Nov/090
Varanasi
Oh travelblog! I know you have been neglected. Now that Ive been making plans to come home and since I've been talking to everyone I feel less inclined to repeat the stories on here... but alas here we are! Its the final stretch of travel and I've just landed in Cairo yesterday - but lets back up...
We left Udaipur and got to Agra - a place where everyone says that the hustle is intense and warns that you have to brace yourself for pushy unsolicited business offers. I dont know if by the time I got to Agra that I was just used to this kind of thing or if backpackers and the writers of the lonely planet are just pussies - but the hustle was not intense at all when we arrived, we stayed just a day and saw the Taj Mahal. The thing is huge - a real spectacle that makes your mind wander just seeing the magnificence of it. Outside of teh Taj in Agra there is not so much to do, just a busy town with honking scooters and rickshaws kicking up dust that fills the air.
The air is filthy - smoke, dirt, gas, shit, piss, peoples constant cough droplets, and Ive had a about of sinus and lung infection since being here. The biggest drawback to doing an extended stay. So after Agra it was a 12+ hr train to Varanasi - the place where Hindus are cremated to go to nirvana. If you've ever seen pictures of India with hundreds of people bathing on concrete steps that was likely people bathing in the holy Ganges in Varanasi.
Stepping of the train you enter a manic, packed city of noise, far from the spiritual utopia I images, but after 40 minutes in traffic you get dropped of at the edge of the old city. The old city is an ancient labyrinth of alleys and storefronts selling legal marijuana for prayer, flowers, photo services to document your family members funeral... every building seems to have a rooftop cafe selling north indian and Chinese food. We stayed at the pink floyd hostel - because of the good review in the Lonley Planet and the extreme Kitch factor. Everyone working in the 7 floor guesthouse was stoned out of their minds - and cooked me some food that gave me the runs for three days.
The next morning Hissham and I walked down the alley from the hostel to the burning ghat, the place where bodies are burned overlooking the ganges. There is a strict no photo policy that you are reminded of constantly when you are walking around. When you arrive at the ledge overlooking five bon fires with corpses in them you are greeted by a makeshift guide who claims to work at the hospice, a very basic concrete structure next to the burning ghats with no windows where the old and sick wait to die before cremation. He tells us about the special mixture of wood used to burn a body that takes 3 hours, and that if you are a child, a priest, or get bitten by a cobra that your soul is considered pure and you dont need to be burned. After the speech and watching bodies burn for 30 minutes he takes you to the push priest in the temple above who says a prayer for you and your family and then asks for a whole bunch of money for wood for widows who die with no money.
Later we take a boat ride down the ganges and see the spectacle of daily prayer that looks like a broadway show of spinning flaming tin lanterns and chanting and lighting effects. The next day we found the same boat driver to take us to the other side of the ganges - a graveyard with bones and clothes of the dead. In hinduism once the person is dead and the soul is in heaven the body is just garbage - which can be seen by the following video. Enjoy!