varanasi

---

ok so varanasi was our next stop after agra, since i last posted a blog i have been ill my luck had run out from eating meat freely in each place. just the usaul stomach problems that can be expected in india and it is the first time i have had it in the six weeks i have been here so not bad really, i guy in varanasi gave us some lemon soda and that help me out a bit. Since this i have decided to go vegaterian and i am now parnoid about everything i eat, hopefully this will pass when i leave india.

anyaway varanasi: Very hard to describe the place apart from it is defently the smelliest and dirtiest place we have been in the whole of india. At the moment the ganges river is really big and wide because of the season we are in which makes it very hard to navigate around, the reason being you can normally just get to a ghat or part of the river by walking alongside it to find things but with it being so full you can't do that instead you have to go through these little cut ways to try and find each place and there are loads of little cut ways going left, right, up and down, me and mika have got lost many of times and we have just given up trying to navigate our way around their now.

we did manage to find a guy to take us on a boat trip of the ganges where he takes you up and down the river where you get to see basically everything. varanasi is famous for it's burning ghats where people are cremated on the ghat and the boat man said that he would show us two burning ghats.
Not knowing what to really expect from the burning ghats in terms of what we would see we went to the first one where we were quite far away in the boat but in one of my photo's you can see the flames and smoke from one cremation.

After the first burning ghat to be honest i was quite unsatisfied and disapointed, not that im some sicko that wants to see some one burn but we where so far away it just looked like someone making a fire.
Then we went to the next burning ghat where to my surprise the boat man docked and said to get of the boat and this guy would show us around. the guy took us and we went up some stairs and after that bam you could feel the flames heating againts you face so bad you had to cover it we hurried round to a cooler spot then i took my hands away from my face and there where four corpses burning next to us about a metre away, im not going to go into detail what a burning corpse looks like up close but the whole experience was quite surreal and i didn't feel anything at the time becuase it was difficult to except what i was seeing with my own eyes.

We have have booked our tikctes to nepal and we leave tomorrow, we are heading to a place called pokara in nepal where there is some good treking and then from there we head to kathmandu. very glad to be leaving india after six weeks our time has been an experience but sometimes quite overwhealming and difficult. some of the places have been great and the lifestyle, climate, culture, people and just about everything in india feels like your actually on a completley different planet.

---

Photos

jay
guy's washing in dirty river

jay
man washing his clothes in dirty river

jay
burning ghat