Pilgrim’s Diary, January 18, by Vipramukhya Swami

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Pilgrim’s Diary, January 18
by Vipramukhya Swami

January 18, 2002– Melbourne, 4:30 PM.

ISKCON Melbourne is the oldest Hare Krishna temple in Australia. The deities look beautiful and well looked after, and the temple room is gorgeous marble tiled with ornate Vedic-style arches.

Aniruddha dasa, the temple president, joined ISKCON in Melbourne in 1978 and has been the president of the temple since May, 1990.

The devotees are polite and well behaved. There seems to be a number of uninitiated new bhaktas and bhaktins here, which indicates to me that some people have joined the movement here recently.

The temple is about three blocks from Port Phillip Bay, which is connected to the Bass Straight between the Southern Ocean and the Tasmanian Sea, and Aniruddha, Devahotra, and I walked there yesterday as the sun was setting. We watched the fishermen on the pier as the waves rolled in. I was really tired yesterday, and Aniruddha said an evening walk as the summer sun is going down helps one to get grounded in the local time. It seems to have worked. I had a good night's rest, and I feel good today, adjusted to the Australian time zone.

It's summer here, and winter where I just came from. But it's not hot here in Melbourne. In fact, it's been quite cool, to the point of needing something warm to wear in the morning. Even now, sitting outside here in the sun, I am wearing my hooded sweatshirt. It should be warmer. This is an unusual cool spell. However, I'm told over the weekend the temperature will rise and it will get seasonably hot again.

Melbourne is on the Southeast corner of the Australian continent, further from the equator than most of the rest of the country. Consequently it tends to be a cooler place than up north. Still, no part of the continent is far from the Tropic of Capricorn, which passes directly through the center of Australia from West to East, so it can get very hot all over.

Australia is big. To drive from Perth to Darwin is 4,396 km. As the crow flies, it's over 4000 km from east coast to west.

We went downtown again today and had lunch at the Hare Krishna restaurant called Gopal's. For $9.50 Australian dollars you can get all you can eat. They have about 200 customers per day. I don't know whether it was because I was with Aniruddha, the temple president, or whether it was because I am a sannyasi, but they haven't charged me for a meal on either of the two days that I have been there.

A few doors down from Gopal's restaurant is the Hare Krishna Food for Life on Swanston Street. They get about 260 people a day. The price for a meal is $3.80 if you have what they call a concession card or $5.50 if you have no card. People with concession cards are students, pensioners, and the unemployed.

In the evening I went to an evening home program, led a kirtan, and gave a lecture. I also received my first donation in Australia on this trip: 51 Australian dollars. Not sure what that's worth, but about half of what it would be in US dollars.