After a 7h bus ride from Pokhara to the Nepali-Indian border and
another 2:30h bus ride to the awful city of Gorakhpur where we stayed
one night in a hotel that could have easily been a set for the movie
“Trainspotting” (we slept in our clothes…) we boarded the train to Varanasi yesterday a 6:30am.
After a nice but slow train ride we arrived in Varanasi in the early
afternoon. We got a quite expensive room, which overlooked the Ganges. It was in a small tower of an old palace house, but even if renovated was already aged.
Today we changed the hotel as we wanted to save some money. Instead of walking along the ghats with our luggage we got a boat for 150rupees
(around 2,20 EUR) and could watch the scenery from the water that we
experienced from the land the day before. Here you are swarmed with
touts, rickshaw drivers, boat drivers, sellers of everything, begging
kids, post card selling kids and men that try to point out things to
you in exchange for some rupees. In a country such as this with 38% of
people living in slums in Varanasi (in Mumbai it’s 56%), in their
position we would most probably do the same. But as a tourist you are
simply pretty annoyed. On top of this you always have to look down to
your feet as you need to watch out for cow shit, rubbish, ominous
liquids (that could be everything from just water coming off a freshly
bathed man, leavings of clothes washing, to human or cow pee) or
sleeping dogs.
Most of what you see are things that you await, but would never see in
a western city of the same size. People bathing and brushing teeth in
the Ganges, washing their clothes on the steps of the ghats, mud and
rubbish everywhere, cows, goats and water buffaloes trying to feed on
this rubbish. You see people peeing in the galis (very narrow alleys),
dying cows covered with flies, drying clothes on stairways, people
hanging around at the ghats, sadhus walking around in their orange clothes awaiting alms, bodies being burned before their ashes will be thrown into the river. In the ghat next to the old burning ghat people are actually catching fish, which you would never expect to even live there. The river itself looks very muddy with flowers and plastic stuff floating in it, but smells surprisingly normal while floating on it in a boat.
Yesterday was Diwali, which is the
biggest festival in India and at the same time brings the new year.
Yes, somehow we always have the phenomenal skill of being in a country
during events like that. There were less lightings at the houses as I
had expected. But still there where candles, oil lamps, chains of
lights and fire crackers and fireworks everywhere. The fireworks and
crackers are not as much as in an average German city at new years
eve, but the crackers blast your ears. I insinuate that here are more
accidents related to fireworks than in western countries…
Yesterday we had nice Indian food in a nice restaurant more or less
overlooking the Ganges. Today we will have middle eastern food (oh my
God, there will be hummous!) in the hotel we stay in. Tomorrow we will
hopefully have self-catered dinner on the train to Agra. At the moment
we are on the waiting list for a sleeper seat on the night train to
Agra. Our waiting list numbers are quite low, so the chances aren’t
too bad to get seats confirmed, but any fingers crossed are
appreciated.
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