New Year's in India's City of Light
It's been a long time since our last post! We've been busy with visitors here -- Beth's brother Robert and his wife Laura came out to visit us among other folks. We traveled together to Varanasi to spend New Year's on the Ganges.
We thought the idea of getting away from the chaos of Bombay for New Year's sounded great -- little did we know how far we were going. Our guesthouse overlooking the holy Ganges allowed no alcohol or meat. The ghats (stepped riverfront areas), crowded in the daytime, turn into a ghost town at night. The management of the guesthouse liked to lock the gates at 10:30pm. Basically, it felt like we were in rehab.
But sober and day-lit is probably the best way to apprehend Varanasi. It's an incredibly intense experience, with women washing clothes in the Ganges alongside praying pilgrims, kids flying kites next to mourners and burning funeral pyres. We wandered all over the ghats, took a sunrise boat ride, and generally witnessed life and death in the City of Light.
When we would retreat to our guesthouse for the evening, the cards would come out, marathon rounds of Hearts would commence, and Robert would mop the floor with the rest of us, shooting the moon every ten minutes. And that is how we spent New Year's Eve -- deeply concentrating on our hands, taking a short break to see some fireworks from the guesthouse rooftop, then back to the battle. While no pictoral evidence of the carnage remains, we have plenty of photos of Varanasi itself.
See our shots of this gorgeous, challenging, joyous city -- on Flickr here.
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