MORE INDIAN HOTEL HIGHLIGHTS!

Accommodation is hard to come by at Auroville in high season. After three nights at the Tenderness Guest House (not part of Auroville community but within the area), Mr Ganesh announces he needs the room for other guests. He then asks me to follow him to another building (he owns a few places) and directs me to a Swedish woman’s room. Why? So I could ask this stranger (we had spoken only briefly) if I could share her twin bedded room!!! Can you imagine booking a hotel room and a stranger knocks at your door and asks if he/she can share it with you?!
Fortunately Sue, who´s in a lovely Auroville accommodation within the sector known as New Creation, says I can share her twin room for her last night there.

Sue, had made a reservation for another sector of Auroville for her last few nights and the whole complex is booked as are other sectors. I ask Ravi one of the auto rickshaw drivers we’ve been hiring if he knows of anywhere down at the beach near where Sue will be. He says his friend has a “wonderful guest house” at the beach and he bumps me along three kilometres to what is described on the hoarding as Nature Loft – a Serenity Beach Boutique Hotel.
The room is clean and has a western loo and ceiling fan. The décor and “furniture” are abysmal and the entrance area tiny and with bare earth where tiles were missing. But I am pretty desperate so I negotiate the price and manage to get 200 rupees shaved off. …that’s about 3 euros but haggling is expected and anyone who pays the asked for 1000 is being ripped off anyway.
I walk along the grainy sand narrow beach to where Sue is now settling in. Now this place, in the Auroville sector named Quiet- The Healing Centre, is about as far away as you can get from the so called “boutique” hotel I was going to spend the next few nights in! Situated a minute’s walk from the Bay of Bengal, fresh, clean, stylish, beautiful gardens, an open air café area, super attentive staff taking bookings for luxury therapies…..need I continue?! Sue invites me to share her room and I am delighted to do so.
.My Saviour Sue describes the mouth watering veggie lunch she’s enjoyed (I had a fried egg and toast in an open air thatched roof café near my ‘boutique hotel’). Three nutritious meals, unlimited drinks (no alcohol) free internet and even a laundry service is included in the rate. I’ll stick to my dump for one night as agreed and join Sue the following morning. Sue heads off to have a massage (this Garden of Eden offers just about every treatment I had heard of and a few unknown ones).
I decide to walk back along the main road. It’s the usual – rubbish lined hovels for houses, dead rat, no pavement, dirty streams and fast flowing traffic skimming past me so close that I can feel the heat from the exhaust pipes. Phew I make it back in one piece.
Later on I shower (no hot water) in the dark as can´t find light switch and head out to the lunch time visited café for food. The streets are dark, empty, stray dogs eye me hungrily and the one and only eating place is …..closed.
There is the tiniest hut (more like a narrow cupboard) where a young lad, around 10, is selling snacks. I buy 2 bananas and a packet of crisps and shuffle back to my inhospitable room to have ´dinner´.