Varanasi airport is an old, low, shed-like building. In one corner is a booth with a little sign that says 'pre-paid taxi'. I don't know why they're so modest. What they actually offer is the sketchiest prepaid taxi service in all of India, and that's a crowded field.
The first sketchy man charges you extra for parking and air conditioning. The second also wants to charge you for air conditioning, and, when you refuse, admits the car is air conditioned anyway. The role of the third sketchy man isn't clear, unless it's to prepare you for the driver by adding to your general unease. The driver might be the father of them all, and the font of all their sketchiness. Approaching him is like climbing a mountain of sketchiness. The others might have other qualities in their off-hours, but if you took the sketchiness out of the driver, he'd collapse, an empty skin.
The driver talks and looks like an evangelical preacher with serious mental trouble. He leaves long silences between words, and looks at you searchingly while he's talking. He doesn't use verbs or articles. His eyes look in slightly different directions, which gives him the unsettling ability to watch his passenger and the road at the same time. I toy with a theory that he's had this done surgically for this reason, but he turns out to not really be that interested in what happens on the road. He forcefully recommends services and sights and specific tuktuk drivers.
I'm staying a big, western chain hotel in Varanasi, because of a vow (and a reservation) I made not long after I arrived in India, when I was confused and exasperated. Most of the other guests are western tourists. There are no buckets in the shower, and no nozzle in the toilet, which means it really wasn't built with Indians in mind.
From my window, there's an interesting view of a small, quiet part of Varanasi. At left, a shiny 6- or 7-storey building is being finished. This side of it is covered in a delicate-looking lattice of bamboo scaffolding that leans alarmingly to the left. Men stand on the topmost poles, 60 or 70 feet off the ground, to work.
Beside that, there's a rooftop crowded with old porcelain toilets. There are usually men here, sitting on a lawn chair beside the toilets or pacing back and forth talking on a cell phone -- wheeling and dealing, I like to think, in the second-hand toilet market. Next to that, there's a rooftop with a hole in it that the residents use as a toilet. The rooftops are all about the same height and are all surrounded by walls; they must have been perfectly private before someone built the busy 6-storey hotel that now overlooks them. Now, it's a bit awkward all around; but they don't seem to mind, and any tourists who are bothered by this sort of thing shouldn't have come to India. I can also see the Varuna river, and on the far bank of that are open fields where buffalo graze and hawks (possibly) circle in huge numbers.
In Hinduism, Varanasi is an auspicious place to die. This is one reason for the active cremation business, and probably also explains the willingness of people to drive in the traffic here. It's like that in other Indian cities, but more intense, and with buffalo, roadside garbage fires, and the occasional elephant added to the mix.
Traffic in rich countries is machine-like; traffic in India tends to be a sort of swarm. It's like watching a flock of birds, everything swooping by and around everything else, and somehow never touching. It all seemed a bit miraculous, until a tuktuk I was in in Jaipur bumped into a motorcycle at low speed, which broke the spell a bit. Also, of course, traffic mortality statistics in India are actually completely horrifying.
I took a tuktuk as close as possible to the ghats, and then followed other tourists into the old city. The old city is a tangle of narrow, nameless alleys. The Durga Puja is on, and temporary pavilions (pandals) have been set up around the city. Inside each is a dais with 5 richly-dressed mannequin-like idols (representing, apparently, Durga, Shiva, Ganesha, Lakshmi, and Saraswati). The largest one I find is prominently sponsored by a plywood company.
People are hosing thick deposits of mud off of the first ghat I come to, and men offer rides in leaky wooden boats. There are masses of flowers washed up on the sand. A man shakes my hand, and, instead of letting go, starts massaging it. He moves on to my arm and tells me about the services he offers -- haircuts, shaves, and massages -- and their prices. I try progressively less politely to get my arm back, and he's almost at my shoulder before I wrench it away. It turns out that this is standard practice. I wonder if the barbers find it frustrating that so many of the western tourists are young hippies with luxuriant beards and long, knotted hair.
I walk off in the wrong direction to reach Manikarnika ghat, the main 'burning ghat' used for cremations. The cremations are a popular tourist attraction. Reaching Manikarnika wasn't a priority; I'm usually as keen as the next person on things that are ghoulish and vaguely disrespectful, but I was happy to leave it for another day.
The Ganges is the colour of milky tea. When I walk along it, people are using the ghats for bathing, laundry, washing, and public defecation (which has a dedicated ghat). At one, two small boys herd 10 buffalo into the river for a wallow. The lead buffalo stops and sniffs dubiously at the water's edge, but they seem to enjoy it once they're in.
The Ganges is famously polluted, with (the guidebook says) 6 major local sewers emptying into it, as well as a few sources of industrial waste, and the various things put into it by the many, many millions of people living upstream. Dead people belonging to certain groups also don't need to be cremated, and are wrapped, weighted, and deposited into the river here. The Ganges is unlike an open sewer mostly in that it contains worse things than sewage. Pilgrims bathe in it for religious reasons, but people also swim in it, do their laundry in it, and wash in it. It's hard to think of things that might leave you dirty enough that you'd be cleaner after a bath in the Ganges than before.
The first sketchy man charges you extra for parking and air conditioning. The second also wants to charge you for air conditioning, and, when you refuse, admits the car is air conditioned anyway. The role of the third sketchy man isn't clear, unless it's to prepare you for the driver by adding to your general unease. The driver might be the father of them all, and the font of all their sketchiness. Approaching him is like climbing a mountain of sketchiness. The others might have other qualities in their off-hours, but if you took the sketchiness out of the driver, he'd collapse, an empty skin.
The driver talks and looks like an evangelical preacher with serious mental trouble. He leaves long silences between words, and looks at you searchingly while he's talking. He doesn't use verbs or articles. His eyes look in slightly different directions, which gives him the unsettling ability to watch his passenger and the road at the same time. I toy with a theory that he's had this done surgically for this reason, but he turns out to not really be that interested in what happens on the road. He forcefully recommends services and sights and specific tuktuk drivers.
From my window, there's an interesting view of a small, quiet part of Varanasi. At left, a shiny 6- or 7-storey building is being finished. This side of it is covered in a delicate-looking lattice of bamboo scaffolding that leans alarmingly to the left. Men stand on the topmost poles, 60 or 70 feet off the ground, to work.
Beside that, there's a rooftop crowded with old porcelain toilets. There are usually men here, sitting on a lawn chair beside the toilets or pacing back and forth talking on a cell phone -- wheeling and dealing, I like to think, in the second-hand toilet market. Next to that, there's a rooftop with a hole in it that the residents use as a toilet. The rooftops are all about the same height and are all surrounded by walls; they must have been perfectly private before someone built the busy 6-storey hotel that now overlooks them. Now, it's a bit awkward all around; but they don't seem to mind, and any tourists who are bothered by this sort of thing shouldn't have come to India. I can also see the Varuna river, and on the far bank of that are open fields where buffalo graze and hawks (possibly) circle in huge numbers.
Traffic in rich countries is machine-like; traffic in India tends to be a sort of swarm. It's like watching a flock of birds, everything swooping by and around everything else, and somehow never touching. It all seemed a bit miraculous, until a tuktuk I was in in Jaipur bumped into a motorcycle at low speed, which broke the spell a bit. Also, of course, traffic mortality statistics in India are actually completely horrifying.
I took a tuktuk as close as possible to the ghats, and then followed other tourists into the old city. The old city is a tangle of narrow, nameless alleys. The Durga Puja is on, and temporary pavilions (pandals) have been set up around the city. Inside each is a dais with 5 richly-dressed mannequin-like idols (representing, apparently, Durga, Shiva, Ganesha, Lakshmi, and Saraswati). The largest one I find is prominently sponsored by a plywood company.
People are hosing thick deposits of mud off of the first ghat I come to, and men offer rides in leaky wooden boats. There are masses of flowers washed up on the sand. A man shakes my hand, and, instead of letting go, starts massaging it. He moves on to my arm and tells me about the services he offers -- haircuts, shaves, and massages -- and their prices. I try progressively less politely to get my arm back, and he's almost at my shoulder before I wrench it away. It turns out that this is standard practice. I wonder if the barbers find it frustrating that so many of the western tourists are young hippies with luxuriant beards and long, knotted hair.
I walk off in the wrong direction to reach Manikarnika ghat, the main 'burning ghat' used for cremations. The cremations are a popular tourist attraction. Reaching Manikarnika wasn't a priority; I'm usually as keen as the next person on things that are ghoulish and vaguely disrespectful, but I was happy to leave it for another day.
The Ganges is the colour of milky tea. When I walk along it, people are using the ghats for bathing, laundry, washing, and public defecation (which has a dedicated ghat). At one, two small boys herd 10 buffalo into the river for a wallow. The lead buffalo stops and sniffs dubiously at the water's edge, but they seem to enjoy it once they're in.
The Ganges is famously polluted, with (the guidebook says) 6 major local sewers emptying into it, as well as a few sources of industrial waste, and the various things put into it by the many, many millions of people living upstream. Dead people belonging to certain groups also don't need to be cremated, and are wrapped, weighted, and deposited into the river here. The Ganges is unlike an open sewer mostly in that it contains worse things than sewage. Pilgrims bathe in it for religious reasons, but people also swim in it, do their laundry in it, and wash in it. It's hard to think of things that might leave you dirty enough that you'd be cleaner after a bath in the Ganges than before.
