Days 223-224: The Waters of the Ganges

Our hotel is Varanasi was right next to the train station, which left it a good distance from the action in the city. Towards the evening we hopped on some bicycle rickshaws and began a chaotic journey through the streets of Varanasi to the shore of the Ganges. Being in the back of a bicycle rickshaw on the streets of Varanasi is not for the faint hearted. I'll leave the more graphic description for when we returned at night, since that was the most wild of the 4 times I did this ride.

The shore of the Ganges, as one would probably expect, is madness. The holy significance of the river in Hindu faith makes it a popular site of pilgrimage, and there are lots of religious pilgrims and monks around. There are also a lot of beggars, merchants, scammers, drug dealers and just people in general around. During the day the river is just as busy as many people come down the steps to the water to bathe and do laundry in the water. While I acknowledge that faith can be a powerful thing, I've certainly never been a person much capable of faith in the face of logic and common sense. I get that the water of the Ganges is supposed to holy and purifying, but bathing in and drinking water only a short distance downstream from where you put your dead into the water (usually as ashes - not always), and which by every scientific test is horribly unsafe, just seems very wrong.
Anyway, back to the first night. After fending off all the aggressive night people for awhile we got on a boat and got rowed up the river as far as one of the major cremation areas, then came back down while releasing some floating candles in the water. Back in the central area some priests were performing a ceremony/show that is done every night, and all the boats were pulled in close around it. The boats were packed in so close that kids were running across boat to boat selling food and water while the performance was going on.

Back on land were were free to wander about and watch the ceremony up close for awhile. In the space of about 15 minutes I got approached by people trying to sell me things probably 20 times, and ultimately just sat there watching people (and a group of kids entertaining themselves by pulling a bull's tail then frantically trying to escape from it).

The ride home was, as I alluded to, pretty wild. There was more traffic, less visibility, and people (including our cyclists) just seemed to be a lot more aggressive in the dark. We clipped a couple pedestrians and scooters/motorbikes, and managed to get solid bumps 3 times by cars - and considering what the ride was like I considered that a pretty lucky result.

We got up pre-dawn in the morning and repeated the trip out to the river so we could watch the sun rise on the river. We took a boat down the opposite direction and watched everybody doing their washing and bathing. Afterwards I split off on my own and walked along the water and checked out some of the markets and shopping streets nearby. I had an almost constant stream of companions - mostly trying to sell me something or convince me to go to their shop, but a few of them were just curious people wanting to practice english or just hear about foreign things.

We worked our way back to the hotel individually and in the afternoon decided to take rickshaws a bit out of town to see, Sarnath, a location full of Buddhist stupas, and the site where Buddha first taught. The local guide for it was pretty annoying as he was both dull and seemed to get upset whenever I ignored him and wandered off to look at things on my own. We visited the nearby temple as well, which had walls covered in Buddhist murals showing different stories.

Most of the others continued on to visit a silk factory, but I've been to enough silk factories in my travels and I didn't want to buy anything, so I just stayed back on the hotel. It turned out to be a good decision as it took 3 or 4 hours for the others to make all their purchases (remember that group theme I mentioned at the start...?)