I had a great idea today as I walked along the river. I put my headphones on and placed the cord in my pocket and then simply avoided making eye contact with touts and pretended I didn't hear them. It worked beautifully! I also took the opportunity to meditate on hearing and specifically on tuning into an ever present background noise that sound...

The 'erotic temples' of Khajuraho are quite an eye opener. I was quite shocked by some of the daring sculptures but very amused by our guide's rather blunt descriptions ("left hand side, lady make sex with dog" etc.). The hotel was particularly nice here and even had a swimming pool. This proved to be a bitter disappointment, however, and we dec...

Temples, palaces and terraces were built on the riverbanks of the Ganges in Varanasi. The ghats are a series of steps leading down to the river from each structure. Each of the 100 ghats is marked by a Shiva lingam. Some have crumbled over the years yet many are still used. Thousands come everyday to take their ritual bath. The men, strip down t...

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 Gha...

In the words of Peter Mathiessen, author of "The Snow Leopard": "Brown eyes observe us as we pass. Confronted with the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details: a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog eating withered grass, an ancient woman lifting he...

Well, it's my birthday & I'm in Varanasi. The journey down here was hellish though!! I crossed the border into India & everything was going fine.......but then I got a bus to Gharakpur at around 19.00 (a cesspool in the middle of nowhere!!) so I could then get a train down to Varanasi. All the trains were booked out solidly......even bei...

I got an overnight train from Agra to Varanasi, it left at 11.20pm and arrived at 7.30am. As I waited on the platform at Varanasi there was the now obligatory power cut which lasted about 10 minutes, during this time it was pitch black and apart from a few people with torches I could not see a thing. When the power returned I could see dozens of...

After a morning visit to a local temple with a huge lingum and more Kashmiri tea with our hotel shopkeeper, he was kind enough to drive Justine and me to the little airport. I had a little bit of a run in with the Jet Airways staff who had apparently given me a discount that they shouldn't have. Despite some emotional blackmail, I held my ground...

This morning we decided to spend some time in the Ghat area of Varanasi, which is the dock area along the holy Ganges River, where people bathe, wash their clothes and carry out cremations. Each Ghat has some sort of special function or meaning. The Ganges itself is seriously polluted. To quote Lonely Planet: "The Ganges River is so heavily poll...

Welcome to India... the Rickshaw driver in Varenasi was something else again. I wasn't sure if I was ready for India again. He just wouldn't take us to the main ghat, but only to his friends guesthouses. Eventually we got to the Vishnu Rest House and it is wonderful. The atmosphere of the ghats is very relaxing and the food is excellent. It was ...