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Published: January 13th 2007
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Once off the train we had breakfast at a hotel then went into central Allahabad to visit Nehru House, former home of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, and occasionally Mahatma Gandhi. It was a base for the Swaraj or Indian liberation movement before they finally achieved independence from the British in 1947. I had been wanting to buy a Rabindranath Tagore book while in India and found one in the bookshop here, at less than the marked price as well.
After about 3 long, hot, dusty, shock-absorberless hours on the bus we reached a small village where we had our first proper sight of the Ganges and where our boats were waiting for us. I have to say my first view of the Ganges is one I will never forget, unfortunately. I'm not sure whether I should even include the following description in here since it was very disturbing, but it was part of my experience of north India so I will. If you are a particularly sensitive type perhaps you should skip the next paragraph.
I had heard of the possibility of seeing bodies, perhaps partially burnt, floating in the Ganges. Most people are cremated before
their ashes are put into the Ganges, but some, including small children and snake-bite victims apparently, are not cremated first. So it was that the first thing I saw as I looked at the Ganges, in spite of Bill's attempt to block it from our view, was the bloated body of what must have been a child by the size, lying on the riverbank. That would have been bad enough, but a dog was chewing on the foot with very audible sound effects, making it probably one of the most grotesque things I have ever seen in my relatively sheltered life. It was quite some time before I could get the image out of my head.
Anyway, it was peaceful enough floating on the Ganges. We separated into 3 groups, 5 of us in our boat plus two crew. There was a fourth boat which was basically the kitchen. Not long after we set off we were served some really good Indian food plus chai which had all been cooked on the boat. Progress was pretty slow, as the water level was particularly low and although we had a sail, there wasn't really a breeze. Even when there was
one, our sail was so full of holes that it didn't make much of a difference anyway. Extra propulsion was provided by a pair of oars, manned by either one or both of the young guys in our crew. The boats were not particularly stable, and almost any movement rocked the boat. Derek was the biggest guy on our boat by quite a long shot, and almost any time he moved the boat tilted alarmingly and he was told "Balance, sir, balance!" by our crew. He was getting bugged by it after a while, but he didn't really pick up the knack of moving carefully.
I'm not sure how much is pollution and how much is from the humidity, but in this season at least North India is almost perpetually covered by haze- often thick fog in the morning, which partly lifts but doesn't really clear at all. This meant that the sky was about exactly the same colour as the river- a brownish grey- and it was hard to tell where the horizon was. The haze does make for amazing sunsets though- every night we were taking similar photos, but couldn't really capture the depth of colour.
Our boats
The kitchen boat is the one with the yellow roof Surprisingly given the river's reputation as being so dirty, we often saw fish jumping near the banks, and were even lucky enough to see pairs of the quite rare Gangetic dolphin surfacing occasionally. They don't come up far enough to take a photo, but they are a browny colour and are apparently completely blind- they find their food by sonar.
Late in the afternoon we pulled over onto a wide sandbank, which was our campsite for the night. The opposite bank was hosting a funeral and the pyre burned for several hours after we arrived. The crew set up tents for us and cooked dinner on the boats again. The sun was gone and it was quite dark by about 6pm, which left us a lot of time to kill before bed-time. It makes you realise what life was like for people before electricity- what did they do all evening? We sat around the tarpaulin table and chatted, which is what people would have done 200 years ago I suppose...
A chilly night, but I didn't sleep too badly. Very heavy fog over the whole sand bar, and when Toru and I went for a walk the campsite
Rowers
Toru and Isabela try to find a rhythm was out of sight in the fog within a few hundred metres. We didn't see any of it, but it seems like there is a lot of life on the sandbar- there were bird and other animal tracks leading all over the place, some of which seemed to be from mammals.
After breakfast we were off again. We had been told that the trip to the point where we would get out of the boats was only a few hours, but with the low water level and lack of wind it turned out to be a lot longer than that. I had felt a bit squeamish the day before about going to the toilet on the river bank and had managed to avoid it, waiting until the guys had set up a toilet tent at the campsite. I had overindulged in chai this morning though, and I really couldn't see anywhere on the banks as we passes that was away from view of either the river or the villages we passed. There was always someone out fishing or collecting grass, or there would be a row of kids screaming hello or throwing rocks which fell far short of us.
We all tied up for lunch, which I ate in great discomfort. It seemed the others were feeling similar though and we pulled over at a reasonably secluded part of the bank. I was very careful to choose a spot that was screened from the river by long grass, but I didn't consider until it was too late that it wasn't really people on the river I needed to worry about, it was the much closer passengers and crew on the shore who I should have been screening myself from! They all politely looked away though. Dignity not really intact but feeling a lot more comfortable, I got back on the boat.
Isabela the handycam fiend, was getting quite bored by this time- nothing new to film- and so she decided to have a go at the oars. She had never rowed before so spent quite a lot of time floundering about at first but had a good rhythm by the end. After that we all had to have a go, and in the last 20 minutes or so it became a race between the boats to reach the bank where we were leaving the river. Our navigator chose a longer route around a sand bar however and we were last.
I enjoyed the boat trip but was also glad to be able to use my legs again. Up through another small village trying to avoid streams of water buffalo waste products- they were tied up all along a stone path, probably most of the day, and the smell was pretty vile. There was almost no way to avoid stepping in it. We piled into waiting jeeps and drove about another hour to Varanasi, where we checked into a hotel near a ghat (kind of a stone pier for various designated activites, could be bathing, washing clothes, some are set aside for cremations; water buffalo parking and cricket were also common uses) at the far end of Varanasi.
Back into a boat- this time an open long boat- and we were rowed out into the middle of the river where we released more than a hundred "flower candles", which were leaf bowls containing marigold petals and a small terracotta dish with a ghee candle burning in it. These are floated down the river as an offering to the gods and it was a nice way to end the day, putting the bowls carefully one by one onto the water and watching them float away.
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