The Holy City

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Hi All. First I want to say sorry for not keeping you all updated. The tour was crazy we were always busy, or seemed to be anyways. Now you are all going to be flooded with India blogs, again sorry about that.

We took taxi's to the Nepali border, got bicycle rickshaws to take the luggage and we walked across the border into India. We must have walked 800 meters before we the customs "office" appeared. It was just 3 guys sitting at a table on the side of the road, crazy, we could have walked right by and no one would have stopped us. Getting out on the otherhand... Then we rented a jeep to take us all to Varanasi. The jeep ride was nuts, the driver had a tape of the soundtrack from a bollywood movie and he played it over and over and over. I actually bought the CD, we all did, haha. The pit stops we made were pit stops. The one place had a 'ladies room' which consisted of 3 stone walls about 4 feet high, and thats it. We have been rating toilets all over India and Nepal. That one was not the worst. We drove through small towns constantly, they almost seem to never end, there are cows everywhere in the streets and garbage, tons and tons of garbage. A lot of the homes in the small villages were huts really, with straw roofs and every once in a while there would be a stone or cement building. The countryside was really quite flat with lots of trees and fields.

In Varanasi we took a boat trip on the Ganges at dawn to see the people and the pilgrims performing their morning rituals, people come from all over to bathe in the Ganges at least once in their life. The Ganges has got be the most polluted river in the world, we floated candles on the river for good luck and none of us wanted to touch the water. They cremate most of their dead but the ones that they do not cremate they just weigh down and throw them in the river. We actually saw a body go floating by. And the amount of garbage on the banks of the river is really unbelievable The people bathe in this water, and some of them were drinking it. It is insane to see. The west side of the river has tons of Ghats or temples as well as guest houses for the people who come on a pilgrimage, they stretch for miles, and some of the buildings were absolutely beautiful, built to look like palaces. There is nothing at all on the east side of the river so that the sunrise is easily seen and not obstructed. People have been performing these ceremonies here for 5000 years.

We did some sightseeing, saw a Jain temple, an old stupa that was in ruins, Buddha preached there apparently. We also went to a museum and to a Japanese Buddhist temple then we went back to the Ganges for the evening ceremonies. Just as crazy as the morning. We took a boat out again, and at one of the big Ghats there were 7 holy men performing an elablorate ceremony with singing and chanting. Then because the Festival is still on, there was another ceremony going on at another Ghat. We watched as about 20 men wrestled this huge statue of one of the Hindu gods (we never could figure out which one it was) onto a raft, floated with it out into the middle of the Ganges and then they just threw it off, amidst cheers from the crowd. Crazy country. I do have to say that it is really amazing to see the absolute belief of the people and how after so many years they still believe so strongly in their religions and ceremonies.

We used auto rickshaws to get around and in the old part of the city some of the streets are so narrow I could walk through and touch the buildings on both sides of me, and you still have to watch out for the cows, motorbikes, bicycles, and rickshaws. Our rickshaw hit a cow, not hard, the cow was Ok, we also tried to pass a rickshaw coming the other direction, they got stuck, we all had to pile out, the drivers were yelling at each other, and then they physically lifted the rickshaws and manouvered them enough to get them past each other. Crazy. We went back to the river in the daytime and walked by all the Ghats and guesthouses. At each end there in a crematorium, so we walked to one of them. They use wood to burn the bodies and we watched about 4 fires, you could make out feet and a head and, after us women left cause we had seen enough, the guys said they watched as a body was picked up with a stick or something and literally, flipped over. Crazy. Thats all I can say.. We leave for Delhi tonight.

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