Varanasi

Bathers at the ghats

Cow trying to play hide and seek, not very successfully

Sunset ceremony

Painting in the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

Scott with a huuuge prayer wheel at the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

An old temple half sinking into the river

Boats on the Ganges

Monks with video cameras! Scott loves these guys.

Our rower at sunrise

Saris getting dried after washing in the Ganges

Our last stop in India was a few days in the holy city of Varanasi. Despite some of the worst harrassment (beggars, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, hash sellers, religious sadhus, etc) we’ve come across in India, it was an intriguing place to stay for a few nights. The town is strung along the holy Ganges river, with over 80 bathing ghats on the riverside, each of which has a different special purpose or property. It was a great way to spend your days, wandering up and down the river, watching pilgrims bathing, people washing clothes, boats, sadhus, and just generally life going on. That’s pretty much how we spent our time in varanasi, although we did get up ridiculously early one morning to go on a boat ride at sunrise, which turned out to be worth it, it’s such a pretty time of day and the ghats were bustling already. We also saw some of the sunset ceremony they seem to put on mainly for tourists, with lots of smoke and bell ringing down by the main ghat. Of course this is India, so it didn’t start till an hour after sunset.

One of the most confronting experiences here was watching the cremation ghats. You can’t watch from too close because the families (understadably) don’t want tourists at their funerals, but from a nearby balcony you can watch all you like. It was morbidly fascinating, seeing them bring down the bodies all decorated and covered in shawls, where they were taken down to the river to be immersed in the holy water, then brought back to a stack of wood, removed from their decorations until they were just in a white cloth, placed on the pile and a fire was lit. There were pyres everywhere, and it was quite unnerving seeing charred body parts sticking out from the flames. We watched for a long time, it was hard to look away. Apparently they have 200 or so cremations a day – and it takes 360kg of wood each – so the place is covered in wood piles 2 stories high, and boatss keep pulling in stacked high with logs. It’s an auspicious place ot be cremated if you’re a Hindu, and there are more than enough people wanting to be burnt there to keep them busy.

We also took a day trip out to Sarnath, just outside Varanasi, supposedly the place where Buddha gave his first teachings. There’s a monument and a deer park, but the most interesting thing there is all the different Buddhist temples from around the world, which have very different feels to them – the neat Japanese one with a pretty garden, the colourful Tibetan one with prayer wheels and paintings, the austere and huge Chinese one with enormous statues, and the simple Thai one where 10 year old trainee monks were studying and were very keen to show us around – sooooooo cute! We managed to piss off a rickshaw driver who’d agreed to wait for us there and then take us back to Varanasi, but who kept following us around and showing us his watch, so we eventually paid him for one-way and told him to get lost.