Varanasi - the city of poo.

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SO having endured the camel safaris and sore bums (Dan had some rather unsightly chaffing!) we thought it would be a great idea to take a 19 hour train ride to Delhi, immediately followed by a 12.5 hour onwards journey to Varanasi. (we did actually stop in Delhi for lunch and it wasn't as bad as we'd heard!). Varanasi is one if India's holiest cities and located on the Ganges river, the lifeblood of Hinduism. For a muddy smelly river it is devoutly treasured by the Hindus and is used for worship, swimming, washing (clothes, teeth and body) and much of the sewage from the city finds its way to it aswell. Dan delighted in telling me many times that for water to be considered safe to swim in, it has to contain below 500 faecal particles per cubic-something (which quite frankly is revolting as it is) but the Ganges contains 1.5 million! - how gross is that! The banks of the river house many Ghats that are where the water meets the bank (kind of like an esplanade with steps) and it's possible to walk along the river for many hundresd of metres from ghat to ghat watching the daily routines of hundreds of Indians. There are 2 burning ghats where the dead are cremated and to be cremated in Varanasi is highly revered - and it costs a fortune. Dead bodies are wrapped in brightly coloured fabrics with glittery metallic ribbons and placed on pyres of wood. If you're unfortunate enough to be either pregnant, a beggar, under 10 or a saddhu (holy man) you don't make the cut and aren't allowed to be cremated, you have a stone tied round your ankles and are thrown into the Ganges instead!! So on our boat ride at 5.30am (immense photo opportunity) we were very lucky not to have bumped into bobbing bodies - athouhg this has happened to others! The boat ride was beautiful, all the same. We were approached by a middle aged, muscle bound chap with a boat who told us a reasonable price. We lept into the boat only for the man to jump out and a 14 year old boy to take his place! Felt like we were going to appear on a documentary about child exploitation! But slowly, the brilliant scam dawned on us... This skinny little kid wasn't able to row very fast, so by the time 1 hour was up we'd only seen half of the promised route and we weren't going to shout at him to row faster, so we ended up paying double for 2 hours! cunning!
The old city behind the ghats was a little like the Viking Centre in York, that recreates a street in Ye Old England. Tiny dark, winding, dank streets (and consequently cool despite the 42 degrees!) with cows and therefore cow shit everywhere, rivulets of filthy stuff flowing freely down them, old crones in doorways stirring vats and pots of unidentifiable liquid and hundreds of people selling trinkets, foodstuffs and cheap rubbish (it's an Indian tourist city far more than Western). Having just reread that, we did actually enjoy Varanasi and had we arrived there earlier on in our trip the whole experience would have been diffrerent, but the novelty value has worn off slightly and besides we were champing at the bit to hit Nepal. We took perhaps the hairiest cycle rickshaw ride we've done so far during rush hour, this guy had promised to get us to the bus station in 20 mins, "or you no pay" and we somehow managed to arrive alive. He cut across 3 lanes of traffic (narrowly missed a bus - David and Goliath), went the wrong way around a roundabout and seemed to rely on the goodwill of Ganesh and the little bell on his bike!

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