[ Varanasi ]
I’ve been going completely stir-crazy for a while now. Twelve or more hours each day spent working on website minutiae starts getting to you after a while (no no, not quite finished yet, but getting within striking distance). Solution: take two days off. No laptop. Not even once the first day, and only in the evening the second day–to browse and edit these photos.
A break is a gooooood thing.
DAY 25: I wandered for 6.5 hours through parts of Varanasi away from the river. No tourists. Just me (mostly). The truth is that I was completely lost for three of those hours, and that was precisely what I was hoping for.
I played in traffic, was yelled at by police, befriended a pig, stumbled across The Evil Empire (a McDonald’s at the downtown mall!), saw the Indian version of soccer moms dancing to Akon & Snoop Dog at a kiddie birthday party, overheard some talking birds, and eventually ended up at Dasaswamedh ghat for the daily sunset festivities.
I also took a couple of pictures.
DAY 26: dawn on the Ganges River. Crappy weather. Floodwaters and laundry (but not in the floodwaters, I promise).
That’s about that. I hope you enjoy what will likely be the final post on Varanasi before I leave in three days for New Delhi. From there, I catch a flight to Beijing, and…who knows what awaits us when we arrive??
Namaste,
Om Shanti,
Etc, etc.,
—jim
(Original Post on Facebook here, with per-image commentary.)
