Varanasi - 12/26 - 29/08 - Jim

So we finally arrived at our guest house in Varanasi, a city formerly known as Benares, the Sahi River View Guest House, by auto rickshaw about 8AM with with fervent hope, after our night in the train station, that our room would be ready. No such luck, it would be ready sometime after 11AM which was check out time for last nights guests. We dropped our bags at the guest house and decided to go for a walk on the ghats, we were somehow too tired not to do something. Varanasi is famous for many reasons including it's ghats and what goes on there. First the city, Varanasi is one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world, up there with Beijing and Athens, it was contemporary with Babylonia, and has for most, if not all of that time been a holy city, for the Hindu's and their predecessors. The Buddha taught there as did the founder of the Jain religion, that was in around 650 BCE, when Varanasi was already an ancient city. The ghats are stairways down the bank of the Ganges river that line the river bank for 3 or 4 miles, maybe more. The Ganges River and Varanasi our sacred to the Hindu's, if you die in Varanasi you get out of the cycle of rebirth, and bathing in the river is kind of like a plenary indulgence, pardon the Catholic allusion. So on most mornings you can see thousands of the faithful worshiping at the many shrines and temples on the ghats, getting advise from holy men and bathing in the Ganges. The river itself is not in very good shape ecologically, we read that its not the human waste that you should most worry about but the heavy metals dumped by up river plants. In another place we read that it was in such bad shape that there was no dissolved oxygen left in the river, making it organically dead. In our walk that first day we saw little of this, for whatever reason not many people were out that morning, we saw none of the weirdness that we had heard about. It was probably a good thing, I was very tired and the ups and downs of the stairs weren't helping that. Adam claims I was actually grumbling at the stairs, imagine!! After a while we went back to our guest house and had some breakfast, I fell fast asleep on a couch, I remember none of this, and after a while our room became available and we thankfully moved in. I napped, Adam showered, and then when I finally pulled myself out of bed I also got a shower, which felt great after our train station floor experience. Later we walked a ways up the ghats to lunch in the old part of the city, me grumbling all the way about all the ups and downs; I was really tired and a bit worn out. Later in the day we found a place close to the hotel for dinner and then to bed.

Woke up feeling a lot better - and anxious to see more of the ghats and the city. We had breakfast at a place right next door, which had great Muesli and curd, similar to yogurt. We decided to walk the length of the ghats that morning and off we went. Along the way we saw a lot of signs for a concert that night, Sitar, Tabla and dance, we decided that would be fun and part way through our walk we cut off into the old city to find the concert site and buy our tickets. This was more of an experience than we originally planned on, fun though. The old city of Varanasi is all curving alleyways with no street signs or method of determining which direction you are heading in, it's alleys are also narrow and a few stories high so you cant even determine your direction from the sun. After a while and a lot of asking we finally found the concert site and bought our tickets. Then it was back to our walk up the ghats, past the burning ghats, where cremations go on at the riverbank all day long, and up almost to the far end. On our way back down towards our guest house we stopped at a place for lunch, the Brown Bread Restaurant, which we really liked, real good baked goods. The restaurant once again took us through many of the allies of the old city, can't say we were learning our way around but we were certainly getting used to being lost. Almost back to the hotel I found a place that was going to cost me, a nice book store just a little way from where we were staying. We spent a little time there and then went back to get a little nap for me, a little reading for Adam, before setting out for dinner and the concert. We tried a new place for dinner, a Japanese place in a Hindu holy city, the world is small, and then found the concert venue again, a little easier this time. The concert was fun, we had to leave a little early as our family run guest house locked the doors at 10:30 PM and we didn't want to be sleeping on the floor again.

This morning we walked about half way up the ghats to get breakfast at "Brown Bread" and suddenly the ghats were filled with people the way they had been described to us. Lots of people taking the plunge in the river, yogis doing yoga and all the other activities that we had been told about, we must have seen Varanasi's only two off days our first two days here. On this,our third day in Varanasi, we decided to try to find a Temple that M. Ghandi had sponsored years ago, strange for a temple but it featured a huge relief map, in granite, of the Indian subcontinent, plus a bit. It sounded good to me, esp given my love of maps, so off we went into the newer part of Varanasi, lots of hotels, stores, small shopping centers and traffic. After a while I began to despair that we would ever find the Temple and began being, according to Adam, a bit of a grouch. It just seemed we were walking in circles and not getting any closer, despite the fact that everyone told us that it was just down the street. Finally, we took up one of the rickshaw drivers on his offer to take us there and in a few minutes we were there. It was really a neat map and it was amazing to see how straight up the Himalayas went, with this my irritability went away. Strange the effect of maps on me. After seeing the map we walked back to the guest house and I took a nap, guess I needed it. We then hung around the guest house for a while, I had a great conversation with a young Chinese student from Chengdu and also headed back to the bookstore for a little book shopping. Just a note, most book stores will ship back to the states for you, so no I am not carrying all the books I have bought, I'd probably need a caravan of yucks to do that. For dinner we went back to the Pizza place we had gone to for breakfast, they had quite good pizza, the best I've had in India, baked in a brick oven, and great apple pie a la mode.

On our last day in Varanasi we were up early, 5:30AM for a hour and a half dawn boat ride up the ghats. It wasn't a spectacular sunrise but it was fascinating to see all the activity from the river, it actually seemed that a lot more was going on from that perspective and maybe there was since we had never gotten out this early before. After a while Adam asked the boatman if he could row for awhile, he rowed crew in college, and he rowed us part of the way back, perhaps not on quite as straight a course as the boatman. After our boat ride we had breakfast and then split up for a while; Adam went back to the guest house to work out and I went for what I thought would be a short walk. Well, as is often true on my walks I got lost and found a lot of interesting places including ending up near a pontoon bridge across the river. On the other side of the bridge I remembered was the fort of the Raja of Varanasi which the guide books said had an interesting museum, so I headed there. The museum was interesting, if in need of a little dusting. There were old cars, palanquins, arms, including swords pistols and elephant guns, and some fabrics which were in pretty sad shape. On the way back I ran into Adam on his way there and then continued on my way. We had agreed to meet back at the guest house about lunch time. While walking back a guy on a bicycle, out of the blue stopped to chat with me, he turned out to be working on his doctorate in philosophy at a local university, and we had a very animated and interesting 45 minute talk. Then it was back toward the guest house, as I approached it, from the opposite direction that we usually took I walked right by a book store we had been looking for the previous day but were unable to find. The guide book had said it was the best in town, so I went in and did a little damage to my credit card. By this time we had checked out of our room, we were leaving for Delhi by train that night to meet Adam's mom, Sheila, at the Delhi airport, so I hung out in the guest house lobby and had some food. When Adam got back he decided that a trip to Varanasi wasn't complete without a dip in the river but he had no place to take a shower afterward, as we had given up our room. Some people from Oregon that I had been talking to in the lobby offered their shower if he really wanted to take his plunge. All of us trooped down to the river and Adam took the plunge, which I recorded with his camera. Adam took his shower, and no longer glows in the dark, and a bit later we had an early dinner at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant, before leaving at about 6PM for the railroad station. We had to catch our overnight train to Delhi at 8PM - which was scheduled to arrive in Delhi at 9AM. This would give us plenty of time to get to our hotel and get cleaned up before we had to meet her plane, which was due in at 9PM. This, however, wasn't the way it worked out, the train left a little late but overnight it must have stopped, both of us were asleep, because when we got up in the morning we began to realize that we were running late, real late. We finally arrived in Delhi about 2:30PM.