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Published: February 5th 2010
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By looking at some of the next photos you may be wondering if we ended up in some weird "adult shop" that deals with stone carvings. But no, we went to a place known as Khajuraho to visit a collection of temples that have been exquisitely carved with all manner of adult themed friezes around the sides. The temples themselves are wonderful feats of architecture, but the friezes, with the detail to attention, skill in construction and XXX rating in nature are what makes the site so famous. They would be an interesting enough site anywhere but in India against the general conservative values people have and women being so covered up at all times makes them particularly scandalous. So we just had to have a look.
Apparently after the temples were built and abandoned, the jungles over took the temples until a British officer was guided to the ruins in 1838. There are three groups of temples, we spent the morning at the most preserved and impressive one, and spent the afternoon checking what remains of the other two. We did an audio tour of the first one and were expecting quite a lot based on all the audio
tours we've done to date, however this time it was a very old walkman and cassette tape, haven't seen one of those in a while! However, it was still informative and helped us spot some carvings that we may not have noticed otherwise, such as the washerwoman with her sari clinging to her, the woman looking in her mirror, and the woman taking a thorn out of her foot. And then there are the carvings that you can't help but notice, such as the one with a man getting a little too close to a horse and the embarrassed woman onlooker. And in one of the temples there is a 1.5m high boar. One thing we had to keep reminding ourselves while we were here was that it wasn't just about the content of the carvings, it was also about the skill and the detail gone into the work. Although the other temple complexes were much smaller, they were still quite impressive. Needless to say many photos were taken throughout the day.
After all the sight-seeing of the day, we got on the night train for Varanasi, which involved an hour taxi ride, then a 4 hour wait at
the train station due to a delayed train. When we boarded our train at something like 3am, we found 6 people in our seats, all asleep. We had gone back to sleeper class on the train and it was the worst train ride ever. The aisles were packed full of people standing, and we had to wake up the passangers on our seats so we could sit down which was a massive ordeal as they didn't want to get up. It wasn't until some official looking men with guns came on that we finally got our seats to ourselves, guns kind of have that reaction!
We had prebooked a hotel in Varanasi and were looking forward to finally getting off the train. However, what we didn't realise was that the rickshaw driver couldn't bring us all the way to the hotel, he had to walk us the last 15 minutes by foot through the maze of Varanasi streets that are too narrow for traffic. It was a tough struggle with the bags that are now carrying a 6x4 ft rug and a king size bed spread, and to make matters worse, the hotel was fully booked when we got
there! Thankfully, the rickshaw driver was still with us and as always, he knew somewhere we could stay. It overlooked the Ganges river with an amazing view from their rooftop restaurant so we were happy.
The next day was a very early rise in time for the sunrise cruise down the Ganges river. What we saw was exactly what you imagine - people bathing in the river to wash away their sins, washing clothes, religious rituals, and burning ghats. It was amazing to see, however no pictures of the burning ghats is allowed. The Ganges is a very holy place to Hindus and very auspicious for someone to be cremated here. We were lucky enough to have a fantastic guide on our trip. His first comment to us was how he drinks the water in the ganges daily but that our stomachs are too weak for it! We weren't about to try it anyways after hearing how much fecal matter is in there. Our guide was so good that morning, that we agreed to do another trip with him that evening for sunset and to see the ganga aarti ceremony. This is a nightly ceremony that happens on the
banks of the river. One thing we noticed here in Varanasi is the constant burning at the ghats. The fires are kept alight at all times, and sometimes the smell of the burning bodies gets a little too much, especially as it wafts in while you're eating dinner at the rooftop restaurant. Nothing like the smell of burning bodies to put you off your meal!
Our short stay in this strange, extremely holy city had come to an end. It was time to head to the train station. Another thing we have noticed all through out India is the many people sleeping at train stations - we are not sure if they are waiting for a train or if they just sleep here. But Varanasi was by far the most crowded. We had decided no more sleeper class so we were back on 3AC, and had just boarded the train to find someone in our seats - the discussions started about where we were to sit instead and while this was going on, we didn't see someone take one of our bags. When we realised, it was quite distressing, but of all bags to have stolen, it had the
least important things in it - the lucky theif got an aeroplane blanket, a travel pillow, a travel hairdryer, some books and most annoyingly, a diary and some battery chargers.The most important item was Carol's passport. It had been a tough few days (and it wasn't over yet!) what with a crappy train journey in, a fully booked hotel, and a stolen bag on the train journey out, so although it was an interesting place, we were kind of glad to leave Varanasi behind us and head to the next stop.
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