City of Life

I can see why you might not like Varanasi. You're sitting in Blue Lassi (Lonely Planet's Number one lassi in all Varanasi, this means that it has wifi and has priced itself out of the market with the locals. As a tangential aside, this is the first place I've been where lassis are served in a bowl with garnish and a spoon - so pretty much a dessert rather than a drink. For the record, whilst it was a pretty good lassi, I think the Lassiwala lassi in Jaipur was probably better. Look at me being all traditional liking the drinking lassi. These brackets have gone on a while, haven't they? Should probably get to the main narrative rather than chatting about yoghurt. Where were we? Sitting in Blue Lassi) when a dead body goes past. I can see how that might be disconcerting.

I had it on pretty good authority that I was going to hate it. That the whole city was spectacularly dirty, the Ganges was a grey colour, that you would get hounded by touts and that all of it - the city, the river and the touts - smelt real bad. And yeah, the city was smelly and dirty, but not noticably smellier or dirtier than any other city I've been to.

Old Varanasi centres itself on Mother Ganges. So you have a series of ghats linked by a promenade which is only accessible by steps (the water level varies a fair bit between wet and dry season, as the metre-thick mud in some places showed). So whilst you did get a bit touted - "boatride, boatride, hashish" - this was comparatively pleasant compared to the full-horn full-throttle motorbikes of every other pedestrian area I've been to in the last two months. The whole river front had the feel of a British seaside resort, albeit with more cows and burning bodies. Insert your own joke with your preferred British seaside resort as the punchline.

Honourable mention goes to Kashi Chaat Bhandhar which may have served me up the tastiest thing I've eaten since I've been in India. If it isn't hands down the tastiest, it smashes the tastiness to cost ratio.