On the Ganges (India, Part 1)

 

In a past life, every day when I got to work I would flip over to a new picture in my every-day-of-the-year calendar of India that Aunty San had got me for Christmas. Back then I so desperately wanted to get away, break free and roam – not be tied to a desk – and India seemed like a whole other world. The calendar was a daily reminder that there was a big wide world out there to see. Therefore, it’s somewhat fitting that the final leg of my trip takes place in the strange land that was part of the inspiration to travel so far and long. I saw pictures of India every day and wished I was there, and now, at the end of my world travels, I am.

The first thing I see as we enter the country is a guy with a straw broom sweeping all the rubbish on the dirty street into a fire that is burning in the middle of a road.

We drive most of the day through the flat and dusty Ganges floodplains regions, people everywhere even in small towns, road conditions and driving behaviour as dangerous as you’d expect.

Our first destination is Varanasi. I remember studying Varanasi in high school, and being able to spend time here has been one of the highlights of my whole trip. Varanasi is one of the world’s most ancient cities (along with Delhi and Jerusalem) and is considered the holiest place on earth. It’s also the world capital of chaos and filth.

The Ganges runs along the face of city, where temples and old building look over the world’s holiest river, and where concrete steps lead Hindu pilgrims down to the filthy waters of mother Ganges. Hindus from all over India come to bath in the Ganges at least once in their lives, and many people are sent to Varanasi to be cremated by the river side.

Apart from all the Hindu religion stuff, the place just looks really cool and has a great feel to it. It’s an intense city, and is really unlike anywhere else I’ve been.

The water front area with the temples and the steps descending into the water are called the ghats, and my favourite thing to do is Varanasi was walk along the Ghats from where we were staying all the way along (1/2 hour walk) to the old part of town. In the morning people would be bathing, washing themselves with mud, meditating on the steps, sitting listening to their guru talk, or eating the cheap brekkie street food. People would be also be washing clothes, including some really vibrant sarees and gowns, and then laying them out to dry on the steps. The water being dirty and polluted, and with every inch of public space in this city being so filthy, it made me wonder how much cleaner they could have been getting their clothes.

In the middle of the day the Ghats were empty, the sun too hot even for the most devout pilgrims, save for the farmers who brought their buffalo down to bath, and the bodies burning on the funeral pyres.

You can’t come to Varanasi without seeing a few corpses.

People bring their deceased family members down to the shore, build a wood pile, place the body on top, cover with more wood and kindling and set it all alight. The family members stand around talking while the body burns. One corpse I saw had burned all the way through save for the feet which stuck out the end of the pyre, unburnt, and the head, which was taking its time. The ritual is finally over when a loud pop that marks the explosion of the skull is heard.

I saw many corpses burning, and many being carried through the streets on the way to the Ghats (covered of course), and can remember looking into a fire one morning and the only thing I could make out was a burnt, clenched, skeletal hand.

In the evenings everyone is back out on the ghats, street food galore, nice views over the river, boats full of people paddling about, the prayer ceremony at old town in full swing, and games of cricket being played left right and centre.

While in the holy city I will mention that cricket is a religion in India. The people are obsessed, and from the street games I watched they seem to be pretty good at it (although a couple of those bowls were throws). They and know all the Aussie players (whenever I said I was from Australia they would smile and say ‘Ricky Ponting’), and they consider Sachin Tendulker a living god. India and Australia are two entirely different worlds. It’s interesting that a sport we both got from the British is our most solid common ground.

India in general, but Varanasi especially, is home to the holy cow. These are cows that roam the busy streets of the city. They act like they own the place, laying out on busy roads to the traffic has to squeeze around them, going in and resting inside shops (considered a good luck omen for the business), wandering around chewing on the garbage that lays around the city in abundance. They are sacred in Hinduism so go around town doing as they please. It’s just bizarre.

One night when I was walking home after a great curry I was walking up a street when there came a stamped of cows down the road. People were running, darting into side alleys, ducking being tuk-tuks, standing flat up against walls. A bull had tried to mount a heifer at the back of the pack and got them all scared. The cows rushed past without trampling anybody and in an instant the street returned to its busting self.

From Varanasi we drove a couple of hours to another point on the Ganges where we would spend a couple of days sailing/ rowing back downstream to Varanasi. Those boats were small, only four of us and two boatmen per boat, making three passenger boats in total, plus one kitchen boat.

I felt a little uneasy about laying back on cushions while the skinny Indian men rowed like the slaves, but was glad not to be working in such heat (though I did row for a while on both days).

We paddled down the Ganges and passed villages with temples and little stepped ghats of their own, waved at kids who ran to the shore to look at us, and enjoyed being on the river. One of the boats even saw the pink Ganges dolphin.

The food they cooked for us, which we would pull over to the shore to eat, was among the best I’ve had in India. Dhal, Chapatti, Palak Paneer (Cheese Sag), and Spiced Potatoes, among other things, were all prepared on that fourth little boat of the fleet.  

At night we set up tents on a sandy bank and it was the sweatiest night of my life. I woke up every twenty minutes or so feeling like I’d just had water poured on me. Nobody slept well, but we were all happy to be there, happy for the adventure of it.

In the morning we explored the bank of the Ganges and found some human and animal bones, even a couple of skulls. Lots of people are brought to the Ganges and just dumped, especially if the family is too poor to buy the wood for the fire. Along the way we saw a couple of dead animals in the river, and even saw a pack of dogs chewing at what remained of a corpse on an upturned funeral stretcher.

We arrived back into Varanasi to see people shitting on the banks a couple of hundred metres upstream from where people were swimming. The fecal coliform bacteria levels are 35 times higher than the permissible levels for swimming (deficiently not drinking, which I saw many people doing). Yep, crapping in public is pretty common here, and in the cities you cannot turn your head without seeing another guys peeing against a wall.

 

And on that note I’ll sum up by saying that the holiest place on earth well and truly blew my mind, especially because of how shit stained it was, and especially because of the corpses and body parts, and especially because here you run the risk of being stampeded by holy cows in the middle of the city.

Where else in the world?