Hello, boat?
This blogpost is dedicated to our friend Claire who convinced us to add Varanasi to our Indian tour. Thanks Claire, it lived up to your glowing reports!
The build up to the monsoon season has started and it's baking hot in the plains of India right now. It's that energy-sapping heat that makes you just want to sit in the shade and drink banana lassies. The hawkers in Varanasi seem to have been struck down by the heat as well.
We had been warned that Varanasi tops the charts on the international hawker hassle index (IHHI). Instead what we found was that the most the occasional hawker could muster the energy for was a plaintive cry of "hello, boooat?", usually from a reclined position as he lay by his boat with some mates. And if you said no, he collapsed back into a fully supine position and gave up.
While the roads were quite crazy, walking along the street was significantly easier, and less stressful, than walking through Bondi Junction / Oxford St London / The Eaton Centre on a Saturday afternoon leading up to Christmas.
All in all it made for quite a relaxed holiday feel to the whole thing. Pretty much the exact opposite of our expectations. And so we spent two lazy days walking the ghats and the alleyways basically just watching people do what they do in Varanasi. And there is quite the range of intriguing/horrifying/confronting things they do! Even having read about Varanasi and seen countless photos in National Geographic and the like, until you see it, smell it and feel it there is just no way to capture the essence of the place (I would say like visiting Ularu but that just sounds like too strange of a comparison).
The interesting thing is that in amongst all the spiritual practices we were expecting like holy men bathing, and the pilgrims dipping themselves three times in the Ganges, there were also kids playing in the water like it was a day at the beach, farmers who brought their cows down each afternoon to cool off (upstream of everyone bathing mind you!) and all manner of everyday activities.
So what of that "hello, boooat" invitation? One of THE tourist things to do in Varanasi is take a boat ride along the Ganges. Th other thing being to don all the Indian clothing you can lay your hands on, grow dreadlocks and hang out doing yoga for a month. We chose option A for this trip. The boat trips are particularly popular at sunrise because all the ghats face East so the red, orange and pink of the buildings glows in the light at this time. Plus it's a prime time to gawk at all the people bathing and doing their washing in the river. Oh, and the burning bodies...
And despite the tourist nature of it all it was a great thing to do. Let's just say we took roughly six thousand photos so we'll let some of them do the talking.
One unusual thing we did was visit a museum at the University where we'd heard there was a large marble map of India from the 19th century. The helpful museum guide arranged for the map room to be opened especially for us which, granted, displayed some large maps but not the one we were looking for. So after a few minutes politely feigning interest in the maps we made a hasty retreat. In our search of the map we stumbled on a fantastic temporary exhibition about an artist called Alice Boner. She was born in Switzerland and in the 1930's when she was in her forties she met an Indian dancer, Uday Shankar, moved to Varanasi and became a benefactor of Indian dance and art. She is credited for bringing a much greater understanding of Indian art to the Western world. There were some amazing bronze sculptures of the dancers and an amazingly complicated mathematical interpretation of Hindu temple sculptures.
We never did find that big marble map... anyhoo, next stop the erotic temples of Khajuraho.
Sigh... I had hoped to add captions to these photos but two hours of fighting with blogger, and I give up! The one with the cow is our front door to our hotel. The ghat with all the wood piled up is a burning ghat. At least one cremation a day, usually multiple. People come from all over the country to, we'll, die here so they can be cremated and put on the Ganges. Of course holy men, children and folks with - yep -leprosy aren't burned, they're put straight in. Somewhat disturbing, despite how clean the water might appear.
The build up to the monsoon season has started and it's baking hot in the plains of India right now. It's that energy-sapping heat that makes you just want to sit in the shade and drink banana lassies. The hawkers in Varanasi seem to have been struck down by the heat as well.
We had been warned that Varanasi tops the charts on the international hawker hassle index (IHHI). Instead what we found was that the most the occasional hawker could muster the energy for was a plaintive cry of "hello, boooat?", usually from a reclined position as he lay by his boat with some mates. And if you said no, he collapsed back into a fully supine position and gave up.
While the roads were quite crazy, walking along the street was significantly easier, and less stressful, than walking through Bondi Junction / Oxford St London / The Eaton Centre on a Saturday afternoon leading up to Christmas.
All in all it made for quite a relaxed holiday feel to the whole thing. Pretty much the exact opposite of our expectations. And so we spent two lazy days walking the ghats and the alleyways basically just watching people do what they do in Varanasi. And there is quite the range of intriguing/horrifying/confronting things they do! Even having read about Varanasi and seen countless photos in National Geographic and the like, until you see it, smell it and feel it there is just no way to capture the essence of the place (I would say like visiting Ularu but that just sounds like too strange of a comparison).
The interesting thing is that in amongst all the spiritual practices we were expecting like holy men bathing, and the pilgrims dipping themselves three times in the Ganges, there were also kids playing in the water like it was a day at the beach, farmers who brought their cows down each afternoon to cool off (upstream of everyone bathing mind you!) and all manner of everyday activities.
So what of that "hello, boooat" invitation? One of THE tourist things to do in Varanasi is take a boat ride along the Ganges. Th other thing being to don all the Indian clothing you can lay your hands on, grow dreadlocks and hang out doing yoga for a month. We chose option A for this trip. The boat trips are particularly popular at sunrise because all the ghats face East so the red, orange and pink of the buildings glows in the light at this time. Plus it's a prime time to gawk at all the people bathing and doing their washing in the river. Oh, and the burning bodies...
And despite the tourist nature of it all it was a great thing to do. Let's just say we took roughly six thousand photos so we'll let some of them do the talking.
One unusual thing we did was visit a museum at the University where we'd heard there was a large marble map of India from the 19th century. The helpful museum guide arranged for the map room to be opened especially for us which, granted, displayed some large maps but not the one we were looking for. So after a few minutes politely feigning interest in the maps we made a hasty retreat. In our search of the map we stumbled on a fantastic temporary exhibition about an artist called Alice Boner. She was born in Switzerland and in the 1930's when she was in her forties she met an Indian dancer, Uday Shankar, moved to Varanasi and became a benefactor of Indian dance and art. She is credited for bringing a much greater understanding of Indian art to the Western world. There were some amazing bronze sculptures of the dancers and an amazingly complicated mathematical interpretation of Hindu temple sculptures.
We never did find that big marble map... anyhoo, next stop the erotic temples of Khajuraho.
Sigh... I had hoped to add captions to these photos but two hours of fighting with blogger, and I give up! The one with the cow is our front door to our hotel. The ghat with all the wood piled up is a burning ghat. At least one cremation a day, usually multiple. People come from all over the country to, we'll, die here so they can be cremated and put on the Ganges. Of course holy men, children and folks with - yep -leprosy aren't burned, they're put straight in. Somewhat disturbing, despite how clean the water might appear.
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