Joachim's Travel Blog
Saturday, November 29, 2003
This morning I am in Bodh Gaya. This is where the Buddha achieved enlightenment and, accordingly, it's a big Buddhist hot spot. Right now there are a lot of Tibetans here - they come down from northern India when it gets cold. I've had some tasty Tibetan food.
Yesterday I left Varanasi. I think I had enough time there, although I felt like staying another few days wouldn't have been a problem either. It's a peaceful place - as long as you stay by the river. But the dirt and poverty get old fast. Bodh Gaya has a lot less of both, and I'm hoping things continue to improve as I move east. Tomorrow night I'll be back on another train, headed for Bubaneshwar, capitol of the state of Orissa. I may meet Verena there or maybe I'll just start touring the countryside. Exciting times lie ahead!
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Today is my last day in Varanasi, I just realized. I thought I'd throw a few comments about my plans, such as they are, into the blog in case I don't get a chance to update it for a while.
Tomorrow morning my friend Andrew and I ship out for Bodh Gaya, which is where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. It's apparently some kind of Buddhist amusement park now, full of temples from every Buddhist country. Kinda like Sarnath, I guess, but on a grander scale. We're going to spend the weekend there and on Tuesday afternoon, Andy's got a train reservation to come back to Varanasi. I don't have an outgoing ticket yet but I'm thinking I will probably head east to Calcutta. It seems increasingly unlikely that I will see my friend Verena here - communication is just too difficult for us to coordinate a meeting (especially when you need to book a train ticket a few days in advance because all the trains are full). So I think Calcutta should be easy to get to without any advanced planning, and from there I should be able to travel anywhere in India pretty quickly. In fact, I guess I could even fly to Dehli again and head to Rajasthan from there. Either way, I think that may be my next stop. Rajasthan - Jaipur and Udaipur, which are supposed to be beautiful, and Jaisalmeer, by the Great Thar desert.
Wednesday was Id (I think that's how you spell it in English, though it's pronounced with a long 'eeee'). This is the celebration of the end of the month of Ramadan. The student I'd met on Tuesday, Tanweer, had invited me to hang out with him and celebrate. I guess when you're a muslim at Benares Hindu University, there aren't that many people throwing Id parties. Well we didn't exactly have a party but we ate a little something and eventually made it back to my ghat where we hung out and talked. He's a really nice guy and I found it very interesting to get insight into the life of a person from this country.
Also Wednesday I finally managed to make it into the "fixed price" shop down the street from my hotel. That's where I found out just how enormously I'd been ripped off when I bought this shirt and pants from this guy I'd met. I guess I had hoped that since I met him through somebody (and a foreigner at that) that I would be getting a halfway reasonable deal, but now I understand that's silly. People have to make a living and here, you do it by bilking tourists. Anyway in the end I wasted something like $30, which is basically nothing. But it turns out a silk shirt should cost something like Rs 100, which means a cotton shirt should never cost Rs 400. But I have one of each now, so that's cool. And I know that silk goes for Rs 150 per meter. I think that's a pretty damned good price. If I were going to be here longer, I would have some clothes made.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Frankly I would have forgotten all about it but all the Americans were really excited. I guess they've been here longer than I have and they miss home more. I ended up having not one but actually two Thanksgiving dinners! The first one was given by a local businessman and mostly attended by the same kind of people. His house is on top of one of the ghats and there is a spectactular view from the roof of the river and the city curving away in both directions. Did I ever mention these steps into the river are very steep? It means you get a great view from the top.
Andrew knew some guy who knew this guy giving the party, so we went. It was nice, and I got to talk to some water purification engineers who are down here trying to build a native filtration system, as well as some missionaries. I don't like missionaries much but I guess they seemed pleasant enough.
The second party was thrown by students in the Wisconsin Program, which is a Hindi program that brings students to Varanasi for immersive language study. Again, Andrew knew some people and was invited and then co-invited me, but this time I was also semi-invited by my friend Darby who I just met hanging around on the ghats. She's in the program. Although the food was less authentic at this gathering, the people were closer to my own age and were more interesting to talk to.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Yesterday, Tuesday, I went to visit Ram Nagar fort and Benares Hindu University.
Ram Nagar is across the river and perhaps two kilometers south of Varanasi. It looks very close, and from here it also looks very imposing. But nothing is really close to anything else here since the roads are all designed for local travel only. Still the trip there was relatively short and I didn't have many problems.
I took a cycle-rickshaw from my hotel to the Sam Nagar ghat, which is not so much a ghat but more of a road that leads down into the water. There I crossed the pontoon bridge that leads to the town and fort of Ram Nagar. Now there was some excitement! The river is quite wide and so the bridge was long. It's supported by enormous pontoons, each one about the size of a van - maybe a little longer actually. They come in pairs, I guess (there were some broken or maybe unused ones by the side of the river), connected by I-beams. I couldn't see how the pontoons were connected to each other. Anyway, on top of the I-beams, crossing them and therefore perpendicular to the direction of travel, were the wooden beams that made up the surface of the bridge. These appeared to be railroad ties. On top of those were metal planks to allow motorcycles and scooters to cross easily, although there were a lot of gaps between them. The real problem was the condition of the railroad ties. Some were in very good condition and appeared new. Others appeared old but still solid. But some were weathered or rotted away to such an extent that the river was clearly visible through them. Of course you had to walk on these much of the time, or risk getting run over by a motorcycle, but this only added to the fun.
Ram Nagar was and apparently remains the home of the Maharaja of Varanasi. He's new, apparently - the old man died a couple of years back and the new one is a playboy who spends all his time in Switzerland. Or so I'm told, but to tell the truth his house looked a little run down and he still sends his kid to school in an Ambassador (classic local Indian automobile, in this case with a bad starter). Maybe he just wants to blend in. Anyway we toured his museum which had a few cases full of rotting textiles (too bad, too - it looked like it had been exquisite stuff) and lots and lots of weapons. Mostly guns. Also a lot of pictures of the Maharaja with King Leopold and other European nobility. The mood was improved by a Tibetan monk from Bhutan who was touring the place at the same time I was.
I headed back over the bridge and caught a rickshaw on the other side of the river to Benares Hindu University. I'd been told to check out the temple there, and the campus, which is supposedly very nice. And it was pretty nice, actually. Shady (a little overgrown, kind of like LA looks, with lots of creepers and shrubs), quiet and full of students. College is nice. The temple was cool and when I was done looking at it I became engaged in a conversation with a student. Eventually he introduced me to a friend and we went back to hang out at his dorm where we talked for a couple of hours. It was fun.
I just fixed the time zone in my Blogger.com settings so hopefully the dates will start to make some sense here. It is Wednesday morning here in sunny, though hazy Varanasi. As I do every morning I took a little "jam tost" on the roof with some tea. It's very nice to sit up there and take in the sounds of the city in the morning. Varanasi is at its best early in the day, I think. There's a lot of noise just around sunrise - lots of bells, drums, singing and chanting. It's very rhythmic. I don't really know the details of who's making the noise but there are many temples along the ghats so my guess is that priests come out and perform ceremonies along the river. I saw some monks doing this when I took a sunrise boat trip earlier in the week.
What's that? Yes I saw a dead body in the water too.
So in the morning from your bed you hear this distant music and it's very nice to wake to. There's usually also the not-quite-as-distant sound of tourists puking but like so many things here, you get used to it and it doesn't bother you after a while. When you go up on the roof all you hear are the sounds of people working. For me this is really the nicest part of the day. I can look down and see women washing their clothes or throwing water out from the windows onto the grass. In the river the boatmen are slowly, slowly making their way down the river (when travelling upstream they seem completely motionless). Roosters crow occasionally and the ubiquitous cows and dogs lazily lie about or stand in the middle of the road. There isn't much automobile traffic in the morning.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
I realized this morning that I should describe this place a little. That may not be possible, but I can at least try. I don't know when I'll be able to get my next batch of pictures online so I'll just try to make do with words.
This morning I had breakfast on the roof of my hotel. Like most riverside buildings here, the hotel building is a four story structure. There are some shops on the ground level, maybe a private dwelling on the next floor, and then the hotel on the top two floors. Apparently the river, currently about another ten or twelve feet lower than that ground level, can flood up several meters during monsoon. The markers for the big flood of 1978 are pretty impressive to look at, as they tower 50 meters or so above the walking area of the ghats. I'll get to ghats in a minute.
Outside my hotel is a road. It's dirt of course. Only the main roads are paved here, but they aren't highways, they're just very busy urban roads. So far I haven't seen any non-urban places in India except from the train window. Hopefully I'll get there soon, though. Anyway, so it's a one lane dirt road which ends a short way north of my hotel. After that it's for pedestrians only all the way north along the river for five km or so to the last ghat.
There are some vendors with stands on the opposite side of the road, and then after that a couple of hovels surrounded by garbage. There are some very poor people living outside my window, and they actually live in garbage. I mean it looks like a garbage dump would look in the US, with plastic bags and bottles and goats and the whole deal. Like all the kids, the poor kids fly small diamond-shaped paper kites over the river.
They're building a temple just past the hovels. It's to Durga, I've heard. She's the "terrible" form of Shiva's wife, Parvati. I hope I didn't just get something wrong because I know many Indians and Sanskritologists will be double checking this blog! Anyway it's a little temple and the guys are up there laying bricks and plastering the walls all day. Apparently building something about twice the size of a garden shed takes about a year here in India. Finishing the big Ashram next door, which looks complete on the outside, will apparently take a couple years more.
Past the temple, there's perhaps fifty meters of open space. The river doesn't run right by the buildings here, since I'm just south of the southernmost ghat. The open space is mostly mud and cows. Or are they water buffalos? They look a little strange. Anyway after that are the big boats, turned up on their sides on crossed wooden poles for repair.
I live just to the south of Assi Ghat. A ghat is a set of steps leading down into the water. It's like a dock or something, but with steps going down. I guess they have stuff like this in Venice, maybe, but here it's basically steps everywhere for 5km from Assi to... drat, I forget what the northernmost ghat is but they go on for a while. You can walk along the river (since the water level is low) and, if you're so inclined, you can walk down the steps pretty much anywhere and have a nice bath.
Between the ghats there are no steps to walk down on but really it's more ghat than not (hm) so most places you can get to the water easily. Not that I ever would, of course - Ganga water is seriously nasty. You'd better be blessed by the gods before you go in!
When you wake up here often the first thing you notice is the smell. Usually smoke in the morning, since everyone has a wood fire lit. It gets pretty thick at times. When you walk down the street you'll encounter other smells, all the time. Maybe chai, maybe diesel, maybe urine, maybe food... you never really know what you're going to run into from one moment to the next. I don't think there's any good way to describe the smells here to people at home. I thought it would bother me that the people here smell bad (they do, and so do I now that I'm off deodorant for the duration of my trip) but it doesn't because you never smell them. The atmospheric aromas are always stronger.
I'm not staying very coherent but I might as well take this opportunity to describe the sounds too. India is a noisy place. On the streets (I try to avoid them) there are always a lot of people. Pick a busy time of day and it's a crush. And everyone is talking, shouting, chanting, honking, ringing. The noise level is constant but it's always broken up into millions of separate sounds. It's quite chaotic. On the ghats it's much quieter, especially because there's no auto traffic. There you hear mostly people talking and shouting, and the omnipresent beggars and vendors trying to sell you stuff. No matter where you go, as a white person you elicit a continuous stream of uncertain "hello? hello?"
"Hello? Hello?" Someday I may lose it and just punch some poor Hindu that comes up to me asking "Hello?" "Hello sir, you want boat? Hello sir, flower? Hello sir, you want toy? Hello sir, you need Hotel? Train? Rickshaw? Restaurant? Silk? Hashish? Anything you want I can get for you." Everyone here can get everything. Everyone here wants me to have everything. Ten o'clock at night, at night as black as coal, you're talking with your friend and walking along the ghat and some guy is going to call out from the darkness fifty feet away "...hello?"
I'll end with the tourists maybe. There are different kinds here and I'm not sure I completely understand all the types. Many near Assi are students. The students wear salwar-kameez (pants suit) and are mostly women (the men wear regular pants and a kurta, or loose shirt. They're young and they look idealistic. They are fascinated by everything Indian and I guess it makes sense why they're here. They're mostly learning Hindi. The tourists mostly live up by Dasashwamedh Ghat, which is the main ghat in the middle of town. They mostly look like hard core yoga people from the States, though I gather many of them are from Israel. They wear somewhat more outlandish clothing and they all have dreadlocks. Hey, I'm growing my hair out too, so how can I complain? I was really looking forward to chucking my khakis and plaid shirts when I got here but then I found out real Indians all wear khakis and plaid shirts exactly like mine. I must have intuition or something. I bought some Indian duds to try to blend in better with the tourists but they're still at the tailor's. We'll see how they fit tomorrow.
Yesterday I went to Sarnath. There was an autorickshaw strike so my local buddy Darby and I had to travel by regular cycle-rickshaw. This took some time, although it's not as much of a difference as you might expect. The 16km take about 45 minutes by autorickshaw and about an hour by cycle-rickshaw. I have taken many pictures of traffic here - basically unless you are a cow you get stuck in traffic just like everybody else. If you are a cow, I guess you don't move that fast anyway.
Sarnath is one of the more holy Buddhist sites. The Buddha preached his first sermon there. He "laid down the law" as they say. I have an image of the Buddha slamming Triple-H's head into the turnbuckle. I guess it's lucky for us he lived in his own time and not ours. Anyway we saw a bunch of buddhist temples - many different nations keep shrines there, including Tibet, Japan, China and Thailand. There were many stupas which I guess in this case were mostly just markers for sites of historic interest. These are just more or less conical markers. Some of them are very large, maybe the size of a public water tank in the US. Some of the ones in the shrines are small. I gather you're supposed to walk around them and think enlightened thoughts. You may be able to tell by reading this that I'm not much of a Buddhist.
The local Indian museum mostly was there to prove that although this city is only interesting as a Buddhist site, through arduous archaeology they were able to find a bunch of Hindu artifacts. This proves of course that Buddhism is nothing more than a minor offshoot of Hinduism.
