Tubs’ Travels

Crumbs, after only 3 days in Varanasi, I started to get cabin fever. In the central quarter the streets are tiny, you can literally touch opposite walls by stretching out your hands each way. They are filled with funeral processions (complete with the deceased on stretchers), tourists, touts, holy men, beggars, cows, monkeys, dogs, excrement everywhere, and motorcycles barging through.

Once you do break through to the bigger streets, they are teaming with cars, motorcycles and cycle rickshaws all hooting. People barge, touts and beggars hassle, desperate cycle rickshaw wallas follow in the hope of a job. There seems no reprieve from the madness.

This is all at 40c, with no breeze.

Suffice to say, Mrs Kingsley thrives in this world, where there is much shopping to be done, strictly between the hours of 12 and 4pm when the City is at its hottest, dustiest and noisiest.

The town is the filthiest I have visited in my whole life… people throw their rubbish into the streets for the cows to eat, complete with plastic bags, and everything else you can think of. The thought of drinking milk here became highly unpalatable!

A Cow in the Street in Varanasi

We stuck to bottled water, but it didn’t take us long to dawn that the restaurants are cooking with water from the Ganga… the very same river you see carrying the leftovers from the funeral pires!

Worse still, the Hindu Times ran a story on how most of the bottled water in Varanasi is made in illegal plants, where the safety standards and filtering processes aren’t followed!

It was only a matter of time before I got horribly sick, a vicious cycle which added to the complications for getting out of my least favourite destination to date. Suffice to say, I was in a real state, confined to bed for the best part of three days. Kelle was amazing, and went straight to the pharmacist, who instantly sold her some superduper medicine, which worked a treat!

India is wonderfully devoid of any enforced Health and Safety regulations, and especially so Varanasi. Loose power cabling hangs low over the streets, and serves to provide the monkey population with a means for crossing the streets. There are holes in the street everywhere… No one gives a hoot about cleanliness… yet it all feels satisfyingly refreshing against the over the top rules and regulations in play in the UK and USA. I went for a shave in the barber across from our guesthouse yesterday… a fresh razor was proudly presented to me, but the hygiene standards were otherwise challenge to us westerners… the place was grimy; the same, unwashed shaving brush and towel used for all customers; the lack of any lighting all made for an experience which challenged and yet delighted me in equal measures. If I die of a rare blood condition, you’ll know know why

By the end of our 11 day stay, we were eating only bananas and packaged crisps…