The Blind Pedestrian at d a v e t r a c k e r . c o m

Ghats on the Ganges River

Varanasi is a small city (about a million people) in the state of Utar Predesh, along the Ganges River in the north of India, directly below Nepal. It's one of the holiest places in India and one of the world's oldest living cities, if not the oldest. Religious people often come here to die and be cremated on the ghats (steps/temples) along the river.

The previous two weeks spent in the mountains among quaint villages was of course not "the India" that even seasoned travelers find intense and exhilarating. Varanasi is definitely "the real India." This is going to be a tough section to write. Some people were talking at dinner about how there is no way to describe the feeling of being here to someone who hasn't. The best way would be to say that now I know what the folks on Star Trek felt like beaming down onto a completely foreign and alien world.

Not to parrot nearly every travel book that's been written on this place, but India definitely is a place of intense extremes. The locals might treat you either like dirt or like family. Their appearance may be either stunningly elegant or unimaginably inhuman. They can be sticklers about manners, protocol and detail in some areas yet appear completely savage and apathetic in others. And your experience tracks this throwing you into a constant love-hate relationship with everything that's going on around you.

I was prepared for a lot of things good, bad and just plain strange (thanks Jim, Ian & Lambert). And so far nothing has really gotten my goat yet. And no one has made off with any of my belongings. But what I wasn't expecting is how completely immersed and ungrounded you can get when not a single thing as far as you can see seems like it's even from this planet. Everything -- traffic, street noises, cars, products, sounds, dress, gestures, language, ethnicity, clothing, architecture, food, music (being broadcast over loud-speakers on the streets), economic stature, emotional levels and tones of voice, animals and plants -- Everything is different. Existential vertigo I guess you could call it. In the most in-your-face and intense way. Then suddenly just seeing a someone wearing a jean-jacket and carrying a modern camera can anchor you again. But there are some moments that are just really hard to describe.

People write books about their experiences in India and I'm going to avoid doing that here, while trying to do justice to some of my feelings about all of this. I'll just say that I had no idea how apt the whole "Blind Pedestrian" term really is. I feel like there is soooo much here that I don't / can't see and don't/can't get. I'll be working on this, but to some extent it seems like that's just how things need to be for a while...

Thursday, November 25, 2004 : Day 34

Trip to Varanasi

Limor, et. al. crashing Sleeper Class
just after dawn
on the train to Varanasi

Hey! I'd never been on a train before! India's train system is legendary and train-trips seem to always be an important part of travelers' experiences here. Really. Me. Train. Never. Part of the experience is getting a ticket. We went to the Darjeeling station around 7am so the line was only 20min or so. There were no tickets to Varanasi until Dec 1. The train system is government run. All you can do is ask for availability for tickets to X. Any kind of conversation such as "well, if I can't get to X, can you get me to a place close to X and I'll take a bus to X" seemed impossible. After a bit of searching, we found a travel agent in town who got us tickets to Patna from which we could catch a train to Varanasi.

There were several blessings on this trip: A taxi going to Siliguri to pick someone up gave us a *great* price -- only 20rs more than being packed like sardines in one of those #(*# jeeps on mountain roads for 2 1/2 hrs. In Padna, at 4:30am we surrounded a tix window from 3 sides, physically blockading people from cutting in front of us, got tix and made the train, hopping on as it had already started moving. Our tix were cattle-class, but we hopped into a sleeper class car. We stopped to talk to some tourists (it was dark) and suddenly locals were making room for us to sit, sharing their seats with us, and one eventually buying us chai and handing us cookies. When the auto-rickshaw got to Assi Ghat, we immediately stumbled on Ben and Anne on the street which really saved the day, as they couldn't get a room at the hotel we were planning on meeting at.

Anyway, the trains are divided into classes: AC/2, AC/3, Sleeper and General. Aside from being air-conditioned, the main advantage of AC class is that only passengers with tickets can go in the car. In the sleeper class, anyone can be in the car and the passengers sort things out. Once in a while someone might come through and check tickets and fine those who don't have them, but it's rare. In the general class, anything goes and it's often standing room only. Even for long train rides.

Tali for Thanksgiving

The trip to Padna was 13hrs. For that trip I had an AC/3 ticket (AC class, 3 levels of bunks). I can't believe how well I slept on the train, even with my pack and day pack with me (locked to my bunk). The trip to Varanasi was only 3hrs and as I mentioned, the fact that anyone could "sneak" onto the regular Sleeper Class cars and the general, unwritten anything-goes rules of India worked in our favor this time. The General class would have been a really tough trip.

Speaking of rough trip, I'm glad I didn't take the bus like... some people did. It was supposed to be 13 hrs but turned out to be 20 with the end being the roughest according to Anne. It was good to see everyone again after a few days. Ben and I were humored with Tali for Thanksgiving dinner.

At some point, Shiva killed a ghost. Through some broken English, this is the extent of my research into what the hell was going on this night. This isn't Diwali (Festival of Lights) but it was a lot more illuminating and a lot less noisy than Diwali. And this celebration is tied to the full moon. Ok -- I need to do a bit more research into this, including the name. But as you can see, it was a bit distracting. Ben was hanging out with this yogi (Baba) and through that got a great connection on a boat which apparently were in short supply that night.

At the Ghats that day [photo credit: Thanks Aimee for letting me shamelessly use this pic!]
Waiting for the boat at the Chai stand -- these are little "disposable" terra cotta cups that can be tossed (into the street w/ all of the other garbage) and degrade back into dirt

The ghats were covered with thousands of candles, all the way down the river. Most of the photos are just of a single ghat or two. It was like this for at least two miles. Hard to fit into a camera.

Backstage (in a boat) at the main ghat concert & ceremony.
The stage was built from bamboo and floating on giant pontoons on the Ganges river

Everything seems to happen in the streets Aside from the Ghats, there's not that much to "see" in Varanasi. Except for ... everything else. The first thing that you notice -- well, that I noticed anyway is that everything seems to happen in the streets. They are used for taxi-stands, live-stock rangeland, food vending and eating, gambling, barber services (yeah, you can get a shave right in the street), pressing sugar cane & other production, playing music, funerals, building fires, sleeping (homeless), trash-dumps (usually in big piles), latrines (anywhere, for both livestock and people) -- oh, yeah, and getting around, usually by bicycle rickshaw or three-wheeled auto-rickshaws.

The Ghats are amazing, but I can't tell you how amazing, entertaining, surreal it was just to go walk the streets of this town. Trying to get it. Sort it out. And just take it in when getting/sorting proved futile. Watching the people, the activity. I knew this section was going to be hard to write.

I think what I (and some others) had the hardest time with at first was the dirt. Everywhere. And not just dirt -- trash, a lot of cow-shit, and other excrement along with some other thing that could only be identified as organic in some way. But beneath / beyond all of this there's an incredible city that seems to slowly emerge over the course of a few days like the color coming out of a Polaroid photo. I'm not religious, new-age or whatever, but there's definitely an energy here that's hard not to feel.

Holy (mad) Cow! I was taking an auto rickshaw when suddenly traffic
stops and people are turning around. There was the sound of bicycles and vendor carts
being knocked over and trampled. The second vid was shot just holding my camera
out facing backwards. I guess cowshit isn't the only issue when you share your
streets w/ livestock. Actually, this does a decent job of capturing some of the
"energy" of Varanasi.

Varanasi is also a very holy place to come to die and be cremated. On "the burning ghats", cremation ceremonies are publicly performed after the body has been carried through the streets. It wasn't easy to watch, but not difficult either. All very natural, really. They ask that you not take photos of the burning, so I didn't.
Above, left: is behind the burning ghat where wood is weighed out and charged for. right: There are certain cases where cremation is not performed. Certain diseases, pregnant women, etc. In this case the body is just placed in the river. It's hard to make out the two crows sitting on top. Many corpses are tied with stones so they sink, but some are set afloat.

There were also a number of other strange things that I'm not going to delve into here in detail. For example, one night we walked by a man sitting on a blanket, face painted and he was surrounded by human skulls. Some kind of shaman or something.

I'll just note that, walking around here, you get into a space where you pretty much forget about your camera (and everything else that you knew).

Tuesday, November 30, 2004 : Day 39

Cricket on the other side of the river.

The Ganges is India's Holiest River This is one of the tough things to wrap your mind around. Bathing in the river serves as a source of purification. And it also serves as the city's water supply (I assume after some filtration). Yet one eyedropper of the water could probably keep a microbiologist entertained for weeks. All of the city's sewers discharge, untreated, directly into the river and as you can see from the above so do many of India's expired citizens. There is no dissolved oxygen in the water and the bacteria count exceeds what is generally accepted for bathing by 1000 times. Many of the corpses placed directly in the river have died of diseases. So, as you can imagine, for even my unhygienic male mind, the idea of touching, much less ingesting the water is pretty scary. We actually had to wade in it when we went to the other side (see below). What can I say? I went home and did one hell of a washing job on my feet and sandals.

Oh yes -- I got my first case of food poisoning. And thoroughly deserved it. Generally I think the street vendors are safe. And this one looked like the cleanest one I'd seen. So well dressed. Up on the Ghat. Yes, generally they're safe, but not when they are serving food on dishes washed in a polluted river... Ugh. I'm tempted to delete this paragraph, so I can just forget about it, but I won't. All was well in 24hrs but I took a Cipro just to be sure...

I thought the reports of there being blind dolphin in the river were just a story until someone in our group said that they had actually seen them.

Wednesday, Dec 1, 2004 : Day 40

Leaving Varanasi

I was really blessed to get to hang out with such a great (and evolving) group for so long. It was time for me to get going toward Agra and eventually Delhi and fly out.

	We went to visit Ugal (sp?) at the hospital. He was really amazingly talented percussionist from Spain who managed to come down w/ a nasty fever the morning after a music party on a guest house roof top. He was doing ok.
Henna tattooed feet attached to Anne.
	My good-bye dinner.

next: BP2.4 India - Kajaharo