Varanasi

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Varanasi is smelly, dirty, crowded but what a cool place. It's one of the oldest living cities in the world and is the centre of the Hindu universe. Our first evening in Varanasi we took a boat ride up along the ghats where we viewed one of the burning ghats, a sobering sight to see the family surrounding the funeral pyre of their loved one. These pyres burn for about three days, leaving only ash and a few bones of the body which are cast into the Ganges. Varanasi's proximity to death makes you stop and think what's really important in life. As part of the evening boat ride we lit floating puja candles, it's said that if your candle reaches the shore before it's extinguished your wish will come true. I don't know if any of ours reached the shore line but it made a pretty sight with a hundred or so candles floating down the river away from the boat.
The morning of our final day in Varanasi we took another boat trip along the ghats to watch the sunrise over the Ganges and the locals bathe at the 80 ghats during the morning. During this trip we had one of those surreal moments where the new India meets old when a canoe passed us with two men watching TV (check out the photo). On our return trip we passed a priest throwing the remains into the Ganges from a funeral pyre we passed two days earlier. That certainly quietened the mood of the crew. Myself and Colin had a chance to row the boat down the Ganges. We did a pretty good job of it, navigating the obstacles and bringing everybody to dry land. While in Varanasi we got to take part in the kite festival, a nationwide annual event when children come to the main cities to fly their kites. There's no real competition, the basic idea is to use the string of your kite to cut the strings of other kites in the sky. The second part is where you chase after and catch kites that have been cut. The local children were able to spot them easily, they certainly put us to shame.

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