We arrived in Varanasi (Benares) on an overnight sleeper car train - pretty slow but uneventful. The train was 90 minutes late but a car was waiting to take us to our hotel. It was an OK place with a quite good restaurant. We asked for a change of rooms when we found ours to be on an airshaft. It took a day to make the change, but the replacement was much better - a room with a view.
Next morning at 6 a.m., we went to the ghats - the Ganga (Ganges) river front area that is so famous, colorful and photogenic. Two days before our arrival a terrorist bomb had exploded at one the ghats - not a very powerful one, but a child had been killed and a number of people injured. Made all the papers, perhaps in US? In the India Times as background to the bomb story, Mark Twain is quoted, “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, even older than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”
A boatman was waiting to take us out on the water to view the sunrise and the dramatic ancient building fronts. Many people were bathing or swimming in this holiest of places in the Hindu world. The boat (a large and well-worn row boat) also took us by the place where cremations are performed 24 hrs a day -- an expensive affair but from this spot, the deceased goes directly to heaven (or so we were told). We were also told that certain kinds of people are not eligible for cremation in Varanasi - children , pregnant women, priests, and other categories.
It was beautiful, but also garish. The buildings are covered with the most ugly signage imaginable - huge billboard advertisements -- and one has to walk through run-down shop areas filled with garbage and shit to get to the steps, also filled with garbage and shit and I had to squint to begin to look past the clutter and see the inherent beauty of the place.
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