We arrived in Varanasi an hour late – at 9:30 instead of 8:30. We arried at the Gateway Hotel in Varanasi just in time for a bit of breakfast. None of us had really slept on the train. We were discussing this morning how it was strangely quiet on the train last night. There is so much noise everywhere in India, but on the train, everyone was asleep early.
We had a little bit of rest time between breakfast and our first tour of the city. Grayson, Mic and Laura had a little nap, and Mic and Jane went out to the pool for a little while.
Our first stop on the city tour was the Temple of the Mother of India. It was created in the 1930s to allow people to worship their country. It has no religious significance. There is a huge relief map of India made out of marble, that took 8 years to create. You can see the Himalayan Mountains, Pakistan, Burma Sri Lanka and other surrounding countries. It’s amazing the things that people make out of marble.
A visit to the Hindu University was up next. Indian Universities (or at least this one) are much different than Canadian Universities. We consider a university a place to study. The only people that really frequent a university are the people that study there and maybe some of their other friends or parents. This university had shops in it, a temple, families, some of them obviously not relatives of those going to university. Many people were camped out on the campus grounds, selling postcards and other items.
During the subsequent walking city tour, it started to rain really hard! We were walking through Old Varanasi, when we had to take cover in a few different stores. They were pretty good about not bugging us to buy anything. The rain did not stop for several hours and the roads were flooded – so much so that our driver could not drive down the street. Many people tried and flooded their vehicles. It was a little scary because their electrical wires are not nicely tucked away on poles (look back at pictures of day 1 if you need a reminder). I envisioned an electrical wire falling into the now-river and reducing the population of India by about 5000. It was pretty wild! Now that we have had that experience, we are good for the rest of our lives. It’s the sort of thing that you really only need to see once.
We reached our hotel with just enough time to have dinner before they closed. We had to get into our little beds right away because we had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. the next day to go to the Ganges River.
