Varanasi features prominently in the film Baraka, which dramatically displays its trademark: the holy Ganges River where seemingly all of India comes to bathe while at the same time bodies get cremated. With these distinct characteristics and traditional charm, Varanasi is quite an alluring gem and a truly special place.

We stayed in a guesthouse right on the river surrounded by the old city. The area’s roads are a tangled complex of alleyways too narrow for cars or autorickshaws. Fearing we’d get lost, we called our guesthouse to pick us up around 7AM from the train station when we arrived. After taking an autorickshaw as far as it would go, we followed our guide through the maze. As we rounded the last corner, we suddenly came upon a blinding orange and pink sunrise and its reflection shimmering in the wide Ganges. It was so beautiful!

On the first day we just slept all afternoon since our journey from Nepal had been so exhausting. We made sure we locked our doors and windows because monkeys roam the rooftops and try to come in. At one point one we could hear one grabbing our doorknob, growling, pushing, and pulling! Yikes. They also kept me awake til 4AM later in the week one night screeching and jumping on a tree outside our window. It drove me freaking crazy.

The next day after some exploring, we got our bearings. Varanasi is situated only on the west side of the river and is lined by bathing platforms called “ghats.” There are also burning ghats were the dead are cremated. The 80 or so named and owned ghats spread out along a 7km stretch, and you can easily walk all the way down. The ghats are sort of giant staircases with several platforms here and there, and all kinds of people come to bathe, pray, exercise, do laundry, fly kites, hang out, buy and sell prayer offerings, and anything else you can imagine.

Dasaswamedh Ghat is the busiest, and the crazy looking painted white sadhus (Hindu holymen) spend their time there performing rituals, blessing people, and smoking a lot of hash.

Our guesthouse was very close to Manikarnika burning ghat. For Hindus, dying in Varanasi liberates them from the otherwise endless cycle of life and death. And being cremated at the river is a big deal. We couldn’t take any photos or video, but I’d never seen anything like it. At all hours of the day, cloth-wrapped bodies decorated with marigold wreaths are run down (sometimes accompanied by music and dancing), and bathed in the water before being set aflame. As you walk in any of the alleyways remotely close to the ghat you’ll often have to jump aside as the procession jogs past you. At first it was sort of horrifying, but after a couple of days it became more interesting than unsettling. There are enormous piles of wood around the ghat and on boats in the water. Outcasts are employed to weigh the special wood in order to determine the price to burn a corpse. At one time I counted 12 bodies burning on the ghat. For me it’s this ritual that makes Varanasi so eerie and surreal.

Besides winding through the alleys and walking down the ghats, we took a sunrise and a sunset boat trip. In the glowing morning light many people bathe and offer their morning prayers called puja to riverside shrines, and at night we joined thousands to watch a river worship ceremony at Dasaswamedh Ghat. On one of the rides another tourist said to all of us, “I assume everyone’s read the guidebook. Don’t touch the water!” The Lonely Planet mentions that the water has become so polluted that it contains no dissolved oxygen and is actually septic. 30 sewers dump out right into the 7km stretch of ghats. The contamination of fecal bacteria is 3000 times above the safe limit for bathing! Kevin and I just couldn’t understand how everyday 60,000 people can drink and wash themselves with water that is hideous for their health. Do they think about that? Do they care? What do they think of people like us who would rather do a million things before submerging a tiny fingernail? I can only conclude that it’s a fundamental, deep-rooted difference in belief. The people bathing believe so strongly that the river purifies them that the idea of getting a disease is not even a concept. But I could never wash in the Ganges without being disgusted, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it is a sacred place and that’s all that matters. Although in my college anthropology courses we constantly studied such concepts, coming face to face with them in reality is still mind blowing.

Sacred and dreamlike Varanasi reminded us exactly why we came to this country: there is no place else like it. We can’t think of a better introduction to the vast Indian subcontinent.

To see all the pictures from Varanasi, visit the gallery.