Day 19 - 21 Agra to Varanasi

Akbar's Tomb North of Agra

Adios Taj

Tundla Train Station sleeping arrangements

Over night train to Varanasi 

The Ganges

Small children contracting Cholera

Stocks of firewood for the funeral pyres

Day 19

Sal still not fully recovered so we decided to take a visit to the doc. After telling our driver we wanted to go to the shiniest, best, most expensive hospital in Agra..something got lost in translation and we ended up in a side street clinic, after 5 minutes of broken English we discovered that Dr Vina was in fact a Yoga doctor. A quick verbal smack around the head and we were off again, we eventually made it to a gen Doc and Sally was soon throwing antibiotics and other assorted medication down her neck. Just in the nick of time as she diagnosed herself as ' weak as a kitten'..thank you Dr Rees.

Afternoon led us to the hope of a decent toilet and Akbar's tomb. Akbar was the grandson of Barbar (great great grandson of Dennis the magnificent) who originally conquered India and started the Mughal dynasty. He was a pretty big deal and decided to build himself a rather large tomb, pic above.

Night time saw us leave Agra and make our way out to Tundla where our train departed for Varanasi. We booked ourselves a 1AC cabin which was supposed to be equivalent to  flying business class....lets just say this wasn't quite the case and i hope BA don't have gaffer taped windows and complimentary cockroaches on their London City to Paris flights! 

Day 20

Sleep wasn't too bad, but unfortunately we woke to find the train had become 3 hours late during our slumber. Apparently this was not as bad as the day before when the same train had been 6 hours late and the train in the opposite direction was 12 hours late.

Day 21

3 weeks! A morning city tour which took in 5 of the apparently 33000 temples in Varanasi with our new driver Vijay - limited English so lets hope no one gets ill.

Visit to the Ghats (riverside steps leading into the Ganges) in the afternoon. A wander down the eternal river saw people washing their buffalo, swimming, drinking water, cleaning clothes, funeral pyres, boat building, sleeping, people watching and that was all in the first 100 m. The river is reported to be so heavily polluted in parts that the water is actually septic but this does not seem to bother the local folk who see their daily lives and the river inextricably linked. 

The burning Ghats are where families bring their loved ones to be cremated. Varanasi is seen as the ultimate place to expire so one can be liberated from the cycle of life and death..with over 1 bn people you can imagine there is quite a queue for the fires and we saw about 6 bodies in half an hour. The locals claim around 300-400 bodies are burnt every day. As gruesome as it sounds it was fairly relaxing and dare i say spiritual to see and we might even buy ourselves some baggy hippy trousers now we have found ourselves.

0500 reveille for a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges.