Keradeswar Guest House Varanasi

... I will never forget. Their are certain people who are not cremated but instead thrown directly into the Ganges because they are considered pure: children, pregnant women, sadhus, lepers and cows. The reason why the cremation ritual doesn't seem to have the same forlorn effect as it would on any Westerner is that Indians seem to view death as another part of life. Their loves ones are reincarnated and to be cremated on the Ganges ...

... full of touts. We had to hang around until the last overnight bus to Varanasi so we escaped the mayhem of the main strip and went to a restaurant lonely planet recommended as the only decent place you could go, the place was derelict so we just sat outside for about 3 hours playing cards and chatting. After hundreds of people tried to sell us rip off bus tickets we got on a public bus to Varanasi which cost 175 rupees (just over 2 pound) for a 10 hour trip. We got the ...

... tier groups across form each other. Therefore, there is a cluster of 8 beds, six on one side of the aisle and two on the other. There are at least 8 or nine clusters on each coach. There are no walls or doors and only sometimes have curtains involved. Just two sheets, a pillow and a heavy wool blanket. Voila!, your sleeper car. Barb and I lucked out, a bit by getting the two lower bunks below the three tier. We had two people on the beds above us and our bags ...

... pay 10) & then queue for ages, but Broc spotted a tout that would bring us a shortcut for 100rup, so we hit off with him! The shortcut ended up being a different entrance with less of a queue!! Eventually we got in & it was class! its just like you see in the pictures, but much better! you know when someone tells a joke & its **** cos you have to be there, well its something like that! the story behind it is really cool (ye can research that yourselves ...

... towers around it. The fact that makes it cool is that they are leaning outwards but you can only see it from close up. They built it like this because if in any unlikely event they fell they wouldn’t fall on the bodies of the old and crinkly peoples in the taj Mahal!!! Which is Emperor Shah Jahan. He built this for his loving wife which I think by now would now be 459 years! Hahaha! He built this for her because in those days the king did ...

... had magically appeared.<br><br>We did the afternoon walk down to the burning ghats but didn't linger too long because there was a darker vibe down there with less friendly people, a few shady characters hassling us and numerous hash pushers who wouldn't take no for an answer. The word HASH was being grumbled to us on every corner and we always had a couple of leech blokes hanging off us asking us if we wanted smoke. Even when we told them that we didn't smoke they would ...

... geckos that eat any bugs that are brave enough to come inside. There's a strange mix of travelling characters in Varanasi during tourism off season including some Europeans on heroin holidays who forgot to leave when it started getting hot, spiritual types, solar eclipse observers, lots of much loved quirky Japanese and Koreans, hippies,seekers, rooftop yoga nazis and other random folk like ourselves (category unspecified) who are crazy enough to travel in the heat ...

... cycle sometimes this is simply not possible. See not all people can make it-although quite a few do and i saw one body strapped to a roof rack. These deceased are cremated closer to home and the family brings some ashes and scatter these in the river. This would be the peeps in the poorer villages and those that lived to far away for it to be practical. <br><br>The lack of visible burning bodies is also due to the presence of a furnace, where you ...

... There is so much to see along the banks of the Ganges... Sadus begging for money, children playing cricket, funeral processions leading to funeral fires, water buffalo wallowing in the mud...Hindu pilgrims getting their heads shaved, holy men performing Puja, pilgrims bathing, men offering boat rides or hash every 30 seconds...It's life on the Ganges and no matter how gritty or annoying I found it, I could not have been more pleased. <br>

... quite happy<br>to just wander up and down the ghats (steps down to the river) and<br>watch the people bathing, swimming, praying etc. <br> <br>I took the 5am boat trip down the river (for sunrise) which was an<br>amazing experience. For just over a pound, you get an hour and a half<br>floating up and down the Ganges, whilst the pilgrims perform their<br>morning ritual bathing in the river. It was really interesting to<br>watch. We also went past the burning ghats, where bodies are ...