Ananda Krishna Van

We did our best to prepare ourselves for India, especially in regards to what we would see and the conditions we might have to stay in.  But even still, the shock of Vrindavan was unbelievable.  I remembered a swami saying during a talk on Vrindavan that you have to be able to see past the oil to get to the water.  I kept thinking that there is a heck of a lot of oil and would I ever be able to get past it to the water.  I so desperately wanted to see the water!

Once we stepped off the litter strewn, pot-holed, dirt road and over the giant threshold into the Ananda Krishna Van complex I felt a teeny tiny bit better.  (Although that didn't last long.)  Inside it was clean and nicely landscaped.

We were led to a room that was slightly below ground and next to some sort of maintenance/laundry area.  The room was noisy, damp, musty and I found mold behind the bed.  I started crying.  Which obviously didn't help calm G down, and she started crying too.  I was panicking.  There was no way I could stay in this room.

Chris left us in the room to see what he could do to make the situation better and he returned with a beautiful, young Russian woman named Lila.  Dhanurdhara Swami arranged for Lila to show us around Vrindavan, and she arrived at the best possible moment.  (More about Lila later... she is an amazing woman and we would have been lost without her.)

Lila speaks Hindi and conversed with the manager about placing us in a better room.  While we were waiting for the new room to be cleaned (which only involves bringing in a new mattress and squeegeeing the bathroom floor), we had our first free roaming monkey experience.  A few monkeys came on to the property and freaked G out.  And me too.  We had been prepped on how to deal with these bold and sometimes nasty primates.  I immediately took off my sunglasses (and didn't put them on again until I returned to America!) and avoided making eye contact.  It didn't take long for a staff person to come along and shoo them off the property.

We eventually lugged our suitcases up to the second floor and into a room with a balcony.  It wasn't great by any means, but it wasn't damp, musty or moldy.  I carefully inspected the bed for bugs, which I probably wouldn't have thought too much about if it weren't for my friend Amy making me paranoid about bed bugs.  I didn't discover bed bugs, but I did find hairs and questioned the cleanliness of the sheets and mattress.  Thankfully I shoved a set of sheets into a suitcase as a last minute thought right before we left home.  And at the end of our stay here I did not bother to bring them home.  In fact, G and I each left a pair of shoes behind too.

Shower curtains are apparently a luxury in Vrindavan, which wouldn't have been a big deal except for the water pooling on the marble bathroom floor made it very slippery.  And since there is no daily cleaning of your room, you're kinda left with evaporation as a means of removing the water from the floor.

But we did have hot water as well as a quasi-Western toilet.  No toilet paper, but we brought our own.  As you can tell from the photo below, daily cleaning (or any cleaning at all) of the rooms doesn't appear to be a priority.  We went through a lot of hand sanitizer.

The crazy thing about our lodging is that it's considered the nicest in Vrindavan.  When someone asked where we were staying and we said "Ananda Krishna Van" they would say "ohhhh, that's so nice" or "wow, that's expensive."  We paid $40 a night.  And after the fact we were told we got ripped off as it should have only been $22.  So, $22 a night in Vrindavan is expensive.  My opinion is that we got $22 worth of a room, maybe even less.  Once again, it's all about perspective.

As far as lodging goes in Vrindavan, there aren't many options.  The only other "decent" place is the MVT, which we tried to stay at but it was booked even 5 months out.  We arrived at the end of Kartik, which is a very busy time for Vrindavan as thousands of Hindus and devotees come here during this time.  Rumor has it that Uma Thurman's father is some sort of Vedic scholar and they rented out almost the entire MVT.  Some told us we were lucky to even get a room at Ananda Krishna Van.

There is another lodging complex being built that's a little farther out from where we stayed, which is being advertised as a luxury place.  Given how many people make pilgrimages there, I can see it doing quite well.