Feeling the Holyness

I’m not really what most would consider “spiritual”. At least, not in the traditional sense anyway.  For this reason, my visit to the pilgrim town of Pushkar (mentioned earlier in my blog) never really promoted any kind of a sensation of an epiphany or enlightenment.

I can categorically say though that this absence of feeling was not replicated in Varanasi, or more specifically – on the Ghats of the River Ganges.

It really is an experience to behold when you float down the most sacred river on Earth as the sun comes up, witnessing the city wake up before your eyes. Weather it was from an old boat, or from the steps of her Ghats, what we witnessed on the Ganges over four days was undeniably spiritual.

But spirituality was just one element of our experience.

We felt shock and sheer horror as we observed firsthand what happens to the bodies of Varanasi’s recently deceased. If you’re an adult (older than ten), without disease, and not pregnant, you’re cremated, in full view, at one of the two burning ghats on the river. They burn 300-400 bodies a day at the main ghat. If you don’t fall in to one of the fore mentioned categories, cremation is not an option. Your body is rowed out to the middle of the lake, tied to a large concrete block, and dropped of the edge. We witnessed one of these, and the image of the body sliding in to the Ganges still haunts me now.

We felt overwhelmed with the colour and culture before us as we observed a packed festival on the banks of the Ganges, from the prime position of the river itself.

We felt the effects of time travel as we were whisked around the bustling local streets in a cycle rickshaw, through markets straight out of the 19th century.

And finally, not just in Varanasi, but in India as a whole, we felt appreciation. Compared to three weeks prior, our recognition of how fortunate we were in our lives had grown ten fold.

Varanasi was our last stop in India, but it was by no means our final unforgettable experience.

There’s no train line that goes all the way up to the Nepalese border, forcing us to take a public bus. As I write this, several days later, my insides are still vibrating. 10 hours in any bus is a tough gig. 10 hours in an ancient, falling apart, filled to the brim Indian death trap is a couple of hundred levels higher.

The noise of the thing. If at any point on the trip, the bus had just suddenly fallen in to a heap of a thousand pieces, my level of surprise would have been on par with water boiling on a stove. The shaking and rattling and vibrating, usually indescribable in words, came to a head when a few hours in to the trip, the glass window right next to me shattered completely. I was thus covered in glass, and looking up expected to see concerned and shocked faces, as well as a bus driver slamming on the brakes to see if I was alright.

In reality, I got a couple of casual sideways glances, and I think the bus actually accelerated. It was just another normal occurrence on an Indian public bus.

We surprisingly survived all the way to the Nepalese border. Upon disembarking, it was like when you spin yourself around for 30 seconds and try to then walk straight. Our legs were all wobbly and our brains were bouncing off the walls of our skull.

Under the watchful eyes of Nepalese soldiers, we walked through the checkpoint and on to different soil. India was behind us. The Himalaya lay ahead of us.