Varanasi, Delhi and the end

 March 27th - Thursday

I spoke in an earlier post about street widening and how they simply remove the front rooms. Well here's what that looks like.

We were picked up at 5:30am for a sunrise cruise along the Ganges and joined by a local guide.  Cars are not allowed in the old part of town, so we parked about 1km away and walked.  Many thousands of people come here everyday to worship and/or bathe in the river and the streets were very full.  We wound our way through the hordes stopping to be blessed by a Yogi. He was extremely flexible and sat with the soles of his feet touching and up under his chin. We continued down towards the bank before climbing aboard a boat.  The cruise was pretty peaceful and the buildings were lit very nicely by the rising sun.  It was fascinating watching the people bathing. We were on the boat for about an hour before returning to the dock.  Our guide then took us through a number of back streets, showing various sites, but the main one was The Golden Temple.  This temple has four different entrances and each had a queue of about 400metres to get in - and several hours wait.  The guide tried to sneak us in a back entrance but the policeman would have none of it.  A different policeman did ask us for a selfie though.  We kept wandering and eventually found a place where we could see the temple and the gold certainly made it stand out.

We returned to the hotel for breakfast and a bit of a break.

Picked up again at 11:00am and headed to a Buddhist Temple.  Our guide told us that Buddhism started in Varanasi and he was very proud of the fact.  The temple was nice with paintings all around the walls depicting Buddha's life.  We then went to the original monastery excavation sight and musuem.  The museum had some beautiful carvings and statues from the excavation.

Back to the hotel for another break (about 3 hours) to be picked up at 5:00pm.  Back out and down to the river for an evening cruise past one of the cremation sites.  There were 5 or 6 fires burning and we saw a body being carried in on a stretcher, ready for cremation.  I won't post all the photos here but if you want to see some, just ask.  It was quite fascinating to watch and we noticed there seemed to be only men there.  Our guide confirmed that women tend to stay home to mourn rather than come down.

Further down the river we stopped at the Assi Ghat to view a Ganga Aarti.  This is a twice daily religious ceremony ( the first being at 5:30am).  It was quite elaborate and there were 3-4 along the river.  7 priests  stand up on a platform each performing various, repititive, rituals.  The locals loved it, but as it was all in Hindi we were quickly bored.  Jeet had driven down and met us there having watched the ceremony for the first time.  He loved it.

Walking back to the car was quite an effort with people absolutely everywhere again.  

March 28th Friday

Picked up at 9:45 and we went to India's first University.  It is set on 113 hectares of donated land.  The buildings were also built using donated money as the British seemingly were not interested in India having a University.  There are hostels a plenty for boarders and lots of faculty buildings. Also on the grounds was a Temple which we visited.  Our guide was very passionate about the whole thing and was constantly trying to teach us about the Hindi concept of 1 god with many manifestations.  While we got the concept don't ask me for the names of all 9 of those  manifestations.  We finished around 11:30 and headed to the airport, dropping our guide off along the way.  We said goodbye, and thankyou, to Jeet and then had to work out how to get into the airport, which was basically go to a kiosk and enter our booking number and have our photo taken.  A small ticket with QR code was printed off.  We took the ticket and passport to an army dude who chcked them, then used the QR code and facial scan to enter into the actual airport building.  Checked in our bags then went through the usual xray machine and everyone was also scanned with a wand - women in a separate curtained off cubicle, men out in the open.  What a rigmarole.

We landed on time and met our new driver, Belvir who took us straight to our hotel.

March  29th - Saturday

Picked up at 8:30 for a whirlwind tour of Delhi.  We went to Old Delhi before the traffic got too bad as later in the day it would take hours to get anywhere. First stop was the Shahi Jama mosque, built in the 1600's.  A lovely building from the outside, it surprsingly had little depth inside.  By that I mean the spaces - we could get to - only went back about 10 feet, even though the building looked far bigger than that from the outside.  Perhaps there were secret rooms/doors.

We then took a rickshaw ride through the very narrow streets of Old Delhi.  The rickshaw was human powered unlike the motorised tuk tuks.  The rickshaw driver wound his way through the streets, stopping occasionally at significant buildings.  He then pulled over and we did a walking tour through the flower and spice markets.  It was interesting and there were some great smells emanating from the stalls.

There were also a bunch of guys in their underpants washing themselves using buckets of water, fortunately no smells emanating from them.

Returning to our driver we drove past the Red Fort - apparently not as good as Agra Fort to enter as it is still used by the Army.  Given our time constraints we weren't unhappy about not going in.

We did however go into  the Mahatma Ghandi museum site, a large garden area with a few monuments to the man. Very peaceful area in amongst the mayhem outside.

Next stop was India Gate, a huge war memorial to 74,000 Indian soldiers who died in WW1.  It looks similar to, but is larger than the Arc de Triomphe.

Still going at a good pace we stopped at Humayun's Tomb which also had several other tombs nearby.  Humayan's Tomb dates to the 16th Century, and is a stunning building.  Inside the Tomb there are several graves, including for Emporer Humayun, his wife Empress Bega Begum - who organised for the building itself, their child and a great great grandson.  Included in the overall area is a tomb for Isa Khan. This tomb in about 20 years older than Humayun's, and more colourful, with nice blue tiles around the top.

Our final stop was at Qutub Minar a huge minaret and victory tower.  Built in the early 13th century it is 72.5 metres tall, and beautifully detailed. Ruins of other buildings were in the complex, with stunning carved pillars and striking orange, pink and grey stones used in the structures.

Time to go and we arrived at the airport around 3:15 for our 6:40 flight home, so a long wait.  Though as with the previous airport there were several layers of security, including needing a boarding pass/confirmed booking to even get in the  building.

The flight was 12.5 hours and very smooth.  I managed a little bit of sleep, but as usual not as much as I'd like.  We landed just afer midday Sunday.

Back to work Tuesday 1st April after a fantastic, fast paced trip full of amazing sights, sounds (too many beeping horns), architecture and culture.