This Post Contains Disturbing Things...You Have Been Warned!

We had booked to go on a boat ride at sunrise on the river Ganges so we left our hotel at 4.30am and headed for the river bank. It was completely dark outside and in order to get to the meeting place we had to get a rickshaw and then walk through dark alleys whilst trying to avoid gangs of fighting dogs and humongous oxen with massive horns that took up almost the whole width of the alleyway. It was like a deadly assault course! Once we got there a man who had clearly abused opium for many years (you can tell by the slurred speech and glazed eyes) led us to a concrete platform by the river and told us we'd 'probably' be safe there for a bit while he tried to find other people to go on the boat with us. Whilst we waited we were asked about 700 times by locals whether we wanted to buy a boat ride.

Waiting at dawn on the banks of the river

A man casually asleep and snoring very loudly.

The opium man came back alone and told us to get on a dilapidated wooden boat with a man wearing nothing but a shirt wrapped round his waist instead of trousers. He rowed us out along the banks of the river and the sun started to rise bathing the city in an amber glow - it was beautiful. After all the dirt and hassle we could finally appreciate the city's amazing architecture; although it has been left to rot and has crumbled over time it is a fantastic sight to see. It is a filthy river and we have been told it contains all sorts of things; faeces, every bodily fluid you can imagine, ashes of people that have been cremated and even the dead bodies of the people whose family were too poor to buy wood to burn them!!! Along the banks of the river Ganges we saw a lot of things, things I will never forget until the day I die: people washing themselves all over in the brown water and even brushing their teeth in it straight after urinating in it, a dead buffalo slumped against a boat with milky eyes that stared at us, dogs mating, monkeys fighting on rooftops and by far the most disturbing...a dog eating bits of pink flesh from a whole human corpse. We went straight back to our hotel when the boat ride was over at 6.30am and we agreed that we didn't need to leave our hotel again for the next day and a half until our train because we had seen enough!

The infamous River Ganges.

Sunrise.

You can see the way that the buildings go right to the edge of the water.

Most Varanasi residents 'wash' in the Ganges every morning.

This is the same burning ghat we saw from above the day before. There is a man in the water blatantly waiting to collect any gold jewellery that may happen to fall off the bodies when they get put in the river! In front of the families!

Yes, this is what you think it is...

We slept all day and emerged to eat some food at a nearby upmarket hotel; for dessert we shared deep fried ribbon noodles glazed with honey and sesame seeds served with ice cream. On our way back to our hotel room one of the staff members ushered us towards the lift - he was clutching a large spoon which, bizarrely, he used to open the lift door. We were stifling laughter about this as we travelled up and at that very moment the hotel had a power cut (very common in India, happens around five times a day) and everything went dark as the lift jolted to a halt. We were suspended in the tiny lift for a good few minutes in complete darkness with this weird man holding a massive spoon!

The next day we had time to kill before our 11pm train and we decided to meet up with the student we had met on the train as he'd offered to show us around the university. Varanasi university is very famous and is the largest in India. We stepped out of our hotel into the stifling heat and were surrounded by continuous, manic horn honking and pushy rickshaw drivers. We were feeling miserable and wanted to leave India! This is the very nature of travelling in India I have found; one minute you are on top of the world and loving life and the next minute you'd do anything to leave and Varanasi did its best to make us feel the latter. Once we got to the uni our friend let us ride on the back of his scooter and for hours we drove around the massive grounds. People were staring at us as usual but it was different this time - they were all smiling at us! The sight of two female westerners on the back of the scooter was obviously amusing to them and our friend is probably famous on that campus now! It was a lovely sunny day and we had such a great time driving around, especially between the lush green fields of the agriculture faculty, and we were finally loving India again!

Temple on university campus.

Agriculture faculty.

On the scooter!!