May 31 - June 2, 2008. Indian Night Trains and a Ride on the Ganges

Some Photos First:

Jenny and me, shortly after boarding our night train from Delhi to Varanasi.

Dad at 5:30 in the morning.

Wood, near the steps of the ghats, used for cremations. Sandalwood is the most expensive wood to use, and is considered the most noble wood over which to be cremated.

Kaitlyn, Jenny, and Nancy, at the beginning of our boat ride up the Ganges.

Just a dude, meditating on the steps of a ghat.

Another dude, deep in meditation.

A cycle rickshaw driver in Varanasi.

Women bathing in the Ganges.

Jenny and me, walking along the ghats at 5:00 a.m.

Interesting topics discussed in this posting include: bats the size of eagles, India’s not-so-glamorous version of the Euro-rail, silk bedding, what “personal space” means in India, and a naked man completely covered in dried mud.

We had originally planned on traveling to Agra and Jaipur. However, due to Gurraj riots in Rajasthan, West of Delhi, we decided that it was a better idea to head the opposite direction. Rajmal, our intern hosts’ driver, took me to the train ticketing office on Friday morning, where we waded and fought our way through the masses to get last minute tickets to Varanasi. Even with an Indian leading the way, the ticketing office was remarkably inefficient. We had to get in one line to reserve the tickets, and another line to pay for the tickets, all the while, fighting to maintain our spot in line. The recurring thought that has been in my head for the last three weeks is, “There has to be a better way to do this.”

Kaitlyn, Nancy, Jenny and I left for Varanasi after work. The train pulled out of the station, and went right past the Red Fort as the sun was going down. I had heard a lot about the Red Fort before, and kind of dismissed it. The thing is absolutely massive. Imagine if they had constructed the Pentagon out of Southern Utah red rock and then placed a huge gate with towers in front. It’s that big, and that picturesque. We’re excited to go inside when we get a chance.

When I think “night train” or “sleeper car” I’m usually thinking about the separate compartments that the Euro-rail offers, with clean sheets, air conditioning, and a sink. Northern Railways, the Indian counterpart to the Euro-rail, was not quite as lavish. We’ll start with the bathrooms. There were two bathrooms per car, one of which had a sign that read, “Western Bathroom.” I peeked into the one that didn’t have a sign on it. It was literally a hole in the floor, with a pipe leading to the track. The “Western Bathroom” had a toilet in it, but no toilet paper, and no running water.

The train’s beds were vinyl, and didn’t look like they had been cleaned in years. A thirty-something Indian man perched himself on my bunk, and managed to communicate to me, “When you want to sleep, you tell me and I’ll move.” In the meantime he made himself right at home. He took off his shoes, one of which fell down the bunks and landed in between the four of us as we discussed the novelties of riding on an Indian train. The guy also had a full meal and left some scraps and crumbs for me. That’s what “personal space” means in India.

The windows of our car were pulled down, and we absorbed the odors of the night. Pungent, burning garbage was the most prevalent aroma, but the train also apparently passed through a field of rotten mangoes, deceased squirrel and unleaded gasoline. Despite the siege of our olfactory senses, we enjoyed the evening ride, and admitted that we were glad we were doing it. Man after man passed by calling out “Chaaaaaai! Chaaaaaai!” or “Bread, butter, omelet!” We had been advised against having the food and drink on the train, but it was interesting and annoying to see and hear the people come by with their goods. I took an Ambien and slept 8 hours away.

Our train stopped for twenty minutes, about 200 yards from the Varanasi station, before finally completing the journey (three hours late). Again, I said to myself, “There has to be a better way.” Tens of taxi and rickshaw drivers vied for our attention outside of the station before we finally negotiated a three dollar taxi ride across town to the ghats and our hotel. Our Lonely Planet book explained that, in Varanasi, the best information to give the taxi driver is a point of interest near your hotel. Otherwise, they will try to take you all over town, or will try to convince you that your hotel is overbooked, out of business, etc. so that you book a room in their friends’ hotel. The hints were useful as our driver tried to get all sorts of stuff out of us before we left. He wasn’t pleased when we continued to tell him that the only place we wanted to go was Assi Ghat. I’ve never had a taxi driver laugh at me and ask, “Why are you so serious today? You don’t like to have fun?” I thought to myself, “Why do you care, you’re a taxi driver.”

The Hotel Ganges View got rave reviews from my Lonely Planet book, and Nancy’s Frommers book, so we decided that, for $60 a night, the four of us would cram into a room and try it out. If any of you go to Varanasi in the future, the Hotel Ganges View is the place to stay. It’s located about 50 feet from the steps of Assi Ghat, and feels like a 1920’s, Indian-themed, Avenues mansion. The lobby and dimly lit dining room have white and black marble checkered floors, and there are lots of interesting knickknacks, paintings and coffee table books on shelves and tables. With the exception of a picture book on Abu Ghraib (which reminded me of Mom’s coffee table book entitled Global Nuclear Terrorism) all of the books in the room had photos of India, Nepal, and the Ganges. There were also cases of books that had been signed by famous Indian authors whom the hotel owner knew.

Our room was on the third floor, and we walked up a steep wooden staircase to get there, past a large, coral sandstone balcony with about twenty pots of flowers and green grass. The balcony overlooked the Ganges and a large Hindu temple. Painters were working on bright images of Ganesha, women, cows or birds. Some painted on their canvases while others painted directly on the walls of the hotel. Every room in the hotel was stylin’. Our room was trimmed with gold paint and had really cool light fixtures.

As it was too hot to walk the ghats in the mid-afternoon, the women decided to shop indoors. So I sat by as they searched through silk scarves, skirts, and blouses. In one store I couldn’t help but take a picture of a slightly pudgy Indian guy in a tank top and a mullet, hanging out on his mat as Kaitlyn, Jenny and Nancy went through his silk goods. Eventually we stopped by a Lonely Planet recommended silk shop, called Open Hand, where Jenny and I bought a couple of handmade, six piece silk bed sets.

In the early evening, we hired a fifteen-year-old kid named Pradeepa to row us up the Ganges to Harischandra Ghat, one of the main ceremonial cremation ghats. As it turned out, all of us wanted to do some of the rowing......so Pradeepa got paid full price for doing half the work. We passed by boys swimming, men doing their laundry, and women bathing. We could see the fire at Harischandra Ghat, and as we got nearer, four men carried a wooden stretcher down from the street. The stretcher was carrying a body wrapped in cloths, and the first stop was the river, where the body is apparently doused with water. The ceremony stopped for a bit, and Pradeepa started back to Assi Ghat before it resumed. When I looked back towards Harischandra, after about two or three minutes, the fire had grown quite a bit.

As we returned to Assi Ghat, with the sun completely beyond the horizon, our solemn thoughts about the cremation ceremony were obliterated by an influx of bats. Their arrival was as sleek as their shape. First there was a tiny one, flying drunk. Then there were a handful of tiny ones. Jenny pointed up to the sky and spotted a large flying creature that looked like an eagle. As it got closer, we realized that it had a 3-4 foot wing span, and that it too was a bat. No joke, it was the largest flying creature I’ve seen since spotting a Bald Eagle in the Olympic Peninsula last summer. After a while, there were hundreds of little bats flying around, and a constant stream of large, anxiety-inducing bats. They flew about ten or fifteen feet above us, and every once in a while, they dipped down and snatched something out of the water. Creepy.

We had dinner at the hotel – a buffet for the four of us plus three other tourists. Among the best dishes were a cauliflower and bell pepper dish, a really good lentil curry, lemon rice, and hot chapattis – think small flour tortillas. The other person sitting at our table was a British photographer, named Sebastian, who was on the back end of a four year trip around the world. He started out in Costa Rica, had spent almost three years in India, and had touched down in a handful of other countries.

Sunday morning came fast. We were up at 4:50 to catch the sunrise on the Ganges and take a walk along the ghats. I’ve decided that the two best places in the world to people watch are Las Vegas and Varanasi, two cities at opposite poles of the spiritual continuum. There were more women bathing in their saris, men leading their water buffaloes to the river, and a group of people doing early morning yoga to the sound of a ritualistic bellman. There were sudhus (men who cake themselves in mud for meditation purposes), more people meditating, and two or three more tourists. We passed Harischandra Ghat again and saw the end of the ceremony that we had missed the night before. People stood around a pyre of wood and oversaw the cremation of a deceased loved one.

Jenny, Nancy and Kaitlyn hired a yogi to come to our hotel for an hour after our return from the ghats. I’m already pretty flexible, so I went back to sleep as the women stretched and meditated outside our door. They all claimed that it was effective, since their muscles were sore the following day. We went to several markets in Varanasi and bought a few more silk items, before heading for the train station to catch another train back to Delhi.

Once again, we became all too familiar with the inefficiencies of the Indian rail service. There are many amazing things in India, but an efficient rail system is not one of them. For an hour, nobody could tell us where our train was, or if we even had seats on the train. Apparently, we had been given standby tickets, and we had to go through a bunch of lines and charts to figure out where our seats were.

Jenny and I have now traveled in India by taxi, rickshaw, bus, train, plane, motorcycle, and company car. If you are interested in going from point A to point B in India, and it is anywhere over 10 miles between the two points, take my advice and fly there. I had the middle of three bunks in our section of the train. As I fell asleep, a man, whose family was sleeping on the bottom bunk, stood up and coughed directly into my face. This went on throughout the night. Jenny woke up early in the morning to three teenage boys sitting on the bunk across from her, staring at her. Good times.

After traveling on an Indian night train, and dealing with the madness that is the Varanasi taxi/rickshaw scene, we felt relieved to arrive home on Monday morning. F-block, with its 1970s East German architecture, never looked so good, and our quiet ride to work was an absolute breeze.