Id rather eat Swedish pickled herring than be here!

Oh gawd...here we go again…. I really do think its time to get out of India and explore pastures new. Varanasi 'The city of death' is supposed to be the spiritual centre for all Indian Hindu’s where life and death are concerned. People from all over the country come here to die, they even have a building where people come to stay, spend their last days and literally 'check out'. Of course, if you haven’t done so within 15 days then you are respectfully requested to leave…… However, in retrospect, I suppose the main reason why people come to Varanasi to die is because realistically, you only have to take one dip in the water of the Ganges and that’s it, your finished, if the waterborne diseases don’t kill you then, the muck and pollution will!!!
One source of information about the Ganges water is quite frightening. Apparently 1.5 million faecal bacilliform reside in every 100ml of Ganges water. The safe level in bathing water is not supposed to exceed more than 500. Needless to say, when I went out on the Ganges boat trips I wrapped myself in cling film and then hopped inside a large plastic sack that was hermetically sealed afterwards!
Bathing in this contaminated water is in some way supposed to cleanse you and being cremated on the Ghats is supposed to give you a higher chance of achieving Moksha, or the release from the Hindu circle of life and death.
This is all very nice in theory and while you have the delusional, archetypical hippie bands of westerners running around declaring their so called 'love' for this so called 'Holy city' to me and many others I have met, it was simply the final straw, the nudge we all needed to get the heck out and go somewhere else such as Nepal or the far north of India.
Varanasi is quite simply filthy dirty and the 48c heat only accentuates this. The narrow streets that run through to the ghats really do pong. Sometimes you are almost overpowered by the smell of stale urine and excrement and you often find yourself sliding downhill on animal turds.
Things do improve slightly on the Ghats and admittedly it is quite moving to see Indian families burning their loved ones in full view of everyone else. The person responsible for the cremation is the eldest son who shaves his head and dresses in white. The body is ceremoniously washed in the Ganges before being placed on a wooden pyre. The quantity of wood used is carefully weighed out and the quality of wood used depends on the wealth of the family, sandalwood being the wood of choice for richer families. Fire is then brought down from a temple behind the ghats and the cremation begins. Women are not allowed to attend as the cremation is supposed to be a time for reflection and not grief, which women seem to be more susceptible to, thus they are asked to stay away.
However, one thing does strike me as being odd. The Ganges is supposed to be holy, yet time after time you see hordes of Indians chucking rubbish into it. Plastic bottles, plastic bags, food and other kinds of rubbish are simply discarded into the river and this does strikes me as being rather hypocritical.
Other items are also chucked into the river, namely dead bodies that don’t meet the cremation criteria. Ok, “chucked” is really the wrong word to use here, however, certain members of the deceased are placed into the water and sunk, while others are quite simply placed onto the water and are allowed to float away. The bodies of holy men, pregnant women, children under 18 and lepers are all weighed down and submerged into the river. Unfortunately, the tethers that hold them down occasionally break and a team of individuals stand ready to go out onto the water to re-submerge them should this happen, it does tend to leave you wondering what the title for this job is??? Personally I like the sound of Cadaver Resubmergance Technician……. Those who are bitten and die from a Cobra bite are simply covered and placed on the water to float away. This is also a good reason to stay away from those guys with flutes and baskets…… Where the bodies end up only God knows, however I can imagine that the people who live downstream are highly delighted by the endless stream of bloated corpses that come unceremoniously floating down the river, just remind me never to buy a beachfront property on the Ganges!!!
When the water is at its lowest, right before the monsoon occurs, a beach of sorts appears on the opposite side of the river to the ghats. A short boat trip across reveals all kinds of wonderful treats, from bleached human skulls to the bodies of children that have been washed up and are in the process of being eaten by the hungry packs of dogs that roam around most Indian cities.
I mean come on, Backpacking must be the ultimate way to travel, what kind of expensive organised tour would treat you to an amazingly macabre experience like this?
So, after thinking that it cant get any worse, on the trip back across the river, we see a body floating past us….. yet another innocent victim of the Hindu burial system, well I suppose at least sometime, somewhere in the near future, one or several of our canine friends will be tucking into a tasty treat of juvenile marinaded in Ganges water!!!
The evening boat trip that many hotels provide does offer 2 advantages. The first is that you cant see anything, the second is that further down the ghats, each evening there is what is known as a Puja ceremony, where several guys wave big plates and fire through the air, blow horns and generally put on a good show….. I haven’t got the foggiest what its all about and I really don’t care at this point, but it was a good hours entertainment which we watched from a boat on the Ganges.

Despite my negative attitude towards almost everything that Varanasi has to offer, a walk along the ghats can be quite a eye opener. Starting at the southern end of the ghats you soon approach what is known as 'The Electric Ghat'. This building was constructed to give poor Indian families the chance to cremate their loved ones at a reduced price, negating the cost of having to fork out for a huge pile of timber which is used in the traditional cremation ceremony. However, this place has not proved to be very popular due to the fact that the electric burning process doesn’t leave much in the way of ashes, thus leaving virtually nothing of the deceased to tip into the Ganges.
One ghat owner actually approached us and offered to tell us about the process and how everything worked (“obviously for a price” I thought, being my usual paranoid self)
Half an hour later we have admittedly learnt a lot and my paranoia was just starting to subside when the request came for us to go and visit the ghat owners brothers shop. For me that was the final straw…. Why people have to ruin what is initially a good experience is beyond me and now I am completely confident that (with the exception of the wonderful people of Goa and Kerala) Indian spirituality and good will are dead! Just to think that I had initially intended to spend 6 months in India makes me cringe! Well at least ive seen a large part of this country and now know that I have no reason to come back…
Anyway, im not going to worry about that any more because im out of here…. Just one 10 hour journey will bring me to another country that I hope is going to be completely different from India….
Nepal here I come……

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