Varanasi

Days 15-17
We are currently in Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas after coming here from Varanasi, however I will keep the two locations to separate posts as they are such a contrast.
Before leaving Agra we decided to get our hands on some sweets/candy that we had seen advertised on TV. The sweets are called "Londonderry"! We nearly fell off the bed laughing when we saw the advertisement, so we decided that we should seek them out for different reasons. My wife merely wanted to taste them. I on the other hand wanted to write a letter to the company that the sweets should be renamed "Derry/Londonderry", "Maiden City, "Stroke City",  or maybe just "Saunter on". At the very least they should launch another few brands of sweets called "Derry" and "Doire".  We asked a restaurant owner about these sweets and where we could get them and apparently they were available on every street corner. I tired to explain the humour around these sweets and why it was funny to us but his reply was "Yes but you can also get "Dairy Milk". Either my story was lost on him or he thought how ludicrous is it having a city without a name that people can agree upon. But India also has controversies over city names as they have renamed all of their major cities. We were having a chat with some South Indians we had meet in our guest house and I had mentioned "Madras" in the conversation, I was immediately interrupted and corrected with "Chennai!" In any case we found the controversial named sweets at the next shop and for the record they taste quite similar to Wurther's Original.

Varanasi also known as Baneras is a Hindu holy city on the banks of the River Ganges. It is the city of Lord Shiva (the destroyer god) and each day thousands of Hindus go down the steps of the ghats on the shores of the river to bathe and wash their sins away in the sacred river.We were not expecting to like this city as it has a fearsome reputation as being dirty and crowded even by Indian standards. When I was in Nepal 10 years ago I meet a Dutch guy who had just come from Varanasi and to say that he wasn't impressed is a serious understatement. He thought that it was absolutely disgusting as the bathers share the water with raw sewage and dead bodies sometimes wash up on the ghats. So armed with this perception and fearful of what we would find there so we decided to just book in for one night at the hotel.
Throughout our trip so far we have had frequent lashings from monsoon showers. The monsoon is caused by the hot air on continental India building up during April and May, this invites the cooler moist air to rush in from the ocean until it forced up by the great wall of the Himalayas. Upon rising it cools and bubbles up the clouds of the monsoon, spawning the greatest wet season on the planet. In a cruel twist of fate for the mountains the great rains which they help spawn, in turn create the humongous rivers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, which along with their tributaries erode the mountains and carry the Himalayan dust and rock down to the sea. However it is the silt rich flow of the Ganges that brings life and fertility to the crowded plains of Northern India, and it is here at Varanasi that we first encounter this river in full flood from the aforementioned rains. We had imagined that we would see the ghats with their temples hugging the river side but the river was swollen a full 6 or 7metres (maybe more!) and most of the ghats along with many of the temples were completely covered.
This made sightseeing on the ghats nearly pointless and almost impossible. Normally you can walk along the ghats for 4 miles but the height of the swell made this impossible.Undeterred we tried to make our way around at least some of the ghats via the side streets, however this proved difficult as the banks of the river are steep and it was extremely hot and sticky. At 7pm every evening a ceremony takes places on the Dasahvamedha Ghat, we decided to investigate. Despite our best intentions, an Italian couple asked us to team up with them in a boat to watch the ceremony from the river. Although it only cost us 125 rupees, it proved to be a total waste of money as we could have viewed the ceremony better from the shore. To be honest we weren't even sure what the ceremony was all about, it seemed to consist of a lot of chanting about Shiva and Krishna and waving flamed mini Christmas trees around. To our horror the Italian even tipped our boatman, who had done nothing except pull the boat with ropes about 10 metres into the water!

There is a citywide 11pm curfew in place in Varanasi and a lot of visible armed security. We discovered this security is for the temples and shrines, some of which are the holiest in Hinduism. If a right wing rival religious group decided that it would be a good idea to damage any of these shrines it would undoubtedly cause the underlying tensions between the religious groups to erupt. When these revenge killings boil over the numbers that are left dead are staggering. In 2002 some Hindu activists were burned in an accidental train fire, however rumours spread that Muslims were responsible and 2000 were left dead in "reprisals" . In 1983 Indra Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguard after she ordered an attack on the Sikh temple. 3000 Sikhs were left dead after being mostly burned to death in revenge attacks. And of course the worst came after the Partition of India between Pakistan and India, when whole groups of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus trapped on the wrong side of the new border decided to make their way to their new homeland. The refugees had to journey through rival territory and many were butchered, trains of refugees arrived at their destination full only of hacked, or burned corpses. In the end the most conservative estimates put the number dead at 0.5 -1million after a few months of savagery. So understandably the Indian government is keen to avoid any repeats of these catastrophes.
At sunrise 1000s of pilgrims come down to the river each morning to wash away their sins and this spectacle gives inspiration to many visitors but to others they see this as a bunch of people taking their morning bath. Unfortunately as two practical minded people we proved to be in the later category! This mass bathing is supposed to be best viewed from the river however with the river so swollen and fast the small row boats are not allowed out on it, so we declined against getting ripped off again and viewed bathing from the shore. However we did get to see a good sunrise over the Ganges and sure an early start never hurt anyone (except my wife!). As for the bathing itself I was decidedly unimpressed one way or the other. It just looked like mass bathing to me and the fact they were doing it in a dirty river didn't bother me much, as I thought we had encountered more revolting sights in India. My wife on the other hand though that it was revolting, helped in no small part by a ghat we had been had walked on the previous evening which we had to tiptoe around human, dog and cow excrement.

We then headed off to the main burning ghat to view the funeral pyres. A young Australian had explained to us in great detail the previous evening about how he had watched the skin blistering on the corpses and any other gory details he could think off. So we were expecting we would react to this in some way, either with sadness, disgust or horror. We reached a view point overlooking the pyres and there they were, burning remains blistering and sizzling in the morning sun over their wooden pyres. Once fully burned the ashes were cleared up and dumped in the river. Then another pyre would be built, and another corpse would be brought along to go through the same process. It looked like an industrial operation. Also there did not appear to be any family around, or any sorrow or grief, just about a dozen or so guys hard at work burning bodies. Neither of us felt much at this whole process, apart from anger at a boy who tried very cheekily to get us to "donate" to help buy wood for the pyres. My wife's reaction to an Irish wake was much worse, but as we discussed afterwards that was because of the personal aspect to a wake, where as this seemed so impersonal and public.
So all in all Varanasi has was thoroughly disappointing for us. We were expecting to have a reaction one way or the other but after all the dirt, squalor, and scamming we experienced we must have built up an immunity to it. We caught our train that evening from Mughal Sari train station 15km from Varanasi. Our train was 2 hours late and it left us with my worst view of Varanasi and that was the sight of hundreds of rats, the tracks themselves were swimming with these vermin and was really a shocking sight.

It was time to get off these plains as the smell, squalor, crowds and attention have worn our senses for too long. So we are off to the foothills of the Himalayas and the British hill station of Darjeeling. Where the cool damp air, tea and pubs should give us a bit of relief and a taste of home, which along with the sight of the snow clad peaks will inspire us to continue our Indian Odyssey.