India for first-time visitors

By Devlin Barrett

Associated Press writer

updated 3:15 p.m. ET April 30, 2008

VARANASI, India - "Cow. Mustard plant. Dead body," our taxi driver said as we drove into town.

Wait, what was that last one?

It was a woman's body, small and wrapped in shiny red cloth, being carried by hand on a pallet down the main street into town.

For thousands of years, Hindus and Buddhists have come here to end their lives — or renew them — in the river Ganges. Dying in this ancient city brings "moksha," or spiritual liberation to Hindus. The living cleanse their spirits by washing in the waters that run down from Himalayan snow peaks.

That tradition draws a never-ending human current of pilgrims, beginning in pre-dawn darkness each morning. From every street and intersection, blurry shapes amble toward the riverside steps, called ghats. The walk is quiet, except for the pilgrims' drums, chants, and tambourines.

The ritual also draws boatloads of tourists. First-time visitors like us typically include the Ganges in a triangle of destinations — along with the Taj Mahal and the temples of Khajuraho, known for erotic carvings — in India's history-rich northeast. But while almost every step in India offers some kind of intense experience, nothing was as riveting as that morning along the water in Varanasi.

After walking to the ghat, my wife Miranda and I were rowed along the river, with all the other tourists. The bathers with their skinny legs and baggy drawers lined the shore steps.

"The water is very clean, very clean," said our cheerful guide Ajay Singh, scooping up a handful to drink and press against his face.

A few oar-strokes later, we passed the floating carcass of a goat — a ritual sacrifice and another reminder that Varanasi's ancient traditions fly in the face of modern rules of sanitation and public health.

If you go India: For our trip, we stayed at the Taj chain of hotels, which are luxurious by any standard. We relied heavily on guides, drivers, and other helpers. Even if you don't want to be coddled, a guide is a wonderful resource in a country with thousands of years of religious, cultural, and ethnic history. A guidebook, even a stack of guidebooks, can't explain everything you're seeing. For our money, there was no greater guide in Varanasi (or the whole trip) than Ajay Singh, who can be reached at siddharthajay@rediffmail.com. As a general rule of thumb, labor in India is cheap, so a taxi, rickshaw, or service is often very affordable. Space, and high-end items however — like a fully-equipped, air conditioned hotel room — are often not. In our case, we paid about U.S. $2,800 (euro1,780) for a 10-day trip for two that included a boat tour of the Ganges, the temples at Sarnath, Khajuraho, and Orchha, hotels, breakfasts, guides, drivers and ground transportation. Airfare was additional.

Upriver and downriver, cremation fires burned continuously. Hundreds are cremated each day. Those who can afford it are burned in pyres of banyan wood that weigh close to 800 pounds (360 kilograms) each. For the less wealthy, there is an electric crematorium. The government has outlawed the old practice of dumping bodies directly into the river.

The never-ending funeral takes center stage at Varanasi, but walk 20 yards past the burning pyre and you're quickly lost in the bustle of merchants, customers, cows, and schoolchildren squeezing through the narrow shop lanes.

In India, even the most everyday details can be jarring to a Westerner. A downtown store takes the religious honor accorded cows to a new level. A huge bull lies lazily in the middle of a pashmina shop, as customers on either side peer at the displays.

A short drive from Varanasi is Sarnath, where Buddha — The Buddha — preached his first sermon in the sixth century B.C. The brick ruins of Buddha's temple look out over the stupa, a 100-foot (30-meter) high circle of dark stone. From Varanasi, it is a short flight to the village of Khajuraho, known for sandstone temples filled with erotically explicit statues.

Many of the central carvings around the temples show sex acts, including one that would require an extremely strong left leg. One theory is that the erotic carvings were made to demonstrate the Kama Sutra to the illiterate. The best time to walk around the temples is late afternoon, when softer light hits the sandstone. It may be a contradiction, but the collection of sexually charged statues was probably the most peaceful and calming place we visited in India.

Khajuraho is small, but the riverside town of Orchha is smaller. We went there to get away from the big cities and see some of the countryside along the way to the Taj Mahal.

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We hired a car to take us on the four-hour journey there. The road runs through vast, empty fields of yellow-flowered mustard seed plants. In these rural stretches, plenty of people still use centuries-old farming traditions like burning cow manure as fuel. Often, the cow pies are stacked in neat concentric circles resembling stubby brown Christmas trees.

In Orchha, we stayed in a hotel tucked underneath the ruins of a temple. We decided to skip an actual room and opted instead for a large, two-room tent in the shadow of one of the temples. It's not for everyone, but I enjoyed sacking out inside cloth walls, listening to the night noises of India. My wife? Not so much. Too many dogs fighting, she said.

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