August 6 - India: Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh to Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Today wasn't very exciting - it was a travel day. We slept in at the Greenwood in Khajuraho, ordered room service and packed up our stuff. We're feeling much better than we have for days, although I'm sure the staff here thinks we're a bit loony for coming all this way just to sleep. But - as Jon says - "Who cares? We'll never see them again!"
Our ride to the airport came at 2:45, and we piled our stuff in. This was a funny ride, because the airport is - quite literally - down the lane and across the street. But we'd arranged an airport transfer from Delhi and By God we were going to use it. The airport is very, very, VERY small and receives two flights a day at the most. There was an India Airlines office there, so Jon stopped in just to see if there were any openings in the flights from Varanasi to Kathmandu. We're not at all looking forward to the two-day bus ride, and we're more upset about wasting two days in travel. Especially after having been bed-ridden for 3 days. Good luck is on our side today, because there are seats available on the 9th of August. The agent told us that we would need to book it out of Varanasi, because he didn't have the facilities to ticket us.
So we hopped on the plane at 3:45, which touched down for the 20 minutes it took for us to get on and then we were off! We landed in Varanasi an hour later at 4:45 and Jon bolted to the India Airlines office to get tickets before it closed at 5:00. Apparently, the staff there wasn't in any hurry to get home because it took them 15 minutes per ticket to complete our transaction. But we're booked and happy because now we don't have to take the bus.
Varanasi
Our guide, Raju, was very happy to see us and is quite a cheery guy. He quizzed us on what we knew about Varanasi as we drove the 30 minutes from the airport into town. Varanasi is considered one of the holiest places in India. Hindu pilgrims come to the sacred Ganges to bathe, a ritual which washes away all sins (and all sanitization - a recent faecal count was measured at 250,000 times the World Health Organization safe permitted maximum!). The city has a number of names, including the City of Shiva, Benares, and Kashi. Among Hindu pilgrims, this is the best place to die since it ensures release from the cycle of rebirths and an instant passport to heaven. These rituals of washing and death apparently take place on the city's famous ghats, which we are to see tomorrow.
Varanasi claims to be one of the oldest cities in the world at 2000 years old. Mark Twain once said about it "Benares is older than history, older than tradition, order even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." I might agree with him.
We checked into the India Hotel in the Cantonment area. The hotel is relatively nice, but we're used to the sterile cleanliness of the Hotel Greenwood in Khajuraho. We weren't that excited about getting back into the "older" hotels where the room smells old and musty. But the rooms were nice and cold, and the beds comfortable. The restaurant in the hotel - the Palm Springs - was very yummy too.
After dinner, we walked outside to find an Internet Cafe. Unfortunately, it IS monsoon season and it just so happened to be monsooning at that particular time. So we went back to the room to wait out the downpour. While we were waiting, the lights went out. Completely. But the rain had stopped so we headed out on the dark, wet streets. It seems that the lights were out all over the place, and this is not an unusual occurrence. All the shopkeepers and vendors had their candles out and it was business as usual. Except for the Internet Cafes, of course. So we bought water and headed back to the hotel. There, the lights came back on and then went out again. It's inexplicable, but quite normal.