They
often harass tourists in the name of an inefficient security system. Having
passengers X-ray their own luggage and then carry it through non-secure
areas to where it gets checked in is an open invitation to terrorism. Yet
in the name of security they put American passengers through excessive
searches and restrictions (like batteries should not be in the passenger
cabin on the plane). This makes it hard on the tourist and makes it hard on
the people checking the tourist, while leaving open obvious security gaps.
The object may be not so much security but of employment. Eventually we got
on the bus to the plane. Once again, somebody saw we had the new edition of
the Lonely Planet guide for India. It was a couple traveling together, Max
from England (though he was of Indian descent) and Staci from Colorado.
On the plane they gave us snacks--cookies and mango juice. It took
about an hour to get to Varanasi (which used to be called Benares). We
suggested to Max and Staci that they could join us going to the Hotel de
Paris, which sounded good from the description in the Lonely Planet guide.
They agreed. Mark had to pick up his suitcase which he'd been forced to
check.
Mark describes the situation by saying, Now India tried for ninety-one
years to make life unpleasant for the British. They did and the British
left, but the Indians still had the talent. These days it is used against
tourists. The weapon is not even non-violence. It is service or the
desperation to be of service. It is what we call in America super-high-
pressure salesmanship. The pressure of their salesmanship is measured in
tons per square inch. They swarm the tourist, trying to port his bags, give
him taxi rides, or just plain beg. Telling them 'no' is paying attention to
them and paying attention to them is a big mistake. They will swarm you and
they will take you down and there will be nothing left but polished bone.
The book of useful phrases in Hindi does not list 'no' since 'no' (or 'nay'
in Hindi) is more dangerous than just ignoring them. It is best to pretend
to speak only Serbo-Croatian. If you can pull it off, you might get some of
them to back off. But as soon as you speak one word of English, it is like
cutting your hand while swimming with piranhas.
Of course, he says he may be over-stating the problem. Our
understanding is that when we get to Agra that's when he will want the
strong language. Suffice it for now to say that Mark got his bag. We found
Max and Staci, who had gone upstairs to the restaurant for a cold drink. We
called the hotel and we got a taxi. And every step was like swimming
upstream in a river of hot oatmeal. We must have gone about half a mile
with one driver hanging onto the hood of our taxi trying to convince us what
a horrible mistake we were making by not taking his taxi. The taxi fare was
Rs40 (US$1.29). (Actually don't believe anything from the hot oatmeal on.)
(Except for the fare. It really was Rs40.)
Regarding the fare, the pre-paid taxi here wanted Rs240 and came down
to Rs200. That seemed way out of line with the Rs40 the drivers were
shouting, but Max said to make sure to verify the hotel price by phone
first, otherwise we might end up with a higher rate so that the driver could
get his commission. When we called, we found out that air-cooled rooms
were Rs625 for a double, even higher than the latest Lonely Planet figure
(Rs575). Pulling out, Evelyn kept looking back to make sure our luggage
didn't get unloaded from the taxi trunk after we had gotten in. Part of the
paranoia was because after we had all gotten in, a sixth person got in and
spent the time it took to get to the hotel trying to sell us tours of the
city.
We got to the hotel and saw the rooms, but they would not be ready for
another twenty minutes, so we sat in the bar and talked to Max and Staci.
We should tell you that the hotel is owned by a wonderful elderly Indian
with a robust manner and an obvious love of both life and his profession.
He socializes with all the guests. When our rooms weren't ready he got us
free lime crushes, then went to talk to other guests (after finding out
about us). Mark says, That's what I want to do when I grow up. The man
is a real marvel.
So we talked with Max and Staci a while. She is a lawyer, and he may
have been also. They met at King's College in England. We suggested they
join us in going to see the ghats in the afternoon as it seemed late for a
trip to Sarnath. (We had planned on doing this, but there was no ITDC tour
there on Sundays, and even if there was it was too late for it. We planned
on seeing the ghats in the morning, but getting up for dawn was starting to
seem less and less appealing. We figured we could either do it again in the
morning or do something else--like sleep until a decent hour.) They agreed,
but first we all collapsed for a while, exhausted from battling hordes of
taxi drivers in the heat.
After about an hour's rest, we hired a taxi to the city for Rs135 and a
guide to the ghats. The streets were chaos, with people and cattle in the
streets, ramshackle buildings on the sides with bright and dramatic movie
posters. The current hit film in India is GUNAAH. You cannot tell much
from the poster, but it shows a man with a gun. That seems to be a formula
for success with audiences just about everywhere.
Anyone who claims that the worst city in which to drive in the world is
Rome or Paris has clearly never driven in Varanasi. Varanasi has everything
Delhi has on the roads--plus pigs, goats, and dogs. So, to avoid over-
crowding, they've eliminated other, less necessary items--like street signs.
There are occasionally directional signs at major intersections, but we
haven't seen anything resembling a street sign, even in Sanskrit.
Our driver parked a couple of blocks away from the Dasaswadedh Ghat
because the area near it was being used for a Sunday market. A guide
suddenly appeared who said he would be taking us around while the driver
waited and would bring us back to the taxi afterward. How much? What you
want. If you're happy, I'm happy. We had a feeling someone might end up
unhappy, but decided to wait and see.
The ghats are really just stone steps down to the water, which seems
like an odd thing to build a culture around, but they have become an
integral part of the locals' lives--and the lives of the millions of
pilgrims who come to bathe there--since they are steps down to the sacred
Ganges. People wash in the Ganges and they bury their dead (or rather their
ashes) in the Ganges. There are bathing ghats and dhobi ghats, dhobi
being the term for laundry. At the dhobi ghats, laundrymen pound the wash
on the rocks and dry it on the back. Given the look of the water, it's not
clear how this can make the laundry clean. The water is very brown and
supposedly very polluted, though a system of pipes now carries the city's
waste water, etc., to an outlet somewhere downstream.
We arranged for a boat to take us up and down. They wanted Rs400; Mark
offered Rs200. They didn't want to accept that. Max haggled in Hindi,
telling them we weren't going to pay tourist prices, and bargained them down
to Rs200. (It's amazing how the Rs135 for the city tour grows.)
We climbed into the boat--which seemed ready to capsize with every
movement--and got out on the water and traveled up the river. There were
what once were fine houses facing the Ganges, but now it seemed like there
poor families were living in them. Mark thinks it might be a mistake to
call these people the poor. Poor they are by our standards and many of the
people seem to be living in houses that are ramshackle, but they do have
houses and food and do not seem to be too disease-ridden. Mark says he
wouldn't know if they would label themselves as the poor. And there are a
lot poorer people around.
Though most of the pilgrims come at dawn, there were still many bathers
at this hour. These were mostly holy men, while the morning crowd would
include a greater diversity of people. Also along the river were many
temples--it used to be said that this city had a thousand temples, but we
doubt anyone counted them, then or now.
In typical Luck of Leeper fashion, as soon as we got out on the water
the sky started to cloud up as if it was really going to let go. Now, part
of the reason for choosing October is that India does not get rain in
October. On the other hand, we went to Spain in a usually dry month and got
constant rain and their worst flooding in fifty years. Regular readers of
our logs will recognize the recurring Luck of Leeper theme. Particularly
when we are in small boats, be they in Phuket or on the Amazon or in the
fjords of Norway. We get rained on. Hard. So here we are on a small boat
on the Ganges in the dry season and drops of rain were falling on us.
We were dropped off at the burning ghat, Manikarnika. It is here
that the dead are burned on funeral pyres, one after another. It is a
constant sequence all day long. In fact, there were three going on when we
arrived. It takes a lot of wood to cremate a body; in fact, one of the main
problems caused by the recent earthquake was that there was not enough wood
to cremate all the (Hindu) dead individually and they were forced to perform
mass cremations. (Similarly the Muslims were forced by circumstances to
allow mass burials instead of individual graves.) The wood used here is all
brought from the north; Evelyn wonders if the quantity is sufficient to be
causing deforestation in some areas.
We left the boat here at Manikarnika and entered a scene that could
have been orchestrated by Cecil B. DeMille. It was just now that the wind
blew up. The sky was black and we were shrouded in smoke from the pyres and
dust. Above, the sky thundered angrily. We climbed the stairs to look down
on the pyres from about thirty feet above them. They were towards the end
of these cremations, Evelyn thinks, as she couldn't see anything like a body
remaining. But we could feel the extreme heat of the fire rising up and the
air was full or smoke, dust, and cinders.
Evelyn says in her log, I was reminded of two stories at this point (I
often find literary connections to our travels). The first I had been
thinking about before we left home: Lawrence Watt-Evans's 'Why I Left
Harry's All-Night Hamburgers.' It is basically about why people travel and
how they often don't see the wondrous close to them because they're looking
too far away. In it, a young man is offered a chance to go away on
something like a spaceship, but he can never return to Earth. Someone else
says to him, 'You want to see wonders and marvels, huh? ... You want to see
buildings a hundred stories high? Cities of strange temples? Oceans
thousands of miles wide? Mountains miles high? Prairies, and cities, and
strange animals and stranger people? ... But kid, you can see those
buildings a thousand feet high in New York, or in Chicago. You've got
oceans here on your own world as good as you'll find anywhere. You've got
the mountains, and the sea, and the prairies, and all the rest of it. ...
You want to see spaceships? You go to Florida and watch a shuttle launch.
Man, that's a spaceship. It may not go to other worlds, but that *is* a
spaceship. You want strange animals? You go to Australia or Brazil. You
want strange people? Go to New York or Los Angeles, or almost anywhere.
You want a city carved out of a mountaintop? It's called Machu Picchu, in
Peru, I think. You want ancient, mysterious ruins? They're all over Greece
and Italy and North Africa. Strange temples? Visit India: there are
supposed to be over a thousand temples in Benares alone. See Angkor Wat, or
the pyramids--not just the Egyptian ones, but the Mayan ones, too. And the
great thing about all those places, kid, is that afterwards, if you want to,
you can come home. You don't *have* to, but you *can*. Who knows? You
might get homesick some day. Most people do. *I* did. |
