This series of posts about Varanasi has been long–but the city is unique, and no series of posts however long can fully do justice to the immensity of it. And so the time comes to conclude and move on. And what better way to do this than to post a series of pictures that to my mind show the beauty of the city bathed in splendid early morning light and dancing with the river!
Happy memories!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Farther up it wasn’t quite as crowded, but people were already bathing in the holy river at this sacred time of day.
The faintest light was creeping into the sky, enhancing the city’s unique beauty.
People were beginning the activities of the day.
And–beautifully–the sun rose over the Ganges River.
