of dollars and they like dollars a lot they like they'll take all currencies but dollars get a good exchange rate most of them it's just a little bit better than maybe some others i think euros get very good exchange rate but as far as dollars get a hundred dollars if they can be new and crisp looking they really like those so that might even get you just a smidgen more cell phones you can bring your western cell phone and you can buy an indian sim card now because of weird indian laws if you buy an indian sim card it tends to deactivate after about two weeks so suddenly your phone's not working so the way around that is when you go to these little shops you maybe even before you go to a shop ask your taxi driver and you want a pre-owned sim card it's like at the shop they know somebody who's activated the sim card already and it's an indian so it's not going to be deactivated and then you buy that sim card for a little bit extra money i mean it's like six dollars ten dollars five dollars you buy that sim card you're much better off and then you put that in your cell phone and generally the way you do it is you buy minutes you might buy a package where you get maybe a thousand minutes a week or you might get and you get one gigabyte of data per day or two gigabytes of data per day or whatever the packages that you buy they'll have an assortment of packages and you buy it that way day by day by day but you buy it as many days as you want you might buy 30 days worth or two weeks worth and renew it at the end of two weeks or whatever suits your needs it's very inexpensive you can get a sim card let's say the card itself cost you five dollars and then your package for 30 days might cost you 20.

So you're in it for 25 for a month somewhere in that range so it's it's very inexpensive find somebody that'll sell you a pre-activated sim card they'll know what you're talking about it's a big problem for westerners so so they know bring earplugs because india's very noisy can be and at night you want to sleep and who knows what's going to happen for one thing they're chanting day and night you may not be able to hear it but that's a good thing it's a high spiritual energy but there's chanting going on maybe very faintly or maybe you don't hear it at all but there's traffic you could be in a guest house and suddenly they're drilling for water right next door to you they're going to build a new house and they're drilling for water because that's how they get their water through a well and it will be ear splitting noise 24 hours a day for days and there was nothing there was just an empty field and suddenly they're drilling india it's like that you never know what's going to happen day by day you just don't know so don't pay too far in advance for a room by the way pay pay a week or two weeks at a time just in case they start building a monstrosity right next to you and you can't sleep because of the jackhammers and everything it can happen it almost happens i don't want to say every time but somehow it happens a lot bring good earplugs i like the ones that you get at the drugstore that are made kind of look waxy and they change shape and you put them in your ear and it molds to your ear they're very inexpensive like you get 10 of them for five dollars or something those seem to block out the most noise to me but find what works for you and bring that you bring your own toilet paper too they don't offer that so you can buy they have little grocery stores all over the place and you can buy anything you forget or don't bring including toilet paper or soap or shampoo or anything what's kind of expensive there is things like shampoo or if you want a chocolate or coffee you can bring coffee and make your own coffee get one of those little heating coils that you can plug in you could buy one in india at the grocery store maybe that's a better way to do it and it has the indian plug on the end and if you ever travel anywhere else buy a converter that converts it to a western plug a lot of these guest houses do not have hot water although that's becoming more and more hot water is becoming more and more included but because they don't you can buy at most grocery stores a coil that costs about twenty dollars and you plug it into the wall and it heats up you dip they give you buckets plastic buckets you fill it with water and it'll heat up all the water and the way you take showers in these kind of guest houses is there's a ladle a big one and you dip it in the bucket and you pull water and you dump it on your head so you can make the water the temperature you want and then dump it on your head and you lather up and wash and then you dump more on to rinse off and you kind of go through that process so you could wait until you get there and if you don't have hot water and you want hot water then get a coil if you stay at the ramen ashram the old part does not have hot water and if you're a single male that's where they'll often stick you but it's a high honor because that's where the old swamis used to live and so people want to get into that place but it just doesn't have hot water it's a great place it's right up against the foot of our nachla the other rooms are more modern and they have hot water and they look more western and by the way the older rooms often will have regular western toilets if it doesn't you can always go back to the office and say could I have one with the western toilet if that's really important to you and often they can switch you to one okay I hope that helps that's a lot of practical stuff about how to actually travel in India once you get there anything I have not covered people are so kind both the Indians and generally the foreigners because they're traveling too and they will share any stories or tips just ask them hey I'm gonna go here or where would you recommend I go or how should I travel or what do I need to get or do or hey I have this problem do you know how I can solve it you know I'm in my ashram and the water's cold and I can't take it I heard about these coils where do I get one well I already told you you go to the grocery store but they could tell you too so anything like that you just ask people will tell you it's a wonderful place I I would highly recommend go to India at least if you have the longing it's never too late you're never too old even if you just have a weekend go just go and see what it's like get a taste and then after that you'll have a perspective and you can make a plan to go back again later if you feel pulled to go back again later and if you don't you don't but you went to an interesting place and you'll have some interesting stories go as long as you can though a week two weeks three weeks four weeks long longer if you can okay I hope this helped next week we'll be back to things more on the topic of awakening we'll see what that ends up being but this week just enjoy yourself and I really hope you read that book in search of a secret India by Paul Brunton most of you have read the autobiography of a yogi by Yogananda that also gives a good flavor of India it seems far-fetched it seems that these things couldn't really happen but in my experience I would guess they probably did it's not quite as specific and it's a little bit more flowery than Paul Brunton's book but it's very powerful and it's a classic and everybody's read it and it just you almost should just read it because it's a classic and it gives you something to talk about with others okay take care I look forward to talking to you next week bye

Reviews

Fantastic William!!! I’m ready for India!!!
Thanks,
~ Jennifer