India - Varanasi

After crossing into India at Rauxal we started to get the con treatment straight away. The chap who spent over 30 minutes filling in forms for us to go through immigration tried to take a couple of hundred rupees as an entry tax. After just laughing at him and saying I don't think so he was happy to let us go on our way.

He was quite helpful though and had told us we were lucky as Saturday is the only day an "express" train goes from there to Varanasi which was where we wanted to go.

We took this and were rather unpleasantly surprised to find we were on there for 11 hours and the whole train was general class, this means the seats are totally wooden and roughly three times the number of people that were ever planned to be on the train are actually squeezed in!

It was quite amusing as everyone bundled on top of each other to sleep and were even all squeezed onto the overhead luggage racks!

Varanasi is one of Indias most holy places, the river Ganges flows through here and people come to bathe here every day, this is unbelievable when you read about just how disgusting the state of the water is.

This is apparently also a very auspicious place to pass on. People come here to die, literally by the river in hospices. People are also cremated right on the river banks on timber fires. Huge stacks of timber are pilled high at the burning ghats.

I must have been coming down with a bad illness that took a few more days to develop fully as my usual patience with annoying people here evaporated and I was filled with an almost overwhelming desire to punch several of the worst street con artists. A few were told to go away and that seemed to be the only thing that actually worked.

An interesting place none the less.