Varanasi

This morning, we had our last rooftop peanut butter honey toast and chai in Jaipur, and then ubered to the airport. As we missed out on the 1AC and 2AC train tickets for the 20hr journey to Varanasi, we decided to splash out and fly. After taking so many trains in India, it was a really nice break to step onto a plane for a 2hr flight (instead of a bumpy and grueling 20hr train ride in 3AC or sleeper class).

We arrived to check into our guesthouse to find our host standing in the entrance in his underwear, doing his daily 10min prayer to the sun god. In the past, we would've found this very strange, but we've seen our fair share of odd things that this didn't phase us.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the ghats, eating dosa and watching the ganga aarti.

On our last day in Varanasi, we walked up to the famous Blue Lassie shop - on the way, we met two young men who were in Varanasi for their interviews to join the army. They joined us for lassi, which we had while watching families walking past carrying bodies to be cremated at Manikarnika Ghat. We next went to Manikarnika Ghat, which is a 24/7 cremation ground. This was a really interesting place to visit, which for us was unfortunately tainted by us getting scammed. A man approached us, claiming to work at the crematorium, and gave us some information and a quick tour. While the information was interesting, he then asked that we make a donation towards helping the poor to cremate their families. We were happy to donate some money, but then were told it was 600 rupees (about NZ$12) per kilogram of wood. They insisted that we donated by the kilo, but we only gave them what cash we had on us, which was about 1500 rupees (aboht NZ$30). We should have listened to the gut feeling we had, which was that this was a scam and walked away. I'm not sure why we didn't, it might be because we've been travelling for so long, combined with India being the most challenging place we've been, that we let our guard down. We returned to our guesthouse and our host said the entire thing is a scam and the money never goes to the poor. The only positive of this is that in over 300 days of travel, this is only the third (and hopefully last) time someone has successfully scammed us.Читать далее