Sita Amman Temple

 As is well-documented it is usually me that takes the pictures, both overseas and closer to home. I get a goodly amount of grief for this, at least until someone needs pictures. If I'm on a student trip then I'm, naturally, taking pictures of my students' responses to the wonders that I've fortunately seen before. Consequently, it's pretty rare that a picture of me overseas pops up. Happily, here is one of those rarities, and a picture that I'd never seen before. Here I am talking to Sally Tate Meacham and Carolanne Kelly at the Sita Amman Temple in Sri Lanka, right next to the footprint of Lord Hanuman (caused when he leapt across the ocean from India in search of Sita). Thanks to the excellent Michael Manfredi for sending this picture along.

The picture was a particularly well-timed surprise because I've been buried deep in the Ramayana as I'm trying to get off to a good start on my sabbatical writing. It's also inspiring me to design another Ramayana-themed student trip, this time focusing entirely on Sri Lanka.

Divurumpola

I continue to try and get caught up long-delayed blogging, which also allows me to clean up my long-suffering phone. Here are a number of pictures from Dirumumpola in Sri Lanka. It's mainly a Buddhist site (complete with stupa, which I somehow don't have a picture of) but also plays a key role in the Ramayana story. While those no great proof that there's any historical basis to the Ramayana, this is the location associated with the place where Sita proved her virtue to Rama by jumping in a fire with Agni. Historical foundation or not there is a definite Ramayana tourist path, which the Sri Lankans have done much more in constructing than the Indians themselves. I'm hoping to run this trip again in a year or two, so I'm definitely looking forward to another visit.

Buddhism is a very iconographic religion, which makes it just about the opposite of Islam in that fashion.

More images of the Buddha.

As I've discussed in previous posts, every subtle movement and placement of the Buddha's hands have tremendous symbolic significance.

The notion of hell, although mainly in the metaphoric sense, plays a big role in some Buddhist art, which always seems strange if you're on the outside of the faith looking in.

More images of hell, which would seem to fit in perfectly with a medieval church painting.

The reclining Buddha is a staple of Buddhist art. Here the Buddha accepts impending death and waits for it peacefully.

More images from the Buddhist side of the temple, as you walk around towards the back. A more gifted photographer (meaning, everyone) could have done great things with this image.

And when you get around to the back of the temple you come across a series of murals associated with the Ramayana itself, forming a little metaphor for how Hinduism and Buddhism have lived side by side in India for centuries. Here are Rama, Sita and Lakemana during their exile. The golden dear, which Ravana used to distract Rama and kidnap Sita, is seen in the backgroun.

Here Hanuman has bounded across the Indian Ocean from India to Lanka and discovered the kidnapped Sita. She refuses to go back with him, leaving the honor of saving her to Rama.

Hanuman is captured, and in the process of escaping manages to burn down much of Lanka.

The monkeys building the stone bridge that will carry Rama's army to Lanka for the truly epic final batte.

The shot is out of order, as it actually occurred very early in the Ramayana. Here Lakamana cuts off the nose and ears of Ravana's sister at Rama's command. This plays an even bigger version of the Sri Lankan understanding of the Rama story because it justifies Ravana's actions in kidnapping Sita; that is, he kidnapped her not out of lust, but rather to avenge his sister and to teach Rama a lesson.

A statue of Hanuman in the back of the temple.

A close-up, showing Hanuman ripping open his chest to show that Rama and Sita are always in his heart, making him a natural symbol for all of India.

Sita jumping into the flames to prove her virtue to Rama after her rescue. The first of two times when Rama cruelly doubts her love and fidelity. For this reason outsiders are often cold to Rama, which Indians have trouble understanding. They view Rama as a heroic but also a tragic figure, who did what he had to do because of duty.

Another view of the same statue, this time showing the people's horror, including that of Rama, at Sita jumping into the fire.

Two Sides of the Same Cyndi Coin

OK, I know I've posted one of these pictures before, but I was cleaning out my over-burdened and long-suffering phone the other day and thought I should post these two together. It's amazing/unexplainable that I still have pictures from a spring 2017 trip on my phone, because, well, that's two years ago, but I've also changed phones since then. Occasionally I'll get phone self-diagnostic messages that I need to clear pictures off of my memory, and I always intend to do so, but it ends up being carried out pretty fitfully. Sometimes I think it's the enormity of turning all of these pictures into blog posts, which saves them forever (maybe) but also means that I need to do something with them. Mainly I think I'm just afraid of losing them, although if I don't do something they seem to magically disappear into the cloud for a while before leaving completely. Anyway, someday I will get completely caught up, which is what may get me to 3000 posts down the road.

Here are two pictures I snapped on our last day in Sri Lanka after we had left the crazy posh hotel where we were checking out elephants and were on our way back to Colombo for the flight. Along the way we, in one of those classic unscripted moments I talk about so much, stopped to have pictures taken with a very big snake (which I've posted about before). I love these two pictures of my wonderful friend Cyndi because I think they are the worst and best pictures I've ever taken of her, back to back.

Cyndi being introduced to the snake, which I'm sure is the worst picture I ever took of her. 

And Cyndi a moment later, which may be the best picture I've ever taken of her. It definitely speaks to her power to roll with the punches, which is one of the many reasons why I love to travel with her. She can instantaneously adapt to anything no matter how unpleasant, which may explain our friendship.

Seetha Amman Temple

I continue to mine pictures from my criminally over-burdened phone, this time, inexplicably, from the student trip to India and Sri Lanka in March 2017. As my students will attest, it always comes back to the Ramayana. I've been thinking a lot about the Ramayana lately because, well it is the Ramayana, but also because if I don't get serious about finishing this damn book the idea will outlive me. Plus, our Core curriculum at Champlain as we know it is disappearing, and it also means that amazing courses like Heroines & Heroes will fade away. Not only is it a fascinating course to teach, but it was also a wonderful fit for travel courses. Our Spring 2017 Ramayana-themed Heroines & Heroes trip to India and Sri Lanka, while exhausting and fraught with some travel-related near-disasters, was the most tightly-constructed and success trip I've ever run. If Heroines & Heroes disappears I really should run this specific course and trip again, which would form a very noble send-off.  Here are some pictures from Sri Lanka of the Seetha Amman Temple. It's officially a Sita temple, but, quite naturally, also celebrates the story of Rama in its entirety. It was also the spot where our Sri Lankan guide and friend Sudarshana Parera finally told the students the "other" story of the Rama, the one where Ravanna was the hero. It was the about the most brilliantly teachable moment of my entire career. My student Max turned to me in amazement and asked, "Did you know this?" And, of course, the answer was yes, but I thought it would be more powerful coming from a Sri Lankan in Sri Lanka than from me in a classroom in Burlington, Vermont.

The extraordinary iconography at the temple. It was another blisteringly hot and humid day in Sri Lanka, and we happily reached the temple in the morning.

Hanuman. It's never simply a monkey when he is carrying a massive mace.

Rama: the unquestioned hero to all Indians. The Sri Lankans view the story differently.

And Rama's wife Sita. This was officially a temple dedicated to her, and it featured many of the events of her capture and rescue from Lanka.

Rama, Sita and Laksmana.

And while Ganesha played no role in the Ramayana, he made an appearance.

Strips as cloth as offerings and appeals for good fortune.

The very large footprints left by Hanuman as he, in his giant form, jumped from India to Lanka.

It was Hanuman who found the kidnapped Sita. He offered to carry her back, but she refused because it would have been an affront to Rama's honor, and so she waited for her beloved to arrive.

Egg Hoppers

It's a great truism, but it's amazing what a great breakfast can do to turn around an ugly mood.  Granted, few people love food more than me, and this is especially true in regards to breakfast.  I suppose it helps when you never seem to sleep later than 5:30 a.m., so you're uniquely qualified to take advantage of breakfast. What led to this strange digression?  Now that Proust, or at least this round of Proust, is finished, I figured that it was time to get back to the original purpose of this blog: travel stories and pictures.  As we enter the mad rush to get everything ironed out for the upcoming Jordan trip, it's difficult to remember that it was only a year ago that we were doing the same thing to get ready to head out to India and Sri Lanka.  Sadly, I don't think I appreciated Sri Lanka, at least at the beginning, as much as I could have.  While we were in India we suddenly realized that we had a potential visa problem; essentially, we had a single entry India visa but because of the peculiarity of our ticket situation we actually needed a multiple entry visa.  Happily, eventually the esteemed Inder and Rohit from Tiger Paws Adventures solved the problem, but it was all that we thought of for several days as we fretted over the situation. At one point in Sri Lanka I even called Senator Leahy's office back here in Vermont to ask them for guidance/help/leverage in attaining another round of Indian visas (which the excellent Elin from OIE managed to pull off in the middle of a blizzard).  It's bizarre to think about the fact that at one point in the chaos we almost cancelled out on the Sri Lankan part of the trip, mainly because we were afraid we'd get in Sri Lanka and wouldn't be able to leave.  In the end we ended up going because we didn't really have a choice; all the money had already been spent on Sri Lankan hotels and tours, so there was no money to hang out in India anyway (although we devoted time to pursuing that option).  Anyway, the whole point of this was that I, and I suspect Cyndi and I, showed up in Sri Lanka exhausted and apprehensive and fretting over a bunch of seemingly intractable problems, and not, at least initially, prepared to enjoy Sri Lanka.  We had flown out of Mumbai in the middle of the night, adding to the blur.  We landed in Colombo early in the morning and it was already broiling hot, although pretty soon we climbed into higher terrains and it grew comfortably cool.  After climbing onto a lovely, comfortable and glorious air-conditioned bus we drove for an hour or so and then stopped for breakfast.  What I didn't know about Sri Lanka is that they make a killer breakfast, which immediately endeared them to me.  My great discovery were egg hoppers, a magic construction that sort of looks like an inverted Islamic taqiyah, but with a fried egg in it.  Despite my offer of $5 none of the students would plop the egg hopper on their heads.  I guess the point of this whole thing is that I wasn't prepared to enjoy the Sri Lanka part of the trip, which was a pity because I quickly grew to love it there, but a quick egg hopper (OK, three egg hoppers) shook me out of my funk.

Seriously, who knew that Sri Lankans cooked such great breakfasts?

OK, so I might have a problem, as egg hoppers #2 and #3 might tell you.  I desperately need to figure out how to make these things, because I doubt if I'll find a restaurant to make me one here in Vermont. #YankeeHellhole

Deposhify

The other day I was in the midst of a Zanzibar travel planning meeting with my friend and colleague Steve.  Our budget for our upcoming trip to Pemba was out of whack, and as we dissected it we figured out that it was because our friend Kombo, as a proud Pemban, had thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the students in his proposed itinerary, but that he'd also bumped up the poshness of the hotels.  We had much the same issue when we putting together our India/Sri Lanka trip last spring.  Our friend Inder did an extraordinary job, but we had to run through a few iterations where we had to ask him to deposhify things, especially the hotels.  Normally I would assume that our tour guides were just boosting their profits, but that's not the case with Inder or Kombo. Rather, I think they were trying to assure that we had as great a time as possible while also showing off the best their countries have to offer.  That said, I think it also speaks to the perception, very common overseas, that Americans are pretty soft and generally bad travelers.  Sadly, there's a lot of justification for that accepted view.  One of the reasons why I devote so much time and effort to planning these trips is that I want to change my students' worldviews, and an essential part of that relates to getting them out of their comfort zones.  So, deposhify is a word I use a lot in my emails.  I'd like to think that I made it up (much like remasculate) but since my international friends always understand what I'm talking about I suspect that I didn't.

I think I sent this picture to a couple of my friends back at Champlain with some line like, "this is how we roll in the Core."  Of course, the exact opposite is true, as this is how we definitely try not to roll on a Core trip.  There's no point leaving a gated community, which American universities are quickly becoming, to head off to another gated community.  Still, that pool was pretty sweet.

Ownership

The other day I gave a presentation in our George "Honey Boy" Evans Symposium here at Champlain.  Mainly I wanted to talk about the important and complex nature of Sita in the Ramayana, which meant talking about her relationship with Rama and Ravana.  Not surprisingly, I had to give some background on an immensely complicated epic, without letting that foundational information dominate the entire talk.  While providing that background I talked a little bit about our guides for the trip, which in turn inspired me post some long-overdue pictures.  The trip was way too short for such our madly ambitious goal of following that path of Rama, and thus of the Ramayana itself.  That said, it held together better than any trip I've ever planned.  One of the many, many interesting aspects of the trip was the role that our guides played in the nature of that exploration.  While the trip was organized by the estimable Inder Singh, he made use of Vivek Pathak, a Hindu, in India, and Sudarshana Parera, a Buddhist, in Sri Lanka.  What I knew, and what, of course, I didn't tell the students, was that the two men had two very different versions of the Ramayana, which appropriately represented the contested narrative between India and Sri Lanka.  On two separate occasions, once on the bus and once in the midst of a throng of Indians in the ancient city of Nashek, he told the story of the Ramayana.  What was lovely - and what could not have been planned better - was that there were subtle differences in the story, which reflected the continued oral evolution of the epic, even one that was allegedly fossilized in a written form millennia ago.  At one point we asked him to identify his favorite written version of the Ramayana.  He admitted that he had never read it, but instead told us, "I learned the story from my grandmother, and my mother is teaching my son the story."  Talk about your teachable moment.  Once we crossed over to Sri Lanka the story became very different because view Rama as the initiator of the war and Ravana the hero, and that, in fact, Rama never defeated Ravana because no one could have done that (instead,he was figuratively, and literally, stabbed in the back by his own brother, and fellow rakshasa, Vibhishana).  We were in a Sita temple one day and finally Surdarshana said to the students, although in a very friendly way, "I've heard your professor telling you the story of the Ramayana, but let me tell you the real story."  At that point you spun a very different tale.  One of the students, incredulous, turned to me and said, "Wait, did you know this?"  And I had to respond, "Well, duh."  The power was in them hearing it at that point, not me telling them in a classroom in Burlington, Vermont.  Both guides have since been included, if sadly certainly not immortalized, in my epics book. 

The path of the Ramayana.  We picked up the trail at Nashek, which is a couple hours east of Mumbai, or, on this particular map, at that jag right next to Pancarvati.

Vivek Pathak, our guide and friend in India.

Sudarshana Parera, our guide and friend in Sri Lanka.

And unfazed by the battle for control of the Ramayana was the most excellent Inder Singh, the head of Tiger Paws Adventures (an organization of which I cannot say enough good things).  The students adored him and he reached a sort of mythic level with them.  As he waving goodbye to us in the Mumbai Airport they all started chanting "Inder! Inder! Inder!!!" much, much too loudly.

It was an amazingly culturally and religious diverse trip, which meant that it perfectly mirrored India and Sri Lanka.  It's wonderful, and funny, to think that the trip was essentially led by a Sikh, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Jewish Atheist.  I don't know what the Pentecostals were doing that week because they clearly missed out.

Yala National Park - the Not So Nice Animals

A useful general rule for leading an international trip with students is that when they get grouchy just take them to the beach.  We learned that in Zanzibar a couple years ago.  It was hot and the students were beat down, but one trip out to Prison Island and a little time on the beach there dramatically improved their mood.  On last March trip to India and Sri Lanka we finally made it to the beach on the next to last day.  When Cyndi and I were researching the Yala National Park we found out that it touched upon the ocean and that there was a beach there so we thought we might just be able to let the students walk on the beach.  I remember our great Sri Lankan guide saying "You really shouldn't go in the water because of the undertow" as Sally and Carolanne rushed past him and dove into the surf.  I've been meaning to post a series of pictures of the students, both at the beach and riding along in the jeeps.  They were a good lot and we dragged them all over India and Sri Lanka, as well as facing the possibility of getting stuck temporarily in Sri Lanka or India because of a visa issue, and they were happy every day.

Hannah and Scott in the jeep looking for beasties.

John, who was unfailingly jazzed every day and was a joy to travel with.  He was also the one who would stand up at dinner and make the heartfelt speeches.  And to think that when I first taught him on his first day at Champlain I was certain that I'd throw him out the window.  Soon, soon, all too soon, my brother, I know you'll make it back to India and Sri Lanka.

Jacob celebrating his Sri Lanka book and Sri Lanka.  He started off the semester a bit shy, but he's one of those students that you can just see grow day by day.

John and Sam taking picture on the journey through the park.  He was disappointed that I wouldn't let him climb on top of the jeep.

Left to right: Jess (reflective), Max (giving me attitude), Hannah (loving the beach), Hattie (talking smack).

Jess and Sam showing restraint and not rushing into the surf.

The same could not be said for Sally and Carolanne who almost bowled over our Sri Lankan guide in their mad dash to the ocean.  I think I may have won them all over to my belief that the Indian Ocean is the best ocean.

Charlotte taking the requisite selfie at the beach.

Max officially losing his shit at the beach.

Sally and Carolanne after being dragged out of the ocean. In the background you can see a peak that Michael Manfredi allegedly climbed when he "went for a walk on the beach."

Cyndi sporting her excellent Quitters Coffee shirt at the beach.

Some old beach bum showed up, oddly wearing a Rising Sun, Indiana t-shirt.

Several women on the trip taking the opportunity to tan, and in some cases burn, before it was back in the jeeps in search for more beasties.

Jess looking slightly disgruntled/abashed after a wave splashed over her and interrupted her nap.  

I think this was the moment when it began to dawn on the group when the trip was coming to a close.  The look on Sally's face (far left) said it all.

And Carolanne deciding to flash the Indian Ocean.  I guess I can post this picture since Carolanne sent it to me and featured it on her own blog.  This interaction was reported to me: Carolanne: "Charlotte, come with me.  I need you to take a picture of me topless." Charlotte: "Sure!"  Apparently it's now Carolanne's goal to flash all the oceans of the world, which I guess is not any dumber than having your picture taken everywhere wearing a Rising Sun, Indiana t-shirt.