Day 34-35 (1st-2nd March) Kajuraho to Varanasi.

An 8-hour train journey took us to the holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges. We were met at the station by a taxi driver who took us to a scruffy looking place in a street stinking of sewage and swarming with mosquitoes rather than the Yoga Mandir which Mr Raj had booked. After much argument he eventually took us there and it is delightful, right on the bank of the Ganges with a glorious view from our room.

On Monday we got by tuk-tuk, cycle rickshaw and our legs to an area somewhere near the Manikarnika Ghat where a friendly man who spoke very good English directed us towards a smart-looking restaurant where, as usual in India, a very impressive menu listed things which we asked for but they didn’t have, Still, I had a very nice Russian salad with perhaps 10 different vegetables in it. Our friend wasn’t after a tip. He only wanted to tell us that he had a shop which we should visit for the best-quality pashminas, only he forgot to tell us where it was. On leaving the restaurant we were immediately collared by a young man who insisted on taking us to the best view of the cremation ground at the ghat. He told us he was not a guide wanting money, but a employee of the temple serving the Ghat and he was explaining everything to us out of the goodness of his heart. Alarm bells started to ring when he explained that the poor relatives of the deceased could not afford to buy the wood for the cremation and relied on donations from rich people. We thought that’s OK, we’ll give 500 rupees until he told us that the smallest donation acceptable if we wanted to achieve good karma was 2 kgs of sandalwood costing $20. At that point we fled.

We then went out of the complex by a circuitous route along narrow lanes with shops selling tourist tat on either side. The lanes were crammed with pedestrians and scooters and even when we got to a main road it was virtually impossible to push our way through due to the crowds making their way to the Damaswamedh Ghat for the evening Aarta. We were accosted once more by a man who wanted to accompany us and tap us for money. The fact that he was bollock-naked apart from a skimpy loincloth exhibiting his gonads and that he was smeared from head to toe in white ash from the cremation ground persuaded us that he was not a nice person to be seen with. The faster we ran the faster he chased us until he finally gave up after spotting another Western tourist. He was an Aghori Sadhu (not saddo) who live on the cremation grounds, smear themselves with human ash and eat bits of human flesh not consumed by the fire. The Aarta was a display by seven people waving a cascade of candles about until they joined in a mass of flame and eventually burned out. Officially, the aim of the Aarta is for the relatives of recently-deceased people to float little rafts with candles down the Ganges. It is supposed to be an impressive spectacle, but we only saw 14 floating down the river with another 20-30 stuck among the numerous pleasure craft moored at the side of the river. Bit of a damp squib really.