Category Archives: India

Varanasi – Riverside activities

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First of all, let me say that I believe the Ganges River is polluted. Not only have I read a most informative article on the subject in Smithsonian magazine, but also I have pictures. 

Ganges River edge in Varanasi

The stone configuration is a kind of washboard for those who wish to wash their clothing in the Ganges River. The other stuff is…er, other stuff.

I mention this because one very popular activity on the ghats (steps) of the Ganges is bathing. In the river.

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And not just bathing. I saw people pouring the water over their heads. I saw people drinking from it. Dan saw a man brushing his teeth in the Ganges.

Nearby, a man worships in a temple to Ganga, the Ganges, the divine river. Westerners practice yoga on its banks.

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It isn’t just the pollution. Dead bodies are washed in the Ganges. People are cremated nearby and their ashes…are taken home again? Mostly? But more about this in the next post.

Maybe this is just my Western squeamishness, but as beautiful a river as the Ganges is, I would not bathe in it.

 

 

 

Varanasi – River, sunrise

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We arrived in Varanasi after dark. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Having left the hotel in Khajuraho at 8 am for what google maps estimated was a 6.5-hour drive–and the driver said would be eight hours–we expected to arrive in enough time to settle into our hotel before dinner. Instead, we had a bone-jolting twelve-hour drive over roads that were sporadically under repair–or that certainly should have been, too late and weary and sore to even consider dinner.

I consider it a personal act of bravery that Dan and I nevertheless signed up for a 6 am boat tour of the Ganges River the next morning. But then, instead of a day and a half, we now had only the one complete day in Varanasi, and we had to make the most of it.

A word about our hotel: We were staying at the budget Hotel Alka (see my review here). It’s a great little hotel that is right on one of the ghats overlooking the river. So we didn’t have far to walk to our boat. This is good, since it wasn’t yet the least bit light when we left.

Ganges River February 11, 6 am

Now, not light is definitely not the same thing as not noisy. To the contrary, there were shouts and singing, bells and drums, a mayhem of noises, happy and intense. There was, in fact, a major celebration of the sunrise-to-be going on just one or two ghats upriver.

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Farther up it wasn’t quite as crowded, but people were already bathing in the holy river at this sacred time of day.

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The faintest light was creeping into the sky, enhancing the city’s unique beauty.

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People were beginning the activities of the day.

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And–beautifully–the sun rose over the Ganges River.

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Getting back into the India frame of mind

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Dan and I are back in India. We were here eight years ago for a wedding and loved what we saw of the country and its people. But we didn’t have nearly enough time and didn’t see half of what we wanted to see. So here we are again. At the moment, we are exploring the state of Kerala. Two days ago, we arrived in Thiruvananthapuram–also known as Trivandrum for the multisyllably impaired–the capital and (with a population of some 750,000) the largest city in Kerala. By way of contrast, we are now in Varkala, on a very beautiful beach.

Kerala is the densest state in India, and you can see it on the roads. There is a whole lot of traffic here. Of course there is a lot of traffic all over India, and the truth is, even though we lived through the traffic in Delhi and it changed forever our concept of “heavy” traffic (By comparison, there is very little heavy traffic anywhere in the USA)–the truth is that we’d forgotten the real experience.

So there you are, let’s say, driving down a two-lane road (one lane in each direction) which is marked with a white line down the middle. The white line does not require anyone to stay on their side of the road–it is only a suggestion. So let’s say you are passing a bus that is going slower than you are. And coming right at you is a truck, which is passing an automobile, which in turn is passing a motorbike. So there you are, the five of you racing toward each other on a two-lane road.

This isn’t a unique hair-raising experience here. It’s a way of life. That’s what the horn is for. In the space of an hour-and-a-half drive from Thiruvananthapuram to Varkala, this probably happens two hundred times. Or more.

So what happens?

Magically, the road widens. Time slows, but at different rates for the different drivers. The passers speed up a little. The ones being passed slow down. Some of you slide over toward the dirt edge of the road–careful not to hit the pedestrians or the parked cars. And somehow you and the truck and the bus and the car and the motorbike all slip by each other when an instant later, for a second or two, the road closes back down to two lanes again.

It’s nothing special. Just ordinary traffic on an ordinary road in India. And it works because the drivers here all have a cooperative mind-set. It works for everyone because everyone wants it to work for everyone. There is no road rage.

We can’t capture it in a photograph; it’s all too fluid. Dan says he’d like to get just one minute of video–any one minute would probably do–of driving down the road here. I’ve got the camera, but I can’t seem to make a video. I just can’t take my eyes off the dance.