Travel Day 934 – Amritapuri Ashram, Kerala, INDIA
Today was quite an Active Travel Day, but it was also an Arrival Day and in this case I was arriving at the Amma Ashram in Amritapuri, officially called Mata Amritanandamayi Math…
Mata Amritanandamayi Math, Amritapuri
After enjoying the nice climate of Bangalore for a couple of days, I was seriously debating if it was really worth going south again to the quite miserable heat, but I had bought my train ticket already and so I felt compelled to actually use it. Also I was quite curious after all to see the Ashram of Amma, the Hugging-Mother. So the 16 hour train ride, the rickshaw ride and the local bus drive were the price I had to pay to reach the famous ashram in Amritapuri…
Actually I was quite surprised that there were only a few buses on offer to go to Amritapuri, but once we came into close reach I started to realize why. The ashram was located at the birth place of Amma and this very spot happened to be located on a skinny island off the coast of Kerala. To reach this location we had to cross a new bridge and drive down to a village on the only road of the island. A few years back, I was told by a fellow traveler, one could only reach the ashram while crossing the backwaters by ferry…
He continued to tell me that he had been visiting the ashram for many years and that it had grown a lot in recent years with up to 8, sometimes 10 thousand people staying there. At first I had trouble getting a sense of the scale of the ashram, but right when we were on the bridge towards the skinny island and Amritapuri, we could already see the ashram from far away and it didn’t look like an ashram at all, but rather like a little city of pink high-rise buildings by the sea…
Once we accessed the campus of the ashram, I had to realize that in fact this ashram was a real city with living towers, three restaurants, a temple, gardens, assembly halls, shops, a hospital, a hostel for school children, small-scale manufacturing factories and some urban sprawl into the local village. I was in complete shock about the extent of Mata Amritanandamayi Math and the popularity of Amma, but to make things worse, it was actually the weekend and the Hugging-Mother was hosting a big event for the Governor of Kerala, which resulted in people running around everywhere I could possibly look…
Because of this big event everything else was cancelled and so after checking in I decided to ditch the crowds and I went down to the beach to see the sun set over the water. Some dinner in the big canteen and a chat with other new arrivals about the many rules an regulations that the Mata Amritanandamayi Math had set upon us concluded my first day. So far I did not really like this place very much and I was debating to get out of here rather quickly again…
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