Varanasi - The Ganges - November 27-30

2005-11-28T23:52:00.000-08:00

Beck calls hotels to book a room in Varanasi, we pack, check out and go to visit Bobby (the woman Beck met at the cybercafe yesterday) at her home. There are 2 identical 2 storey houses next to each other sharing a gate. Bobby and her family live upstairs in one of the houses. It is a fascinating insight into Indian middle class. So far all we have seen are the street life - beggars, street children, shopkeepers, touts, guesthouse emplyees, autorickshaw drivers, etc. Bobby's husband, Devendra, owns a business supplying bottled LPG gas to houses or cooking and heat (there are no pipelines in India). We are served tea from a black and gold china set and are shown through their wedding, holiday and family photo albums - the three most important things in Indian life. We read about Indian weddings before we left and were hoping to get to experience one - the event goes for weeks before the ceremony and the ceremony and reception themselves go for 3 days. A wedding costs the same as a house in India, and is said to be one of the reasons that Indians find it so hard to break out of the cycle of poverty.

At 1 we head back to the guesthouse, pick up our bags and go to the train station for one of the hourly trains to Gwalior for our 7.45pm train to Varnasi. The 3pm train pulls out as we walk onto the platform. We sit and wait for the 4pm train. One of the things that it has taken some getting used to is the propensity for Indian men to openly stare at Rebecca. I asked Justine on the trek what it was about - to us it seems rude. She explained that just as to westerners, tanned skin, fit bodies and exotic heritage is a sign of health and the free time and spare income to develop it (creams, tanning beds, beauty parlours), so fair skin, blonde hair and a curvy figure - all of which Beck has - are equivalent signs of exotic ideal in India (there are equivalent skin lightening creams and parlours here). It is no longer a surprise when the male of an Indian family sitting on the bench behind us turns around and stares at Beck, no more than 25cm away, his elbow touching her shoulder while his wife sits next to him and stares for an hour; another male walks past, sees Beck, turns back, puts his bag down in front of her, sits on a hay bals and stares; children flock to the bench looking. All you can do is ignore it - like the touts.

We make our trains and as usual, Beck has befriended one of the fellow passengers in our cabin who comes from Janhsi and strongly suggests we break up our planned trip from Varanasi to Jaipur with a stop in Kujaraho. We look in the LP and the idea is appealing. At varanasi we go to the foreigners ticket office to change our ticket to Jaipur. The other ticket booths won't serve us. We wait an hour for our turn and change our ticket to Kujaraho. Kush from the guesthouse we are staying at comes to pick us up annd takes us by autorickshaw to the closest spot he can let us off. We then walk for 15 minutes through a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, none more than 3 metres wide and 100 metres long before coming to a dogleg or T intersection requiring a turn. By the third one, we have lost our bearings and are glad we are being lead. We end up at the river, climb the stais and enter our room which has views from the balcony down the river, overlooks an amazing ghat (washing and prayer platform) which has half subsided, and is regularly frolicked along by mokeys who, over the next few days, join us when we sit out there to read or watch the sunset.

We hed out to make calls and eat. The alleys are narrow bazaars like the Old City in Jerusalem or Istanbul except that they are filthy, full of cows and cowshit, garbage, beggars, the spittle from the betelnut the men constantly chew for euphoria and human, bicycle and moped traffic, and of course touts every 3 steps trying to force you into their shop to buy silk, clothing, food, spices, postcards, web time or souvenirs. Before we have gone 200m, Beck is freaking out about walking the alleys at night. After 40 minutes of alleys, touts, wrong turns and Beck freaking, we get to a main road which rings the alleyway bazaar. We have lnch and prepare ourselves to enter the alleys again, get hopelessly lost within 10 minutes, (instantly seen as an opportunity by a number of beggars to guide us back to the hotel, which one does and we pay him for).

Beck wants to change hotels out of the bazaar and in the main section of town. She calls a couple of places, make a booking and returns to the room calmer. Kush explains tht the alleys are safe if you stay on the main ones (these are recognisable because they ar more than 1m wide), and come back to the hotel by 10pm(apparently there is a criminl element in Varanasi (mafia backed politicians, gangs, etc)). Beck decides to stay and after 2 long, exhausting days we have an early night.

At breakfast, Beck befriends Barbara (of course) and invites her dinne with us where we are meeting Rhonda and Annie from the trek. We spend the day walking along the river exploring the ghats where prayer, washing of bodies and clothes, and the sacramental Ganges cremations occur which will release Hindus from reincarnation and allows them to travel to Nirvana. The afternoon is spent in a cybercafe converting photos to a smaller siz, which you are probably aware, the Indian infrastructure does not allow us to upload. Aftr a combined 8 hours of web time, I have been able to set this site up but not load any text or photos. I talk to Jett for 20 minutes which is the highlight of the day. The webcam I set up for him isnt working and Indian internet doesnt have enough bandwidth for it to work so we stick to the phone.

We go back to our room via the ghats which, now that it is evening, are holding westernised/touristy shows with Xmas lights, music, insense and chanting. It is interesting to watch yet feels very inauthentic. We pick up Barbara and head to the restaurant where we had arranged to meet Annie & Rhonda for a pleasant meal accompanied by Indian live music. Annie will be in Rajasthan about the same time as us and we agree to meet up. When we get back to the guesthouse, we organise a sunrise boat tour of the Ganges which we get up at 5.30am for. It goes for 2hrs at gives an insight into the daily lives of the locals - bathing, washing, praying - although even on the water you can't escape the touts - they paddle up o you in their boats offering flowers and candles to place in the river for prayers, or gaudy souvenirs. It is mindboggling to think that the World Health Organisation states that water needs to have no more than 500 parts per 100ml to be drinkable, and the Ganges that these vents take place in has 1.5 million. The sunrise and the dolphins are exhilirating.

We spend another combined 8 hours working on the web site only to find that the photos we can loaded from our cameras, resized 1 at a time and the guy running the place burned to a CD for us yesterday, had not been burned to the CD, and had been deleted from the PC we were using and all the work from yesterday had been lost. Today's effort was just to get us back to where we were at the end of yesterday, set up to start doing things on the site, with nothing actually available. The guy still wanted to charge us for the full 8 hours. I will leave our response to your imagination. We go to our first yoga class which we had been hoping to do daily since the end of the trek. It is fun and challenging, the teacher having patience, skill and a great sense of humour with a raucous laugh which burts out regularly and says is a oga relaxation breathing technique which he recommends we incorporate.

The next day we pack and checkout. Kush tells us that the previous evening, while we were travelling from the cybercafe to the yoga class, there has been an assassination in the city of a mafia connected politician and 8 of his bodyguards by a hit squad of another mafia connected politician. That day, there are no shops open for fear of retribution, riots and protests. We get on the web, book accommodation in Kajuraho and change some of our flights. We do another yoga class with Sunil, just as much fun and energetic as the first, and join him and the other 3 women in the class for dinner on a balcony overlooking the river and one of the evening tourist ceremonies taking place on the ghats. We hear that the assassinated politician is being cremated at one of the ghats that night and the bazaar is going to be shut down for safety. It is recomended we get out ASAP rther than wait for 9pm when we were planning to go. We get our bags and walk to the main road, more familiar with the lanes and alleys. As soon as we get to the main road, we are surrounded by a dozen autorickshaw driver grabbing at us, begging us to go with them, giving us ridiculour prices before we have even told them where we are going. It's as if they are desperate to get a paying fare that will get them out of the area before the politician's funeral ceremony begins. We choose one and at the last minute a white suited traffic policeman gets in the front with the driver. This would normally be a comforting hing, however there is a sly, ominous grin on himas he looks at us and we are concerened that we are going to be asked for a bribe or even taken down an alley and attacked. I start conversing with the driver and tell him there are people waiting for us at the train station who know we are coming from the bazaar. A short while later the policeman gets out, the driver saying he had to bribe him not to force a bribe from us. We get to the train station and pay the driver double for getting us there safely, relieved we haven't "disappeared" as 2-3 tourists do every few months which we later find out. As soon as we ariive, men surround the autorickshaw asking us if we have change for 100 Ruppes. It is an obvious scam to rip us off - shortchanging us or giving us counterfeit - but the audacity of a mob attempting to do it without thinking it looks suspicious is bizarre.

It is 9pm. Our train is due to leave at 11.35. Every 1/2 hour for the next 3 1/2 hours announcements come over the system to say our train will be delayed. At 1.30am we finally head off, sharing a cabin with Andrew and Karen, an Australian couple who have lived in London for 8 years and are travelling on their way back to Australia. We are glad to be out of Varanasi and heading to a small town with a big reputation for the quality of the architecture and carving on its temples.

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