Travelogue: Hare Krishna

I spent the past several days at an ashram. Simply put, an ashram is a monastery. The one I visited is for devotees of the Hare Krishna movement and is also an organic farm that accepts volunteers. The movement is based on some pretty basic ideas about keeping life simple and healthy, and is all about yoga, mantras, and praising Krishna. It is also a little bit like laws and sausages, in that it might spoil your spiritual appetite to know that it was founded in New York City in the 1960s.

Life on the ashram is soothing. The community consists of gardens, temples, and dormitories on 9 hectares of land in the Pampas outside of Buenos Aires. Despite the proximity to the Grand Capital, the farm is quiet and the air fresh, with the majority of neighbors being lazy cows, horses, and pigs. A few families live in separate houses on the land, while devotees practicing the monastic lifestyle live in communal spaces at the center of the community. The devotees make offerings to their gods several times a day in a fantastic temple that looks like a space ship.

Despite the spiritual nature of life on the ashram, religious views were kept at arms length on a "take it or leave it" basis for guests. All were honest about the fact that this life is not for everyone and that you have to, after having gotten your ya-yas out in the material world, really want to dedicate yourself to finding an inner peace.

What follows is the schedule of a sample day for the volunteers who, it should be noted, paid a nominal fee and were treated more as guests than laborers:

7:30 AM: Wake groggily in your spartan, monastic, yet comfy room. Stumble to dining room for breakfast of chapati bread, banana marmalade, and custard.

8:30 AM: Head out to the construction site for the day's work. Work consisted of pounding posts into holes in the ground for a future floor. The girls did gardening with Maria.

10:30 AM: Sit in the sun to share a mate and discuss American imperialism, spiritual wanderings, and the invasion of Argentina by Monsanto and the Soy lobby with Ariel and Gustavo, our "supervisors." They are kinda mercenary eco-construction workers who recently moved to the ashram from an eco-village called Gaia and are not involved in the monastic lifestyle.

11:15 AM: Resume working.

1:00 PM: Finish work, go put on sandals and lie in the sun.

1:30 PM: Lunch, followed by siesta.

4:30 PM: Yoga and Meditation

5:30 PM: Tea and snack

8:30 PM: Dinner

9:00 PM: Read two pages, fall asleep in spartan, monastic, yet comfy room.

Every day was exactly the same, save for Sunday, during which we did not work and had an extra meditation session.

Sometimes DVDs were played in the dining room, and I feel obligated to note that I watched an anti-abortion video that had been crafted out of scenes from Kill Bill.

Ariel lived in this cozy little trailer.

One of our gourmet, lacto vegetarian lunch dishes.

There is pleasure to be had in the monotony of pounding rubble into a hole for hours at a time.

Typical afternoon activity.

This young lad claimed to be something of a Dr. Doolittle.

The gardens and the house under construction.

Pizza!

The great Argentina Pampas.

The temple, called a "truly," and another sacred building next to it where they keep the clothes of the gods.