Varanasi
Namaste (Hello),
We are now in Varanasi, India, the city of death and learning on the banks oif the holy (but very dirty) Ganges river.
The bus trip here from Nepal was a tortuous 20 hours (impossible to sleep). To top it all off we were welcomed to India with out first scam, a bus conductor who demanded we pay again for our bus tickets (when we had already paid for them on the Nepali side of the border). The dilemma was that we weren't sure who the scammer was, the travel agent in Nepal (back across the border) or the conductor. I had faced this sort of thing before in SE asia but in India it seemt that the people are alot more aggressive in their scamming. This guy was shouting and threatening to throw us off the bus. We ended up forking up the money and when we realised our mistake he had jumped off the bus into the night. A lesson learnt.
Varanasi is a very holy, very beautiful, very dirty city. The absolute intensity of the city streets take some getting used to, even after SE asia and Nepal. There is cow diarrhoea and the cows that do them everywhere. On the banks of the river there are 24 hour cremations at the two burning ghats (steps leading into the river), raw sewage goes straight in (apparently there are 1.5 million coliforms per 100ml, the safety limit is 500 per 100ml. I.e. the water is septic) and there are people bathing in its waters everywhere.
It's quite a striking image to see half a dozen burning bodies, the air filled with ash and soot, cows milling around, people selling chai in ceramic cups, wreaths of bright flowers floating in the water and people bathing in the muddy water, all within meters of each other.
This section of the Ganges is particular auspicious for Hindu's to be cremated and the bodies you see burning there apparently come from all across India.
Tomorrow we might check out the University here and in the evening we board our first Indian train to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.
Cheerio,
Khai Lin
