Varanasi
At 5:30 am I woke up, or even earlier if I could sleep, because at 6:00 am the boatman came to bring me for a sunrise tour on the Ganges, the most popular trip in Benares. I gave the guy from the hotel Rs 100, that I am sure that was his commission, and I was supposed to give the boatman another Rs 100 for the tour. The boat ride is splendid, with the sun lighting over the ghats and the entire Benares waking up to life.
It takes you for about 2 hours around the to the center ghats, between the two burning ghats where the dead are cremated round the clock. The boatman told me that everybody is cremated except the swamis, the babies, the pregnant women and the people who dies bitten by cobras, the animal of Lord Shiva, to die like this being considered a blessing. Unfortunately it is a strong restriction to take any kind of pictures around the burning ghats and you have to go far away and zoom in if you really care about it. So I got a scolding latter on when some guy saw me shooting from afar, and no matter that there were no details he explained me that is better not to do it. In front of a number of the ghats there are professional washers who are doing the laundry. The process is by soaping, wetting the clothing in the Ganges and after that hitting the laundry on some stones.
When the process is finished all the laundry is dried out by exposing it in the sun on the ghats’ steps and on any existing usable surface. So from here we get our sheets and towels in the hotels, I guess, and that is the reason that their white is having all sorts of tones in it… Walking back to the hotel I met Vasu, an Indian photographer that I chat with in Haridwar. It was an interesting coincidence to bump into each other. After the boat tour I went to see what is going on with my room “upgrade” and apparently nothing was available, but he asked me to still wait and see. I went to have breakfast of a banana pancake at Monalisa, the German Bakery, where I got in a conversation with Traude from Vienna, who quit her job working for the government to find the sense of life outside office work. She was also in shock traveling in India for quite a while. A lot of people decided to come and travel in India after quitting their job at different stages in life.
To travel in India is very cheap and you can stay here forever with $20/day or even less if you push it. But the shock is still there…. I did not have the entire day for chatting and I had no clue what is happening with my new room so I made some investigations for other hotels and when returning to the hotel the manager told me that they still don’t have anything, I paid , took my bags and left to Sita Hotel where the “deluxe” room is slightly better but 4 times more expensive…..And it has AC. The problem is that the nice hotels in Varanasi are not on Ganges but in posh green areas, slightly far from the river. But you want to stay on the river and as a result you pay roughly the same price for a way worse room than if you stay close to Radisson and the rest. But the advantage of having a room on the ghats, that I used a lot, is that after a short walk on the ghats in 42C you come to the room and take a shower and at least you feel less muck on you. Tauder showed me a great map of Varanasi, that is offered for free, a rare thing in India, at the train station so I took a cyclo, got there and talk with a very nice man who was so helpful. Latter I heard that he is mentioned even in Lonely Planet as a great resource. He also pointed me to the Government approved stores with fixed prices in silk, a store that is very close to the rail station.
This detour transformed my day in a shopping day, going from one store to another and latter to another one and finishing all the shopping around 5:00 pm, a good thing because it is finished and done.Another good thing was that it kept me indoors for the peak of the heat. On the way I moved with cyclos, a sort of full size three wheeler bike, driven by some wallahs who are making a terrible effort but at least are kept employed. During this shopping spree I crossed in a totally different part of town. Green, quiet and secluded it felt more like an American suburb than a short walk from the madness of Varanasi’s center. I could not believe that something like this exists In Benares. There were only villas and, as I understood, a lot of military were living there. When we returned at one point this quietude is brusquely ended when you literally cross a street and you enter the regular mayhem of the Indian city. But it is like a magic line that you accidentally cross. It is not gradual. I came and dropped everything to the hotel in my palatine room with a broken mirror and bugs in the sink, deluxe otherwise, and I left to shoot on the ghats, going again towards the burning ghats. At the burning ghats some touts, that Varanasi is full of, asked me if I would like to shoot some pictures. I told them no way and to get lost but they insisted saying that they can get approval from the owner of the ghat, that is BS because they would pocket the money and go.
Funerary Ghats, Varanasi
After they figured out that I have to shoot video they said that is free to shoot but how about I donate money for the poor people to have wood to be burned!!! These creeps were shameless and like all these type of creatures they were asking exorbitant amounts starting to make a grid of how much footage can I get for the wood I would buy to burn corpses!!!! Quickly they made a chart like in a post footage house…. When I flatly refused they were insulted and asked me to leave. It is against the spirit of the ceremony to take pictures of such an event in consideration for the families that congregate there. I went to the puja where I got some better shots and latter had dinner on the roof of one of the nice and more expansive places in Varanasi, Dolphin restaurant, from where you can see the entire city and the Ganga that is slow and lazy like a summer day. When I got at the hotel I notice that I had a sleep partner, a gecko that was running the walls and ceiling looking for insects to eat. And with so many insects around he was a chubby guy.
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