Back to India! First goal: Varanasi, formerly called Benares.
From the Nepalese border, we take local buses. We are the only whites and the people seem more amused, especially since the bus is full and we are sitting on our bags in the driveway. A taxi, two buses and three rickshaws later, here we are arrived in the sacred city. Ten hours to cover three hundred kilometers, or thirty kilometers an hour on average.
From our hotel on the banks of the Ganges, we observe the spectacle of ritual ablutions, snake charmers and children playing in the water. Our guide calls the Ganges poisonous so we do not like them. In the evening we attend the “Puja”, the religious ceremony on the ghats (quays) of the Ganges. The ritual is very precise and the gestures really graceful and millimetric.
Near our hotel is the main burning ghât. It is the place where one burns the bodies on buchers to purify them. Pregnant women children, or dead by cobra bites are thrown directly into the water. We are sometimes surprised to see people floating around.
Inside the city, it’s another kind of show. It’s a kind of permanent Lille clearance sale. Of course, we are offered all kinds of drugs. But drugs are the devil. Not good, it can make you sick.
But Sylvain does not need drugs for that, just a good bacteria. After a few visits to the toilet (nothing unusual in India) he staggers, yellow: “Francis, call a doctor, it’s okay, I do not go down to the toilet, I have more strength.” Not easy with forty of the Turkish toilet on the ground floor. François helps him drag himself to the hotel next door, in a luxury room with integrated western toilets. Some medications, a good night’s sleep and a day in bed and Sylvain is on his feet. Just in time to catch our train to Calcutta.