Varanasi

Driving in a small rickshaw at high speed on the highway, slaloming between the huge orange sikh trucks, we are finally approaching the holy city of Vārānasī. This place should be one of the highlights of our Asian journey. Place of high spirituality and of dramatic water pollution, Varanasi is the place you have in head when you think of India, the place everyone wants to see, the place everyone should see perhaps, but a place that is not always easy to reach. It was with apprehension and excitement we did the trip to this place of extremes, and we arrived with fatigue as well. 

In the morning, the apprehension disappeared. Varanasi wasn't as scaring as we expected, in fact the place seemed to us somehow very peaceful. The atmosphere around the ghats, even when very busy, seem to hold on the time and give us a rest. Still the place remains an extreme concentration of Indian colors. The ghats step down in a chaos of irregular stairs to the river. The morning mist over the Ganga leaves slowly the place to the crowd. Boat drivers constantly come to offer their services. Men wash in the waters of the Ganges. Women dry clorful clothes on the dusty stairs. Children play with their kites while teenagers prefer cricket. Old saddhus meditate the whole day. Constantly corpses are burnt on immense piles of wood. Cows, goats, dogs, monkeys and other animals make Varanasi an open-air zoo. The city is so full of colors, action and everchanging details that makes it a perfect place to snap photos on every corner. We're joking, that after some time spent here one could open an exhibition of e.g. pictures of only cow shit.

 

 

The old bazaar is also a significant place, even if sometimes the city of Varanasi seem to be reduced at the ghats. The bazaar is articulated around the Temple of Vishnawath. We had a long walk bare-feet in the dirty streets to reach it, carrying offerings in a basket and making the queue with other pilgrims. But the place is highly protected by the army, and we had to walk the way backward to the market when we couldn't convince the soldiers of our hinduism... In the bazaar we found also am amazing lassi, in the Blue Lassi shop, where we could enjoy the creamy drink in a narrow room while outside corpses where carried under colorful cloth toward the nearby cremation ghat. Cremation in Varanasi was very different than cremation in Pashupatinath. If in the temple of Kathmandu we were immersed in the most intimate moment of one's life, in Varanasi cremation is just an element of the general picture. It seems normal and even the goats lay in the ashes.

 

In Varanasi the religious life never stops and temples come one after another. On our first morning in Varanasi we visited a few small temples. At the entrance of one of them, young men were selling bhang lassi, a lassi mixed with cannabis butter, a popular offering to Lord Shiva, allowed in Varanasi for this religious reason, but openly sold around by local smugglers. In front of another temple, we encountered a talkative saddhu who spent his morning teaching us mudras and mantras. We couldn't hold our laugh when learning one mudra of Ganesh wich looked pretty much like a raised middle finger...

 

It is true that in Varanasi some people are pushy when they see tourists. Beside the boat drivers who want to sell helicopter tours, some others sell drugs with a snaky voice "hassshisssh...", fake saddhus ask for money and weird men try to shake your hand to force you to a hand massage. Often a smily "No, thank you." is enough but sometimes you've got to be more imaginative. If one want to shake your hand, better join them in a traditionnal Namaste. Or like me, hide them in your sweater and explain that you were born with no hand.

 

Many people come to Varanasi to study Indian music. Varanasi is a center for Indian classical music. That's why, for this entry there will be no hidden songs (as in all of the entries of this blog), but you can listen here to one of India's most famous classical master.