Morning flight to Varanasi, one of the world's oldest continually-inhabited cities and spiritual center of Hinduism, where people bathe in Ganges to remove their sins (though it's just as likely to remove their skin). Varanasi airport is one big room with one gate for "arrivals" and another for "departures" - like the other Indian airports I've visited, and unlike pretty much everywhere else in the world, it's a quiet cavern of calm, refuge from the raging city outside.
After lunch at the hotel (Chinese/Indic fusion with several kinds of cheesecakes and mouses), it's an afternoon trip to Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon. Our slick, talkative, Hindu-nationalist guide tells us all sorts of improbable (or simply false) things about Buddha and on alighting from the bus we have to run for our lives to escape hawkers. First stop is a 1930s temple designed and built by the Imperial Japanese Government (just before they tried to invade India, in fact) with a room showing the stages of Buddha's life and a nice courtyard with kitschy statues showing Buddha giving a sermon. It looked like this:
Then it was the archaeological museum, home of the famous Sarnath lion capital (the emblem of modern India, found on coins and the flag) and a small but exquisite collection of Buddhas and other statues. Sadly, one wing of the museum was closed.
Then we popped up the street to the deer park, the site of early Buddhist monasteries and a stupendous stupa for circumambulating. This is what it looked like:
The deer park was lovely, but I spent most of my time there fending off teenagers trying to sell me souvenirs, trying (not altogether successfully) to enact the central Buddhist tenet of renunciation. This would be a recurring theme at Varanasi.
Before heading back to town we also poked around a brand new, supergigantic Buddha statue erected by the Thai government, which seems to be under the mistaken impression that Sarnath is suffering from a shortage of things to circumambulate. It looked like this:
Next came the undisputed highlight of the Varanasi trip: a rickshaw ride through the old town to the riverfront to watch the ceremonial tucking-in of the Ganges for the night. Bicycle rickshaws are somewhat dangerous and feel vaguely exploitative, but they do have certain distinct advantages over mere walking: they're faster; they protect your shoes from the ubiquitous cow dung; they insulate you from hawkers; and they immerse you in the insane hurly-burly of the streets in a way that no motorized vehicle can. This is what we looked like in our rickshaws:
The ride to the river was one of the most exhilarating and bewildering experiences I've ever had. It was a raging torrent of sound and color. Rickshaws and bikes and pedestrians and scooters swirled around each other in all directions, lights flashing and horns blaring, while cows lounged stupidly in the middle of the road, serene in their sacred bubbles. We lurched over potholes and through filthy puddles, past shops and roadside food stalls of every description. Crones with golden nose rings sat cross-legged on blankets with vegetables splayed before them like offerings to the gods. Teenagers with new mustaches and stylish jeans stared at us as they growled by on their motorbikes. The smells were indescribable.
Finally we reached the ghat and wormed our way through the crowd to a couple of boats moored to the shore. Had the river been in a better mood we would have gone out on the boats and viewed the city's famous riverscape from a nice panoramic distance, but the monsoons had made it swollen and violent, so we simply bobbed along on the shore. It was like this:
We lit candles in little floating vessels and launched them onto the river with a wish. We swatted at hawkers and listened in mute incomprehension to the chanting coming from the shore. I lay back on my patch of boat and watched the clouds part to reveal a single star, and then I sat up and saw seven priests rhythmically fanning incense with elaborate featherdusters. Then it rained, briefly but heavily, so I huddled up with two of my companions and formed an umbrella canopy that kept us mostly dry while the others scrambled to put up a tarp and huddle under it. It was perfect.
Day 15: Sunday, July 14
We celebrated Bastille Day with an early morning trip to the same ghat as the night before to watch people taking their morning bath in the ganges. I was too beset by hawkers to really appreciate what was happening, but some members of our group endeavored to join the bathers, wading a little into the river or splashing its waters on themselves. As of this writing nobody seems to have suffered any serious medical consequences from this.
Then we followed our slick and untruthful guide through the narrow streets of the old town, accompanied, for the entire journey, by teenagers trying to sell us things. I was lucky (or callous) enough not to attract much personalized attention, but some members of our group had a pretty hard time of it. I would look over at Keith, say, and actually fail to see him through the layers of hawkers who had attached themselves like leeches. Then there was the cow dung simmering away and swarming with flies in the soupy morning heat, creating a strong disincentive to lift one's eyes from the ground and observe the ancient city we were passing through. When we stopped at a platform overlooking the riverside cremation facilities (if you die in Varanasi you gain release from the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation, so there's always a steady supply of corpses for the wood-fired stoves) a number of "employees" of the cremation facilities came along to helpfully explain what was happening. When we, choking on corpse smoke, turned to leave, they demanded "donations," which a few of us were trusting enough to provide them. Only once we returned to the bus did our silver-tongued guide tell us that the authentic cremation people never demand donations; we'd been rooked.
The hot, odiferous, hawker-infested morning nearly undid the magic of the previous night, but not quite. Here's a what it looked like, complete with cows, hawkers, and a genius trying to ride his motorcycle through it all.
After the old town we made two more stops: one at a 1930s Hindu temple with a gigantic relief map of India on the floor, and the other at Sanskrit University to examine an ancient Ashoka pillar and marvel at the neo-Gothic, British-built, not-even-remotely-Indian-looking architecture of the main building. Then it was back to the silent, cavernous airport and the flight back to dear dirty Delhi, which, after Varanasi, never looked so serene and inviting.
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