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It was very dusty and hot for the last few weeks I spent in India and Nepal in late July. The monsoon hadn’t really hit and some states had been stricken by drought. Locals were anxious about it. The dust can get into your every nook and cranny and wears down your clothes and patience.

Before leaving Nepal I went for another small trek, this time into the Annapurnas near Pokhara. With a couple of friends we passed through similar scenery to what I’d seen on my previous trek in Langtang national park. We’d wanted to go to Annapurna base camp where we would have been surrounded by towering peaks (Annapurna 1 is over 8000m high). We only made it half way there before turning around. Spent a couple of days in a village called Chandrakot where a Darwinite Australian seemed to have made a home for himself with his Nepalese Misses running a hotel, selling weed to tourists and talking in droll, drawn out sentences. Nice spot.

Travelled down through Sunuali into India to Lucknow via Gorakpur, van, buses and train. By now I felt pretty confident about dealing with the local rickshaw/transport/hotel/middlemen/touts/sharks and I was even playing it a little bit like a game. You bargain with him, tell them how expensive they are, joke a little bit and go through the theatre of taking your business elsewhere by walking off. Sometimes it was sorta fun. My apprehensions about this aspect of travelling in India/Nepal have eased since I last wrote.

I stayed a couple of days in Lucknow, saw the Byzantine-like Muslim Bara Imambara and explored the labyrinth of narrow passageways above a very large hall. Some local kids befriended me and Managed to squeeze a few rickshaw rides and a meal out of me while they showed me around their neighbourhood and a large local market.

Varanasi is quite a city and is the most sacred place in India for Hindus. The Ganges River (‘Ganga’ to the locals) was lying low, due to the monsoon’s lateness. The multitude of ghats and lingams that line the city side of the river are the city’s defining feature. The religiosity and multifarious activity tied up in this small stretch of river dominates local life. The ghats are a hotch potch of steps leading down to the river. Phallic lingams (small sculptured stone Hindu towers) adorn the ghats as do some remarkable old and crumbling buildings. People bathe, they pray (or perform morning puja), they wash their clothes, they burn their dead, they source the city’s water and they dump their effluent in the Ganga. Apparently the faecal coliform levels are something like 100 times more than the safe standard in the Ganga when it leaves Varanasi! It doesn’t seem to bother the locals though, they adore the Ganga.

The two burning ghats were something else, of which Mankarnika ghat was the larger. Approaching it you’re struck by the large stockpiles of timber and the occasional chanting of a funeral procession amid the every day life in the narrow streets. Silk finery adorn the corpses carried on bamboo stretchers to the allotted cremation plots according to the hierarchy of the Hindu caste system. Women are outlawed from attending the cremations apparently because the outdated sutee practice (traditionally where the wife is thrown on her husband’s funeral pyre, but also sometimes when the wife does so voluntarily) still rarely happens. I was told a woman had committed sutee within the last year and this prompted the prohibition of their attendance.
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