Vanarasi, city of life or city of Shiva, is one of the holiest places in India, where Hindu pilgrims come to wash in the Ganges or cremate their regretted relatives!
I first met my CS host Tarun who picked me up in the train station with his motorcycle the 30th at 8am. Not so easy to stay stable on the crappy roads with a backpack of almost 20kg! Later, I met Devashish, another CS guy who give me some tips about a daily trip in the city.
I quite follow his recommendations and spent the whole day going around the temple and Ghats, these temples along the Gange. If the monsoon ended 2 months ago, the Ganges is still too high to walk on the river side. So I was more in the narrow streets in the city, going to some major Ghats. I saw body cremation in Harishchandra and Manikarnika Ghats; took a bath in the Ganges close to Kedar Ghat where I met some Indian tourists; walked to the narrow streets up to the Vishwanath Gali “golden temple” where I met the same Indian guys again; almost got lost the way back until the “ganga aarti” ceremony in Dasaswamedh Ghat.
Seeing all this is quite emotional, picturesque and tragic at once, you feel the spiritualism around. A feeling that I got in the golden temple in Amritsar as well!
The day after (1st of October), Tarun brought me to the big new Vishwanath temple in the middle of the university campus, and later arranged a rickshaw for me until the train station. My train was actually at 6pm, letting enough time for a trip in Sarnath, 10km north from Varanasi.
Buddha came to Sarnath and gave his first sermon there. The place is then a holy Buddhist destination. Original temples were however destroyed by the Mughals, but many temples were built in the 20th century. These new temples were the most interesting point for me, appreciating the architecture differences between the Chinese, Tibetan, Japan, Thai and Burmese Buddhist temples! I could recognize the characteristics seen earlier in these countries: like in Mongolia and Ladakh, the Tibetan temple was arranged for monks on the side, while many pictures of the Dalai Lama were hanged on. The Thai are it seems always fan of the big Buddha statues. The Japanese style was however completely new for me and maybe the one I liked the most, very fine in the decoration!
As I suspected, the ruins of the older temples are not that impressive, and are probably more interesting for Buddhist people! Many Chinese groups were praying there…