So, I'd just worked out that it was 9pm Friday night in England and 7am Saturday in Perth. I could be just getting up for a day of doing nothing in Perth, lying around on the beaches or wandering around the city. I could even be at home watching Friends. But instead I was trying to get comfortable on a 2.5 foot wide bed with a half inch mattress and not enough headroom to even lift myself up on my elbows. Oh, and I was trying not to kick Lisa in the head as we were sharing the bed top & tails fashion. It was all going so well up until then.....
We both decided we really like Varanasi, although Lisa was ill on Friday so I’d been doing stuff on my own. I got up at 6am and went down to the ghats to watch the sunrise over the Ganges, very peaceful and interesting watching everyone come down to bathe. Apparently washing in the river washes all your sins away, although you do end up with an interesting coating of effluent, chemicals and body parts from the burning ghat a few hundred meters up river.
Everything is done next to the river, people come down to be shaved, to have their hair cut and ears cleaned. All the people who have come to Varanasi to die stay around here, so sometimes being surrounded by begging lepers can get quite upsetting (although as the legs are quite often the first part to fall off at least they can't chase you down the road like the rickshaw drivers (sorry, that’s horrible I know!)) Actually the hassle factor wasn't really a problem, although every few seconds rickshaw drivers would shout at you most of them took the first 'no' for an answer and left us alone.
The most bizarre thing most people find about Varanasi are the burning ghats, right on the river were everyone can see it goes on 24 hours a day. Only certain people can be burn there, depending on what the circumstances of your death are. Some people are taken out into the center of the river and set adrift. They wrap the corpse up in white shrouds and use 250kgs of wood, lit from a flame that is claimed to have been burning for 5000 years. Whatever is left is swept in the river....
Later on in the morning I met Neil, a Buddhist postman from a island of the west coast of Scotland, and we got Lisa out of bed and went out to Sarnak, a very important Buddhist site where Buddha gave his first sermon. Very peaceful, walking around the ruins of the stupas and generally enjoyed being away from the hustle of India.
Once we returned from there we got ready to leave to catch our train to Siliguri, and that’s where it all started going wrong.....
The train was meant to leave at 9pm, we go there at 8pm and settled in on the platform. 9pm came, train pulled up with no markings or numbers on it, after basically losing our tempers at someone we found out that it wasn't our train, ours was going to be late. So, 10pm came and the wind got up. 11pm came and it started raining. We're sitting on the platform wrapped up in blankets that luckily we bought in Delhi for when we got into the mountains. 12pm, no train. 1am, train! After running up and down the length of the train (about 15 carriages) we finally found the right coach, got on and found our bunks. Each part of the coach has 6 bunks, 3 on each wall. When we found ours it already had 8 people in the bunks and 1 on the floor.
Well by this point I was starting to lose it, as none of them could speak any English though they couldn't understand what I was calling them. Fortunate a very helpful Indian who had been bought up in England (and went to the Reading Festival last year, so we had something in common) got everyone out of our bunks, as one of them was a man probably in his 60's we let him have my bunk and we both got into the middle one.
The thing about Indian trains on second class is that people are always selling something, so every few seconds someone walks the length of the coach shouting 'chai', 'samosa' or 'watch-cd-wallet'. They seem to think that even though you are asleep you'd actually not mind being woken up to buy a wallet. With this and people singing when they got in the train at other stations and one of the people in the bunks opposite coughing and hawking out the window every few minutes it makes for a trying time, especially with my legendary patience.
So with earplugs in and a blanket wrapped around my head to block out the light I managed to get a couple of hours of uncomfortable sleep, and woke up to find that we'd pulled in a station. Where we stayed for 3 hours. This set the pattern to come, station, stop for an hour. Move for half and hour to another station, stop for an hour. AS we were meant to be in Siliguri at 1pm Saturday we were resigned to getting in at about 6. So 6 came, we're trying to work out on the map were we are
(unfinished)
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