A phrase readily utilised by travelers to India is 'prepare for every sense to be completely overwhelmed' but after an already delayed 24 hour journey and feeling slightly nauseous the last thing you hope to be greeted by at the platform edge is a rotting human corpse....Welcome to Varanasi.

Varanasi sits along the banks of the sacred Ganga (Ganges) river and consists of a series of Ghats that are essentially small jetties that lead down to the river from which ritual prayer and offerings can be performed to the Hindu deities. It is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world and is defined as one of the seven holy cities of Hinduism. The privilege of being born or cremated in Varanasi allows Hindus to escape the cycle of reincarnation and reach moksha (or nirvana). We hadn't really made any plans of where to stay so we just plumped for a ghat in the middle so we could wander down either side. The tuktuk driver, whom I had severe reservations about -due to the fact that he seemed to know a 'good hotel' wherever we suggested- dropped us off at a very clean and very cheap hotel with a rooftop bar and restaurant. It was unfathomably cheap even by Indian standards and as we checked in it became apparent that this may be because we were the only guests in a 20 odd roomed hotel. In the midst of the continuiys masquerade that circumvented the town it had occurred to me that as we walked down the road to the hotel a steady stream of fresh corpses had also meandered on bamboo stretchers before us. It's unnerving how quickly this becomes normal and just part of the daily routine...."What do you want to do for dinn...oh hang on, shimmy over, body coming...yeah so what was I saying, fancy that place by the river for tea?".

Straight from check in we headed up to this rooftop restaurant for lunch. The view overlooked the lazily flowing Ganges and allowed us to see most of the ghats on the left hand side as well as the six or seven humans on fire right beneath us. We had completely inadvertently checked into a hotel that overlooked the Harishandra burning ghat, one of two burning ghats where Hindus are taken for ritual cremation. The hotel manager was friendly and after seeing the inquisitive and startled look on our faces he offered his knowledge on the processes involved. I've typed this blog in great detail (twice) but unfortunately the site 'lost' them so here's a brief overview instead....

Cremations typically take place within six to eight hours following death, but occasionally bodies are brought from all corners of India and in some cases even from the further afield, typically the US & Canada. The process itself is a fairly withdrawn process in comparison with India's usual flamboyance. The deceased is shrouded in sari's after offerings are made in the family home before then being carried on a bamboo stretcher (or the top of a jeep) as the male family members chant "rama nama satya hai " meaning 'the name of God is the truth'. The deceased is carried to one of the two burning ghats. Harishandra is smaller and older than the main Manikarnika ghat but still performs around sixty cremations a day with the main ghat taking anywhere from two to three hundred.The service then involves the body being carried into the Ganga and a final offering of pure water is poured into the mouth. The body is then carried to the pyre before being covered with more wood by the workers. The family then light a flame from the 'eternal flame' that is said to have burned continuously for many thousands of years.

The flame is then carried around the body five times to represent the five elements of the world; Earth, fire, water, air and spirit. The pyre is then lit, usually around the head, as the mourners begin to back away. After a few hours the lead mourner, usually the eldest son, must undertake a very spiritually significant part in the process whereby a bamboo spike is driven into the skull of the deceased to allow the release of the spirit. The body itself takes about 3 hours to burn and typically requires 250-340kg of firewood that must be purchased prior to cremation. Poorer families will struggle to afford such quantities and so when less wood is used, often the feet or arms will flop out the sides and usually just require bending back over the top, usually by bending the knees back the way they definitely didn't come from. After the 3 hours a small amount of the body will remain which is usually the chest and torso of males and the pelvis of females. This is taken by boat to the centre of the Ganga and dispersed into the water. There are, however, 7 groups of people who do not require cremation and are deemed already pure. These include children, pregnant women, lepers, people bitten by snakes and those who have committed suicide. Instead, they are dumped directly into the Ganga where they inevitability float back up after a little while which means that the morning boat trip can be disrupted by the occasional plop of a body reaching the surface and casually floating on by. There are in fact men who's job it is to collect the bodies throughout the day.

As we spent that evening on the hotel rooftop with the hotel staff we discussed the simplicity and even beauty than can be found in death and the underlying fact that, despite whatever pre-conceptions the story above may give, it was in all essence a spiritual passing that allowed those who chose to believe, a sense that this was just another step in the cycle of life and that their loved one is not gone, just elsewhere.

The next day we sat out to see the main burning ghat and to see how the two compare. With the greater volumes of bodies, it is of course a more industrial affair and the intense smoke and smell of barbequing human effervesce through the narrow streets and come to a head at the main ghat. With a fear of causing offence and in the knowledge that we would be forced to make a sizeable donation we walked to the precipice of a building overlooking the ghat we were forced to listen to listen to a predictably over-friendly young man who would then fleece tourists out of every penny he could. Surely this wasn't what the city and its ghats were created for. Were we funding this trend of enthusiastic and curious tourists who just wanted to see something new? Possibly, but it certainly gave us a new perspective on life and death and the way in which different cultures absorb it's endless intricasies.

Nevertheless, it must be said that the beauty and spirituality of Varanasi is perpetually disrupted by the endless swarm of touts and sellers that refuse to allow a moments peace. Even when we innocently spoke to locals at the nightly festival, we would be hounded by those same friendly individuals the next day to visit there shops and stalls. We intentionally took long routes round the town to avoid them by the end!

Possibly the strangest occurance amongst the many that Varanasi can throw at you occured on an unusually hot afternoon. After having a morning massage on the banks of the Ganga whilst witnessing the pilgrimages and washing in the river in the morning, the heat became unbearable. We headed into a nearby restaraunt, ate some grub and left an hour and a half later to find the streets knee height in water. The rain in this incredibly short space of time had been and gone but yet had left a trail of destruction that meant we would need to wade through oceans of festering debris before we could get back to the hotel. This.Was.Miserable. Within a few hours though, the water had subsided and we could reach another restaurant, that despite having a ludicrous amount of insects inside, actually served up some pretty good food. And with that, and some stress with the tuktuk to the station, we left Varanasi feeling.....different