Visiting One of World's oldest cities

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Varanasi or Banaras or Kashi is heart of Indian religious culture and also one of oldest cities in the world, right along with Damascus, Jerusalem, Luxor etc. The city is on banks of Holy river Ganga, and is a unique place where Ganga flows east - west. The city is one of major centers of Hindu religion, and also has one of the major Buddhist centers Sarnath nearby.

Day 1

We reached Mughal Sarai station by an overnight train from Kolkata. Surprisingly the train was on time. Its about an hour drive from Varanasi city and Banaras Hindu University where we were staying. First item of day was breakfast. We were there to attend a conference, so the breakfast was arranged there. It was a completely yummy typical Indian breakfast of aalu puri. I loved it! Then we checked into our room, took nice shower and were ready for lunch, again at conference. Lunch was another yummy spread of typical Indian food. I had the best ever hot naans and found it really hard to control overeating. Dessert was another out of world experience. I knew that next few days are going to be all about food now!

In the evening we took a boatride on Ganga to see the famous aarti on its shores. The shore is lined with ghats, and old palaces. These belonged to different kings and queens that ruled this area and were used as bathing places for them. The grandeure still remains though the bulidings have mostly become khandahar. The aarti was indeed magnificant with many priests performing the ritual in sync. For dinner we were taken to the palace of last raja of Banaras. There we were surprised by a dance performace by grandsons of leading Kathak (Indian classical dance from the north) guru Birju maharaj. The performance was really good. After the performance we had another delicious spread for dinner.

Day 2

Today after another delicious breakfast we wanted to go to Sarnath. Its one of the leading center for Buddhists with many temples and remains of ancient monasteries. We asked around on how to get there and most people said take auto - 20 km, too much for that, or take taxi - too expensive. So we decided to try our luck with bus. We were quite lucky and immediately found a bus that took us to Sarnath. Once off the bus, we immediately spotted a store that was selling banarasi print clothes from local producers (we will later find out that it was a common site in Sarnath). We went into the store and did some shopping. I was quite impressed by prices and quality of saari and suits there.

Then we got started on seeing the temples and ruins. There were temples from all Buddhist countries - Thailand, Japan, Korea etc, each carrying its own unique flavour of the country. Though the ruins were quite in ruin 😞. They were clearly not maintained. There were some signs saying don't walk on walls etc., but no one to enforce and no one following them. While we were there we saw a ground of school kids come in, and they were walking / running all over the ruins. It made me so angry, such a place in Europe would be thoroughly preserved and maintained as a major tourist attraction. Not here.

Day 3

Today I had to visit some of my relatives who greated us with even more amazing food. I had not expected this trip to be a food galore! Then we thought of seeing some of the great temples in the city and walking along the ghats of Ganga. We expected to see lot of activity on the ghat as shown in TV. But we were very disappointed. There was hardly any activity on the ghats in afternoon, it probably increased in evening. The place was full of vendors asking if we wanted to take boat ride, and it was sadly also one of the dirtiest places I had seen. I could not stand more than 30 min of walk there. Though seeing shooting of a Tamil film brought some excitement.

Then we tried to go to 3 temples -

The main Kashi Vishwanath temple, but we told that you will have to leave everything outside and there might be line and crowd there, plus need to be aware of pick pockets. So we decided to skip it. I am not fan of crowds, and I did not want to get robbed at a temple!

The sankat mochan temple of Hanuman - We went upto the entrance, there was not too much crowd, still I somehow did not feel like going inside there also. The atmosphere was just not what you would want at a temple.

Finally we decided to go to the temple inside Banaras Hindu University. It was a nice small temple, with little crowd and much better ambiance. So we decided to go in there. The place reminded us of BITS, Pilani campus temple and also C'not in our campus. After the temple, remembering old times we had some noodles at a small cafe outside. It was quite cold already, so we just walked back to our room and called it a day.

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Photos

Aarti
The main Ganga aarti

Temple
Thai temple with giant Buddha

Unknown building
In Varanasi city

Ganga ghats
View of palaces along Ganga shores