The first thing we did was go to Benares Hindu University, famous for having a nice campus, and we went to the art museum there. Then we came back to the city and walked along the river from Assi Ghat all the way to our hotel. We did a little more walking along the river but it started to rain really hard in the evening and that put a damper on our plans. The next morning we got up early for a dawn boat tour of the Ghats, before heading out of town to Kolkata.
Bathing in the Ganges
One of the major pilgrim activities in Varanasi is bathing in the Ganges. More symbolic than anything, as the people are probably dirtier after the bath. At the "burning" ghat, where they cremate people, we learned that all cremated bodies are dumped into the river. Also, people who's souls don't need to be cleansed in holy fire, such as a pregnant woman, are just dumped whole into the river (weighted down of course). It used to be that poor people couldn't afford enough wood to burn their loved one's body completely, and there would be stray body parts floating about in the river, but tourists complained and they've since established a system of charity to assist in the cremation process. On top of the dead people, there's also plenty of dead animals and live animals and probably countless tons of garbage and waste. In addition to bathing in the water, hotels wash laundry in it, and some people actually drink it. Suffice to say, if one of us drank the water we'd probably die within minutes.
Ganges at Dawn
The dawn boat tour was cool, and it's about the only way to get a good look at the very interesting waterfront in Varanasi. The city is basically really long and skinny along the one side of the river, so if you want to see it you have to get out on the water. We hired a boat from in front of our hotel, we negotiated the guy down to 150 rupees for an hour boat ride, which is ridiculously cheap, and after we realized how hard it was paddling the boat against the current, we gave him a bit extra.
One of the Ghats
You can see the people dressed in orange who came to Varanasi to experience the holy water of the Ganges. It was an incredibly colorful and interesting place. The narrow streets were packed with groups of people all wearing only bright orange, walking to or from the river, among the multitudes of other pedestrians.
Market
I think this was a market area, super crowded with people, and lots of boats trying to offer their tour services.
Bird
Very, very colorful. After the boat tour, it was off to the airport and then to Kolkata. The hotel we stayed at in Kolkata was really cool, it had a colonial style and it was pretty isolated from the city around it which seemed to be a reasonably good thing at least as far as the nighttime goes. Sadly, we were unable to enjoy it much, as Paula and Hilary both started to feel the first symptoms of illness here. We ended up just chilling in the hotel and then we left in the morning to catch our flight to Bagdogra, and from there we'd take a long car ride up to Darjeeling.
The drive out of Kolkata was pretty long and I took a lot of pictures of the traffic around us, super colorful buses, trucks, taxis, etc. As you can see, there's a lot of artistic customization of vehicles. Even though we did a lot of driving, there was always enough to see and you didn't feel like you were losing time being stuck in a car.
Pilot
The buses all had a little "Pilot" decoration on the driver's door, this one was pretty simple and cool.
From Kolkata we flew off to Bagdogra to grab a jeep up to Darjeeling, one thing that's amazing is how flat most of India is, and then when you reach the Himalayas they just explode up out of the ground with little warning.
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