14.5 hours on the train later...

I arrived in Varanasi yesterday around 12:30pm. The train was about 1.5 hours late getting in to Agra, and then in total about 3 hours late arriving here. Oy. Several people have smiled and told me "India is great, but always late!" Truer words, yeesh... I had a decent compartment with a lay-down berth instead of sitting in steerage, which was nice. The bad things were threefold: One, I was on the top bunk right where the a/c blows. All night. Without stop. The blankets they provide are no help whatsoever, so I froze my tukus off even after roasting in the heat at Agra. Two, the bathrooms... my god. To think I bitched about the other toilets. Basically? It's just a long hole straight down to the tracks. Everything falls down the hole and the stench is even more fun than what I previously described. I will be carefully rationing my intake before and during such journeys in the future, and I have two more. Eeeep. Three, there are no announcements for the stations the train stops at! You have to pretty much guess or leave yourself at the mercy of other people on the train. Or keep staring out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of the sign(and hoping it's not in Hindi) wherever you're stopped. The other bad thing is that there is very little time to get on and off the train. You have to have your shit ready to either jump on or off NOW, DAMMIT. Heh. That part is actually kind of fun. Other than that, it was an interesting experience. OH! And one of the rail employees made a rather crude comment and gesture about my boobs. Sigh. Being stared at is a fact of life here, and I've mostly become immune to it (not unlike the driving).

The Indian people are overwhelmingly nice and kind, ever ready with a smile and tons of questions and compliments. One bad thing is that someone is always trying to sell me something or beg for money, and the pushiness is incredible. My most-common phrase this trip is "no thank you." "NO thank you." "NO THANK YOU!" It's too bad, because I'd love to buy about 80% of the stuff people are trying to sell me, haha. I've seen some Kashmiri carpets to die for-- I could have picked up a $5,000 carpet for about $700, but... yeah right. Here in Varanasi they're known for silk. Last night we made our way in the dark-- did I mention the power outages in India? They happen all the time, no one pays attention, you kind of get used to it-- to a beautiful silk embroidery factory down narrow, twisting, dark, stinky streets. It was fun. When we got inside they happened to have a generator so I could actually see everything. My god, the fabrics made me want to cry they were so beautiful and relatively inexpensive.

Last night and this morning I took a boat ride on the Ganges to see the bathing ghats. I'm going to have to let the pictures describe them because I certainly can't do enough justice to what I saw, but I'll try. First of all, Varanasi is the most important city in Hinduism and it's also one of the oldest cities on the planet. Hindus bathe in the Ganges river (it's actually called the Ganga here) morning and night, but most especially at dawn, for purification and theoretically to cure illness of body/mind/soul. According to Hindu belief, people who are cremated on the banks of the Ganga are released from the cycle of reincarnation, so there are a lot of funeral pyres at two main burning areas. We arrived at one of these two main areas. Yes, I saw funeral pyres. Yes, they had dead bodies in them. The river itself is toxic as hell, not because of the ashes, potential body parts, animal shit and garbage-- although that certainly doesn't help-- but because a few miles upriver are chemical factories and a lot of their waste goes directly in to the river. I did touch the river though, by lighting a pretty little candle in a paper cup with flower petals around it and floating it downstream. Photography is acceptable everywhere except the burning areas, but it somehow felt a little wrong to me to take shots of people while they're bathing-- they're not animals in a zoo, this is their religion, not mine, and I'm funny about intruding on holy moments or places. That said I did get a few shots but they're from farther away than what most people were taking. I hated seeing the boatloads of tourists with their digital cameras flashing as people were praying in the water. Maybe it's a little hypocritical but I can't help it.

I've seen several extraordinarily beautiful Hindu temples, where outsiders are accepted with a smile. I have some lovely shots of the outsides as photography is (in my mind rightfully) prohibited inside. Today I went to Sarnath, a very important center of Buddhism. Sarnath is the place where the Buddha, after attaining enlightenment at Bohdgaya, came to teach his five disciples. It's a really cool place with a HUGE stupa and lots of other monastic ruins and an intact Jain temple, although that was closed. The Indian Archaeological Society is currently restoring the ruins and their methods are, well, interesting. The pictures demonstrate better than I can explain, but let's just say that women in saris hanging off of a 100-foot stupa are quite a sight to behold.

Tonight I'm taking the train to Siliguri, and from there it's on to either Kalimpong or Darjeeling and into Sikkim. I'll be taking another night train from Siliguri to Kolkata to catch my flight back to London.

I don't know if I'll end up getting service for my cell phone or not, so if you've been waiting for me to give you the number I'm sorry! Time has just flown by and it's incredible that my trip (at least the Indian portion) is half-over. I feel like I've barely gotten a tiny little sip and I want to take a huge gulp.

It's hot outside and I don't want to leave the internet cafe, but alas... back into crumbling, molding, fascinating, ALIVE Varanasi I go.