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I left the guesthouse at 5:30am in order to catch a boat at sunrise. I shared the boat with two Spanish girls (and the oarsman of course) and we excitedly watched people bathing, swimming, washing clothes and drinking the water of the holiest of all rivers, the Ganges. They lathered themselves, filled up bottles with water and prayed while sitting in the water. A few meters further apart, at cremation points, deceased people are bruned and their ashes scattered into the river. It is a real spectacle to see life by the Ganges! It's strange that people drink water where you wouldn't even want to bathe a toe! I guess it's not so much the dead bodies, but industrial waste which causes problems. But after all, the people I saw looked pretty healthy! Maybe there is something true about this water...
The rest of Varanasi is not very spectacular. It is a very busy, noisy, smelly typical Indian city with an over-average hustle and bustle.
The 10min bicycle-rickshaw ride to the bus station was quite exciting, as we almost run over a cyclist who cut our way, we bumped into an auto-rickshaw and another bicycle-rickshaw crashed into us. Nothing serious happened though.
I took the Bus to Sarnath, where Siddhartha Gautama (known as Buddha for the unteached) gave his first sermon, to visit some temple remains. This has been a pretty dull excursion, as there is nothing much left of the temples (actually, only a few bricks) and it bored me. |
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