India, Varansai

Travel in India is both hard and rewarding. It often seems that the entire country has mobilized to keep you from your destination and that no matter how hard you might try, the bus you are on is the wrong one and stops a few kilometers short. Then without explanation everything suddenly works just right and you find yourself right where you wanted to be. Nothing is easy and most everything is rewarding, if only for the challenge of having done it.

Several weeks ago we arrived in Varanasi. As we got off of the bus we were confronted with the usual normal swarm of people asking where we wanted to go. We knew better than to give them the name of a Hotel (if we had they would have tried to collect a commission and the price of our room would have gone up.) Instead we asked to go to a place called

Dasaswamed ghat. The driver agreed and off we went. We arrived to find a large yellow and black government sign letting us know that we had arrived. Up and down the street were signs of other hotels including the one we wanted call home. However, when we went in, we were told that the hotel was full but that they had opened another hotel and there was room there. The hotel we were taken to was great and the price was right.

There was only one problem. We always seemed to have trouble getting back. When ever we would ask for directions to Dasaswamed ghat we would be pointed in a different direction. It took several days to make sense of this but we had been "had".

The government sign that said Dasaswamed ghat was a fake, as were the signs for the other hotels on the street. The reason that we could never find our way back was because we were about 1 kilometer south of the real Dasaswamed ghat.

It would be easy to be bitter about this but when we looked at other hotels it became clear that we had done much better then if we had not been scammed. From the roof of our hotel we watched the continuous stream of bodies being bathed and then burned so that there ashes could be sent down the Ganges river.

I took pictures of the signs for both the real and almost real ghats but those pictures were the victim of another scam and will never be seen.

I hope that this email finds everyone doing well.