Hotel Haifa & Restaurant Varanasi

Hello everybody I on my way to Delhi in 30 minutes. Hopefully this computer will hold for this message. As before I wrote half of the message and a power shortage in the middle killed it all. Varanasi is very interesting. Probably the 2 days that I'm here have been enough to see the basic. Not clear I needed more. The city is amazing with 80 Ghats along a 7 km shore. The Ghat (piers) typically belong to a temple or so. They claim this is one of the oldest cities on earth. The Ghats are high a...

So I'm back in Delhi. Everything working as planned. This morning I went to the train station to see if I could buy a return ticket. The bus is 5 hours, versus 2 for the express train and 3 for the slower one. Fortunately I could find a 2nd class ticket. Only thing available. I'll be with all the Indus, will probably be an experience. Nothing else was available. One third the price of the one I'm going, 91 rupees, 9 shequels. Then I had a nice breakfast on the streets. One Chai, two bananas, ...

So today I'm flying in the afternoon back home. Getting in Ben Gurion at 4:00 AM in the morning. Will take the train home. I still have a few hours left, but no mood to do much. The ending of the trip blues are starting to hit, but is nice going back home. Yesterday I woke very early, about 5:00 AM to catch my train to Agra. The train was at 6:15. The train station is walking distance from Parar Ganj, main bazaar area where I'm staying. This is the Mecca for the back-packers. Everybody stays ...

We set off from Lumbini at 5am for the long drive to Varanasi. after 40 mins we reached the border of nepal and india and it was the funniest thing, there is basically just an archway where you leave nepal, and 100m away is another archway and you are in india, in between is the nepal immigration where you fill out a departure form, and they just look at your visa on the india side and away you go., we got in new cars, very spacious, for the long drive ahead. after a few hours we stopped for ...

I'm currently sitting in Varansi, the holiest city in India, non-the-less. This place is the home of the famous "Ghats". Ghats are river side terraces of the Ganges where worshippers come down to the Ganges to wash there sins away..... as well as wash, wash their clothes, urinate, dodge the water buffaloes / goats / dogs / monkeys and burn bodies. The water is a pretty putrid colour and smells how it looks, so its a bit of a shock to see the locals washing their teeth with their finger and th...

Varanasi is apparently one of the oldest cities in the world and the most important for Hindus in India as it lies on the Ganges (the holy river) and has about 80 ghats, some of which are used for the ceremonial cremation of the dead. They are also useful as a reference point if you get lost in the sprawling mud streets. After we had dropped the bags at the hotel we had an orientation of the city, starting at the Ghat we were closest too, Assi Ghat, then moving on to one of the two crematory ...

We arrived in Varanasi at 10am on Monday morning. We spent most of the day making up for our lack of sleep on the train. We went out on a boat on the Ganges at dusk. It was an unforgettable experience. We saw burning bodies, weddings, Hindus singing and chanting and we lit candles and put them into the river for luck. We spent around an hour and a half on the boat. It was worth coming to Varanasi to do that alone. It was just as well because we didn't have time to see anything else because we...

The boats pulled up at one of the many Ghats. Ghats are wide sections of steps, like in a football stadium, that lead into the Ganges so people can bathe. It was a five minute walk to the hotel where we had a glimpse of heaven in the simplicity of a shower and a few hours relaxing in our room under a fan. Although there was no air conditioning, the hotel was much nicer than the hostels that we were used to staying in by ourselves. At 4:30pm Chandra arranged cyclos to the central bazaar - ther...

September 5, 2007 Varanasi, India We arrived in Varanasi about 5 AM without much sleep so it has been 24 hours of hard traveling. We are staying at the Hotel Haifa for 1100R per night with A/C and bathroom. The Hotel Haifa, for being within meters of the Assi Ghat on the Ganges, is not too bad of a place in itself; it's just everything around it. Everything in India, so far, smells of feces and dried urine and even though the hotel management has men on every floor on their hands and knees sc...