Last entry.......

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Back to the future (or ahead to the past?)

Here's the last one, as I prepare myself for returning to civilization (should I put quotes or not?).


In the last month I could not update the site as I struggled with some sort of bacteria which I contracted probably along the way, while eating something on the street or, more likely, drinking tap water....I guess this is how things happen, a small one-time concession, a slight exception to the rule of care turns into a BIG MISTAKE with loads of consequences. In my case, it was one night where I woke up in my guest house room at 3am with an incredible thirst. As I did not have bottled water, i decided not to use my super water purifier (which saved me several times) and instead took a sip of water from the tap and then went back to bed. The consequences of this action (which I will leave to your imagination) lasted 2 months. More than that, my mobility was very much reduced, I could do less things, move around less, and above all could not sit in an internet point for a long time.


So, here are the last pictures, from Varanasi/Kashi, where there are no limits to the revolting and the sublime. On the revolting side, I cooked an italian dinner for the guys working in my guesthouse. After one day of running around to find ingredients (pasta is hard to find and costs a lot in India), I managed to put together a nice (very nice, I must say) recipe of coriander pesto -- one I got from a good friend with whom I cooked a few centuries ago:
*fresh coriander
*cashew nuts
*garlic
*olive oil
*lime juice
*salt, pepper
(grind everything in a mixer until it is smooth, and then serve, without cheese, on a hot plate of spaghetti or, as in the original recipe, chinese glass noodles).
Well, I was amazed to watch the faces of the 3 indian guys I invited, as they tasted the first mouthful, and appalled when, before the second mouthful, one of them got up and took a full bottle of green chilly sauce and poured onto the spaghetti a quantity of this green slime that could easily disinfect the whole Ganga river flowing below -- then, smiling and bobbing their heads sideways, they finally approved the recipe, while my mind, soul, and intestine were silently concocting images of stranglings, hangings, and all sort of medieval niceties which are clearly an appropriate and deserved retribution to anyone who dares to make such awful tricks with my cooking......

Varanasi has also been the last part of India I visited, before moving out of the country -- that is, to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, two Dravidian states where the rythms, the sights, colours, smells, people, are quite different from Aryan territories.....for one, much less bargaining -- incredibly enough, I arrived in Pondicherry and asked the rickshaw driver to take me to a guest house (which in Varanasi is equivalent to turning your ATM card over to the driver with the PIN code) and he not only did not have a clue of where to take me, but once he got to a guest house he did not even bother to get out and ask for a Baksheesh from the owner....I guess people in the south are more rich. On the other hand (sic transit gloria mundi!) in the south I often found myself eating in places where I would not send my worst enemy, only to avoid the inevitable and omnipresent coconut, coconut oil, coconut milk, which is used everywhere and with everything in Kerala -- yesterday, of all places, i ended up eating in f******g Pizza Hut! It is true that I now understand much better why these terrible american inventions which shoud be worth their inventors a thousand years of torments in the lowest cirlcles of hell have so much success with people: when travelling for such a long time, and knowing that the quality of the food is such an unknown wherever you go, at some point you end up preferring to eat known shit and pay a lot of money (typically, a Pizza Hut meal will be from 5 to 10 times more expensive than an Indian meal) rather than incurring in the n-th disappointment covered with or fried in f*****g coconut oil! But I will take revenge once back, and treat myself to a good pizza with pomodorini del vesuvio, basilico, and mozzarelline di bufala.........

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Photos

The answer, my friend........
Harischandra ghat, Varanasi

Tam Tvat Asi
Manikarnika ghat, Varanasi