Beautiful Pokhara to deadly Varanasi

So we find ourselves on a Golden Tours bus at 7am bound for Pokhara. The journey is to take at least 7 hrs (it took 8) & we get a free lunch & AC (which consisted of a couple of weak air vents above our heads). However, as we left so early we didn’t experience the heat of the day & had an enjoyable ride with Golden Tours Travel buses (rival of Green line in Nepal) After being totally “had” at the bustop in Pokhara (a tout took us to his boss’s hotel, which we ended up staying in for one night at an inflated price) we found a really lovely little hotel/guesthouse at the end of the stretch of the lakeside hotel area for a tiny bit less money but with constant hot water! (A real luxury we’ve already learned from looking at various hotels in Pokhara) The best thing about this place so far is that you can actually see the Annapurna mountain range every morning pretty clearly at sunrise. It’s such an incredible site, partly I think because we haven’t really seen any really high mountain ranges yet except for when we were on the plane from India to Kathmandu when we saw Everest & the whole mountain range parallel to the plane. It was pretty outstanding to think that people were currently on this mountain climbing to the same altitude as that which we were currently at. The town of Pokhara is idyllic and the whole place surrounds a huge lake which appears to be quite clean! This place is driven by tourism however, so souvenir & trekking shops abound while lazy holiday makers spend the hot hours in cyber cafes & restaurants & the trekking enthusiasts head off to the Annapurna Mountains in the early hrs. The place is totally geared for outdoor activities & you can spend a heap o’money here doing what you will. We had a great time rowing and trekking up to the World Peace Pagoda this early morning & then had a rather crappy time biking on utterly useless broken mountain bikes cycling against all odds to view the outlying areas this way. We got to see another side of Pokarah however which was great & also visited the the Devi’s Falls and Gupteshwor Mahadev Cave. Our evenings in Pokarah were generally spent on the lovely leafy cool balcony of our guest house after catching a usually pretty good meal at one of the lakeside restaurants. Our time in Pokarah as in Kathmandu had slowed to a near halt it seemed after the intense start to our trip. So after walking around for hrs in Old Pokarah one day we decided to leave on a bus headed for Sunauli, one of the borders to India. We got the tickets for a local bus and were off the next day. We had NO idea what we were in for! It all started innocently enough. We got on the 6.30am bus bound for Bhairawa from where we’d get a rickshaw across the border to India. Then we’d either get a bus to the train station & from there get a train to Varanasi, or we’d got get there via an 8 hr bus ride. This first bus was extremely small & the seats were hard as hell. Because there was no suspension & the roads were hairaisingly high, winding & bumpy. The driving of course was extreme & we came across a couple of accidents along the way, one a head on collision on a bend. They career around these turns at breakneck speed with only a tooting horn to warn an on coming vehicle. It’s like a game of Russian roulette. At one point you WILL have to swerve….somewhere. If you’re lucky you’re not on a cliff edge when you do. Anyway---Finally we arrived at the border of India where we completed our visa exit forms & walked over the border into a filthy dusty Indian border town of Sunauli. I don’t mean to sound clichéd but it was the teeming seeringly hot India we’d left a couple of weeks before & I think we were all a bit overwhelmed again. We waited a few hrs after taking some foul food at a roadside restaurant for a bus to Varanasi to depart. At 4.30pm. We took of very slowly through this hot messy town & embarked upon our perilous journey of the day. I was feeling not too bad at this point but proceeded to go downhill as the journey progressed. Dave too was not exactly happy. People hopped on & off the bus throughout the trip. They would cram into the bus shouting & pushing up against Dave & myself who were already very constricted with backpacks on our laps & beneath our feet. I noticed I was beginning to fill pretty nauseous which isn’t like me at all. As the hrs ticked by I’d resorted to clutching a plastic bag as I was sure I would vomit any second. And finally….I did! I had to throw the full bag from the window. No one batted an eyelid & I felt pretty good for a while until it started to come upon me again & this time I felt that other things were going on as well. I managed to hold on until the next toilet break when I walked swiftly to an area where some rickshaw drivers were sleeping peacefully & did what I had to do. I managed to hold it all together until we finally reached the guesthouse where we wanted to stay & ended up vomiting profusely over the stoop of the establishment clutching feverishly onto the wall for support. It was dark by this time & I’d no idea what I was stepping in or where I was. The next 18hrs were a development on this living hell. The only room available for that night was basically a small hot cave with Indian toilet & no windows. Yes-no windows (it was around 86 degrees at night). The fan worked intermittently as did the electricity. Hence my night was basically just a back & forth to the bathroom illuminated sometimes by flashlight & sometimes by a harsh fluorescent light. I didn’t feel better until the evening of the next day. Dave managed to get us a room with windows & a western toilet & by the next day I was raring to go. We were not disappointed by the burning ghats of the river Ganges. We saw more than enough burning bodies & more disturbing than these were the corpses that washed up to the opposite bank in various states of decomposition. The dogs would line up along the shoreline waiting for the bodies to drift in. Birds too were waiting to feast if they hadn’t already. I have never seen such a morbid site. The bodies which are tossed into the water are those who are Sadu’s, leprosy victims, pregnant women, babies & those who have died from a cobra bite. All these are considered “holy” & cannot be burned on the pyre. It seems incredibly “unholy” watching the birds & dogs devour these disgusting bloated rotting humans. I mean what a way to end! However the soul has supposedly left the carcass by this time so I guess it doesn’t matter!! This was illustrated in a particularly morbid fashion when a guy just tossed a little bundle (baby) from a boat with a rock attached while he laughed & joked with his buddies. It was truly shocking I must say. It’s a pretty hard thing to get ones head around seeing the most horrifically disfigured, rotting corpses bobbing in the water by a child who is playing happily with a homemade boat inches away. All bizarre stuff but worth the trip to Varanasi for sure. We’ve been staying in our first true backpackers guesthouse recommended in the LPG. I’m not usually interested in staying at these kind of places but am surprised to find that it’s actually a great place to stay in such a place as Varanasi where it’s pretty stressful most of the time as there are very few places that you can dive into to escape the heat if you’re out & about. So having large cool balcony to hang out on is a great respite. It’s also interesting to experience this mysterious backpacker world for a bit. As though we ARE backpacking I don’t truly consider ourselves as “true backpackers” as the accommodation we are staying in goes beyond dormitories & camping & our time spent away is relatively short. The people at this place vary somewhat though there are a large amount of hippy “drifters”. They have sometimes been traveling around for a year or more & there seems to be a certain “competitive” edge amongst them as to who’s been away the longest. They stay in these hostels really cheaply for months at a time slowly planning their next move. They may try & earn a little money here & there cherry picking or whatever is needed in the country they’re at. I guess they must have been pretty sick of home to be bumming around like this. It’s different if they’re in their “gap year” as it’s just a kind of long backpacking holiday then & they have a return ticket. There are other older travelers too who are traveling alone & have their own individual stories as to why they’ve taken off on such a long venture. S’all quite interesting. Varanasi is a different city to any Indian city we’ve been in so far. It is easy to get lost very fast as the streets are very narrow (the width of one water buffalo I realized yesterday as a group of them came banging along the road & we had to jump into a “store” to escape being trampled) And they are laid out in a maze-like network. Tiny store fronts line the streets selling the usual fair from tripe to toilet paper. The roads are filthier than any I’ve seen partly because of the huge amounts of mangy dogs, cows & buffalo that defecate where they stand/lie. However, the heat IS a bit much plus we need to keep on schedule a bit. So we get a ticket after a few days for a day train 3AC to Lucknow. Something to look forward to again. But I know the train ride won’t be as bad as the previous bus rides. Oh I forgot to mention, we also ended up going to The Heritage Hospital in Varanasi in order to get some antibiotics for an incredibly severe attack of mosquito bites which I’d been blessed with during our bus ride from the border to Varanasi. People literally stop & ask me “what happened?”---I am pretty ashamed of my disgusting legs at this point. The hospital seemed pretty ok but of course I felt bad being rushed ahead of everyone in the full waiting rooms just because we had the cash in hand & I guess were paying quadruple what an Indian would pay. Another tourist we met here was admitted for two nights because she was so dehydrated from 40hrs of diarrhea. Luckily the Dr just gave me a couple of prescriptions & proceeded to chat about what we should do in Varanasi. The whole “consultation” had been bizarre & basically consisted of him talking on the phone to someone & then talking to his wife for 10 minutes as she burst into the office a couple of times pretty upset about something. He never apologized to us and this seemed the normal way of things so I made sure I told him what the problem was & he took a quick look at my legs, wrote a couple of prescriptions & that was that. He was really more interested in telling us about his wife’s interest in moving to Mumbai & how great the Wildlife Park is in Varanasi. Anyway----it was all in all an “interesting” experience & my eaten up limbs are beginning to feel a bit better today. shall be heading there tomorrow via a 7 hr train journey from Varanasi coach train terminal at 11.55am. This time we managed to get a 3 AC which’ll hopefully be ok