India the Hot - Varanasi to Amritsar

After crossing the border at Sonauli, our first task was to try to not get too ripped off in exchanging our Nepali rupees, and our second was to eat our first genuine Indian lunch (yum). We opted to take a night bus from Sonauli to Varanasi, instead of taking a bus ride to Gorakpur and hoping to catch the train. As we began our scheduled 12-hour journey, we noticed a marked increase in the number of trucks, buses, cows, and people (make that men) on the roads and roadsides. The land was mostly farmland, with wheat crops coming ready for harvest, and the landscape was dotted with ladies in brightly coloured sarees working in the fields. Unfortunately, our bus was a bit fast, and we arrived in Varanasi at 2:00 in the morning. Our welcome to India was quite typical of India in that our rickshaw driver tried to take us to 5 hotels other than the one we had specified, in the hopes of receiving commission from their owners. After yelling at him "you bad man, no rupees for you", he finally took us to the one we had wanted. As luck would have it, there were no rooms available, so another very helpful, friendly man helped us find reasonable accomodation at a reasonable price.

Varanasi is truly a magical place - one of the oldest cities in the world, sitting on the banks of the Ganges River, a pilgrimage site for Hindus, and the holiest place for them to die and be cremated, as it offers the hope of liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Mark Twain said of Varanasi "It is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and it looks twice as old as all of them put together." We arose at sunrise one morning to take a 2-hour boat ride up and down the ghats, watching the pilgrims and sadhus bathing, praying, and doing their laundry; cows negotiating stairs; kids playing cricket; and the recently deceased being cremated. We wandered the warrens that form the old city, getting lost and then finding our way back towards the river. A walk like this involves watching for cows (and their poo), dogs (and their poo), and people (and occasionally their poo) all along the paths; talking with the kids and shopkeepers; and answering the question "what country?" about a million times. We noticed that there seemed to be very few people along the ghats during the day, especially compared to when we were both here last (4 years ago, but in the months of January and February) - as one local man told us, the summer had arrived one month early, and temperatures soared to around 40 degrees during the day.

From Varanasi, we took a night train to Delhi, where we trimmed down our backpacks as much as possible for the rest of our time in India, leaving a large bag with our hotel, to which we will return at the beginning of May. We did a day trip to Agra, and visited the amazing Taj Mahal. From a distance, the symmetry and lines of it are breathtaking, and up close, the inlaid marble is gorgeous. Completed in 1653, it is a remarkable monument to love, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his second wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14th child.

Another night train put us in Jodhpur, the "blue city" with the magnificent fort, the Mehrangarh, and the place which gave name to the baggy-tight riding trousers. We stayed at a very nice guesthouse here, Shivam Paying Guesthouse, and spent our mornings seeing the sights, and our afternoons napping under the fan in our room, trying to escape the heat which had now risen to 42 degrees. The walls of the majority of the buildings inside the old part of Jodhpur are painted a lovely indigo blue colour. Originally the colour was to indicate the homes of Brahmins, but nowadays anyone can paint their home in blue, as it is thought to keep the heat and the mosquitos at bay. At the fort, we took in the audio tour (which is actually very good), which highlights the history of the fort, the day-to-day life of the former Maharajas, and the role of the current Maharaja. One of the most interesting but tragic sights within the fort is the mural showing small handprints painted in red. These represent the handprints of the Maharaja's many wives who commited the act of sati - immolating themselves on their husband's funeral pyre after he had died in battle.

**Photos for Jaisalmer and Bikaner unfortunately have a little virus and are resting on our USB memory stick. We now have a program that can fix the files, but it is very slow, so we will have to wait for our return to Canada to fix the problem.**

We arrived in Jaisalmer, the "golden city" on April 13th, after a long, hot bus journey from Jodhpur through the Thar desert. As seemed to be our pattern, we rested in the afternoons and saw the fort and the Maharaja's palace early in the morning. Jaisalmer is the only fort in India in which people (about 300 families) actually live inside the walls. Unfortunately, the lack of proper water and sewage systems for these inhabitants and the dozens of hotels also inside the fort have led to quite a bit of decay and crumbling fort bastions. Still, it was great to climb to the top of the palace to take in the 360 degree views of the sandstone buildings within the fort, the city beyond its walls, and the expanse of desert that stretched as far as the eye could see.

We left Jaisalmer on an early morning bus bound for Bikaner. When we arrived in Bikaner we headed straight for the train station and after a bit of a wait, found out the good news that the train tickets that we had been on a waiting list for had been confirmed and we had berths for our journey to Amritsar. We then had time to go to see the infamous Karni Mata Temple (Rat Temple) just south of town. Karni Mata is an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, and the rats are believed to contain the souls of her followers. As at all temples, shoes are left outside, and we tried not to think about the little crusty bits that we walked over on our way into the temple. I didn't last inside as long as Edwin did (I kind of have a phobia about rats), but we watched the rats scampering about and feeding at the bowls of sweets and sweet milk that are left out for them. The temple is home to about 20,000 rats, of which four or five are the very lucky white rats. We should have quite a bit of good luck, as two rats actually scampered over Edwin's feet, and we also saw a white rat at one of the feeding bowls. There were many pilgrims at the temple, praying and making offerings of sweets for the rats, and their solemness made us realize this was a temple, and not the weird spectacle it seemed to us. On the way back to Bikaner, we rode on top of the bus, enjoying the sunset over the desert, and watching kids flying and fighting their kites from the rooftops. We saw boys dashing down the street - kiterunners chasing the cut kites.

We booked a room close to the train station in Bikaner until our departure at 1:45 that morning, and tried to sleep, but it was too hot and the single cot too small. The train departed about one hour late, and it was our most tiring journey yet. So far, the trains have been great, but this one was very overbooked. In our compartment, with 6 bunks, there were 11 people. We had to kick people out of our assigned bunks, which was kind of tough to do at nearly 3:00 in the morning. The journey lasted until 4:30 the following afternoon, and it was very hot and crowded. Then we boarded a second train, which had 10 people in a compartment for 6, for the last 3 hours to Amritsar. Needless to say, we were very tired when we arrived that night.

Fortunately, Amritsar was a bit cooler, and we had a good sleep before waking at 5:30 for sunrise at the Golden Temple. The Temple is the holiest site for Sikh people, and the Temple complex provides inexpensive (free dormitory) accomodation and meals for all who visit. We stayed at a hotel just outside the complex, but partook in a few meals, sitting on the floor with about 400 other pilgrims on this one of two levels, as dozens of volunteers served up chapatis, dal, rice, and a sweet dessert at lunch time. Before entering the complex, we left our shoes in a locker room, donned head coverings which were provided, and washed our feet by walking through a pool with flowing water. The Temple is absolutely beautiful, with the sun's rays shining off the golden dome, surrounded by a pool of water, and marble buildings and walkways. The dome is said to be guilded with 750 kgs of pure gold and represents an inverted lotus flower, which is a symbol of Sikhs' aim to live a pure life. We found The Sikh people are very nice and friendly, and there's very little (if any) hassle. When we told one of the men who wanted to chat that I was from Canada, he said "ah, Little Punjab".

In the afternoon, we took a shared taxi to the India/Pakistan border near Attari. Every night, when they close the border, there is a special 30 minute "closing the border" ceremony. Thousands of people attend the ceremony every day, and the atmosphere is one of a festival, with music and dancing, and people waving the flag of their favoured country. As the ceremony begins, the double set of gates which separate the two countries are flung open, trumpets sound from the guardrooms, soldiers bellow (hopefully longer than their counterpart on the other side), and then the most hilarious marching show begins. Five very tall (very handsome) soldiers from either side do the strangest, fastest march we've ever seen from the guardroom up to the border, staring and scowling at the other side, with puffed up chests and clenched fists. They wheel to face their flags, and after they have returned one by one to the guardhouse, the flags are lowered, very slowly so neither side is higher than the other. All the while, the crowds are singing, cheering and chanting for their side. It was a wonderful spectacle to see (and hear).

During our 2 weeks in the lowlands of India, the heat has really been a factor in how, when and where we travelled. We did what we wanted to do, but much of our time was spent trying to avoid the heat of the afternoons, and we moved from place to place with no real rest days. So what does 42 degrees feel like? Well, we were sweating pretty much full time from about noon to about 6:00. We drank litres and litres of water, trying to rehydrate. The water in our water bottles would feel like we could make tea in them, and our rooms got so warm that the floors and the bed would radiate heat. We would have the fan on constantly, but it would feel like a furnace blowing hot air on us. At night, we took to dousing the floor with water to try to cool the room, I slept in a wet t-shirt (not to excite Edwin), as it helped me keep cool. As this is the beginning of summer, we don't know how the local people cope when the temperatures reach 50 degrees.

We are happy to now be in the cool of McLeod Ganj, in the state of Himachel Pradesh, very near the Himalayas. We will spend the he next two weeks in this state before returning to Delhi and our flight to London.

Location: McLeod Ganj, India