I'm in Varanasi, one of the holiest places in India, and a location most Indians will try to visit at least once in their lifetime. I had a good journey across here from Khajuraho which has somewhat restored my buoyancy and mood. My bus left on time (3pm) and during the journey the conductor kindly moved me to a seat with good leg room just to be nice. It also rained about four hours in which broke the heat and made things more bearable, and helped me to fall asleep periodically on the shoulder of a strapping Spanish backpacker. On arrival (at 5.30am) a cycle rickshaw driver offered me a competitive price to my hotel and took me straight there with no messing about. In recognition I gave him a hefty tip and was genuinely appreciative. There are, it seems, some reasonable people around after all. I hope he had a nice day today. The hotel I checked into, the Alka Hotel, is nice. I've spent most of the day asleep in it getting over last night. The hotel is located in one of the old alleyways of the old city and looks out over a broad stretch of the Ganges. The river below is full much of the time with the strange mixture of Indian bathers frolicking with rubber rings (bathing in the Ganges is a great honour) amongst the ashes of freshly cremated corpses (being cremated in the Ganges is an even greater honour).
I didn't mention in my last blog that I made a friend in Khajuraho called Meike (she is German and has been working in Nepal but has taken some time off to visit India). We kept each other company for a few days and she also gave me a short novel called Are you experienced? by a guy called William Sutcliffe which has utterly consumed me. It's about 'Dave' who goes travelling in India (on much the same route as me and even in some of the same hotels) on his gap year in pursuit of a girl. He soon finds he can't stand her, backpackers, or India, and sets his powers of sarcasm to work in describing and deconstructing it all. It's very, very funny. There are descriptions of backpacker hostels as prison cells, being so hot you feel like you are cooking slowly from the inside, chapters with titles like 'what do backpackers do all day?' and effective character assassinations of all the middle class young people who came out here to find 'the real India' and act all new age, plus a good knocking of all the tourist operators. Dave also struggles to cope with India itself and is not backward in coming forward on the subject: 'I had heard the old cliché about how when you arrive in India it's like stepping into an oven. But this hadn't prepared me for the fact, that when you arrive in India, it is like stepping into an oven.' Meike's gone back to Nepal now, but it was an enjoyable interlude and she was good company.
I'm going to chill and wander in Varanasi for a couple of days now (tomorrow I'm going to visit an Indian university!) and from here I will carry on to Bodhgaya, which is where the tree is that Buddha sat under to achieve enlightenment and nirvana. It's the most sacred site in the world for Buddhists. The hotel are booking me a train ticket onwards so I don't have to go down to the station and go through all the hassle of trying to queue up in a country where queuing roughly equates to a group of people charging at ticket booths in the manner of a cattle stampede. Reminds me of another quote from Are you experienced? in which Dave is questioned by a grumpy Indian journalist on what he does whilst backpacking: 'so basically once you arrive somewhere your main interest and priority is booking tickets to leave to the next place?' Dave: 'yeah.'