NOTHING, NOTHING can prepare you for Varanasi: streets with no pavements so you share the road with bicycles, rickshaws, cars, motorbikes, dogs, goats, cows of every shape and size. The air is filled with dust, car and cycle horns of every pitch and there were brass bands which played off key as if you needed more noise and chaos. Add to the mix temperatures in the mid-thirties and that is this 'holy' city for pilgrims and priests and tourists. The Ganges at dawn (6am) was lapping our boat and launching a small candle onto the water seemed appropriate if a little kitch. We had to buy it as the boy selling them was in a homemade boat made of a few polystyrene boxes somehow stuck together. How enterprising is that?
Sunrise is so peaceful -The sound of oars and the clothes being beaten clean(!) on the shore
We went down to the main ghat for the sunset 'arti' (Hindu prayers) along with thousands of others. Somehow, the scene was best described as a 'spectacle'; a 'light and sound' show. A few Sanskrit prayers would have sufficed. This Varanasi, however...
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