Days 5 & 6 – Varanasi

Varanasi has been my favorite place so far. The lonely planet describes Varanasi as being more chaotic than Agra, with many more touts hassling you. They also comment on the roads being covered in cow patties. They were only correct about the state of the roads. I had to devise a way to scan at least 10 meters ahead and then look around while I walked those 10 meters, then scan the next 10 meters. Otherwise I was always looking at the ground and missing everything that was happening around us. As for the touts and chaos, we found Varanasi much more mellow than Agra.

Meaghan and I stayed at a nice place away from the Ganges. It had a big courtyard, a sheesha bar and a pool. We also had comfy beds, which we were really stoked about after the greasy sheet motel in Agra and the 16 hour overnight train ride to Varanasi where we awoke at each station we stopped at; paranoid and uncomfortable on the skinny vinyl cots.

Our first evening in the hotel we met Chelsea and Michel for dinner at the sheesha bar. I was congested and tired and my lungs felt like they were on fire from the pollution, but luckily Meaghan was her usual charming and chipper self and she befriended some Varanasi university students in the restaurant. One of which was Prateek, a real sweetie that offered to take us to the river in the morning to see the sunrise.

The next morning Prateek bartered a good price for a boat ride up the Ganges. The Ganges is the sacred/heavily polluted river where people come to cremate their loved ones. The belief is that you go directly to “heaven” as soon as your ashes hit the water. We bought flowers and sat with a “priest” of sorts and chanted a mantra with him, then lit candles in dried banana leaf bowls with flowers and released them into the Ganges. I sent mine down the Ganges with my Dad in mind…

The view of Varanasi from the river is really something beautiful. It is amazing to think how long some of the ghats (religious structures) have been there for and that ceremonies that occur along the banks of the river are the same ones practices over thousands of years.

We spent the day walking around the town of Varanasi, playing “prairie oyster hopscotch” so to speak. We observed a ritual in ghat that represented the lingum and yoni where a woman who is having trouble conceiving is dunked in the Ganges (perhaps curing her infertility but gaining an ear infection). We attempted to take a bicycle rickshaw to a bakery, but the rickshaw peddlers really took us for a ride when they said they new where the bakery was that we wanted to go to, but then dropped us off us no where near it. We also enjoyed an exciting stampede down a skinny alley, as we ran wide-eyed, hearts racing and locals laughing at us.

The evening was equally as interesting but perhaps a little more sombre. We took another boat ride up the Ganges at sunset. Our first stop was at the ritual that was being done under bright spotlights with a massive crowd of people watching from boats and in stands. Though this sounds like a tourist attraction, it was still an amazing display of exotic music and ritual that made my neck hair stand on end. The river was lit with hundreds of floating candles that people in boats had lit and sent off.

Then we headed up river to the burning ghats. An eerie surreal site of loved ones being cremated while their families sat quietly by and watched. An even more disturbing site was the tourists taking this as an opportunity to get up real close and take photos. Ugh, gross.