Varanasi Is Like A Riddle

Hello, and welcome to the Kated travel podcast, today from Varanasi, in India. Where in the sky, there is peace — peace from the smells, the spirituality, the bhang lassis and funeral processions, the cows and the monkeys — the monkeys that run across the rooftops and bang on the window of where you’re staying, at five o’clock in the morning.

In the sky, the kites, the young kids flying their kites on a lazy Sunday afternoon, flying them over the great river Ganges, flying them freely above the city, from which they hail.

Varanasi is like a riddle, a riddle that swallows everybody whole. There is nobody who visits Varanasi who is not completely enveloped and completely captivated by what is India’s holiest city. It’s a place of opium dens, and burning corpses, and scam artists, and all this colour and all the smells and all this life that is tightly packed into 4,000 years of ever-changing history.

Smart Monkeys And Stolen Clothes

It is an incredibly intense place. A lot of people actually really struggle because when you arrive in Varanasi, you come out of the train station and you see just thousands and thousands of people sleeping in the train station car park, sleeping on the platforms.

And then you come into the city where everything is so narrow. Everything is so tight. You don’t have a single second to collect your thoughts, it’s just impression after impression after impression. And the only real escape for me was being on a roof, being on a rooftop above the city, looking at the sky, watching the kite fliers and kind of zoning out, even from all the sounds that came up from down below.

And even on the rooftop, these monkeys would run past, and at first these monkeys would snarl at me and I absolutely shat myself. These monkeys were snarling at me, so I ran into where I was staying, ran down the stairs, bolted the door. And the monkey stole the clothes from the washing line. And this woman came up. She must have been 90 years old, with a stick. She was only about four foot eight, and she started chasing after the monkeys.

And they have these daily challenges, between the monkeys and the people. And the monkeys, they’re so smart. What they do is they steal the clothes off the washing line, especially when people like me run away instead of defending the clothes. And the monkeys sit on the edge of the rooftop and pretend that they’re gonna throw the clothes off the roof and what you have to do, you have to come up and give some food, give a food offering — a peace offering — so that the monkeys will leave your clothes.

You Need A Great Guide

And that’s just one example, one of the things that can happen, and that’s when you’re on the roof, away from it all. And when you go onto the street, there is this — what seems like a competition, a competition between all the colors, the smells, between people and animals. You know, the cows blocking the way, carts that want to go past, all these things happening. And it’s impossible to take it all in. So you stop, you have a chai, you watch it go past and try and reflect on what’s happening.

And then you try and understand what’s happening, and Varanasi, you cannot understand it without a good guide. You cannot understand it without somebody from Varanasi, from that place, showing you how it is. More so than any other city I’ve ever visited in the world. You need a great guide because a great guide helps you make sense of what is going on there. So, a great guide can take you down to the Ganges, where you can watch a temple ceremony, play out. A guide can take you to the famous burning ghats, where bodies are taken and burnt ceremoniously at the ghat — like a platform next to the river Ganges as a very holy sign-off, the ultimate sign-off, really for Hindus living in India.

A private guide can take you into temples that you wouldn’t even see — you wouldn’t even see the entrance to this temple. And you walk in and it opens out into this place of carvings and incense smells and people in the corners with these friendly, but peculiar eyes. And in these temples, you can experience a ceremony or a private ceremony or be part of a ceremony.

Google Maps Doesn’t Have A Clue

And, and with the guide it’s possible to not get completely lost in the labyrinth. You know, the whole city is a labyrinth and you walk off and you think Google maps is going to get you somewhere. And it’s absolutely not. Google maps doesn’t have a clue in Varanasi. The only people who know what they’re doing now are local people.

You know, I mean, how do you respond when you’re walking along the street and a snake charmer pulls out a snake and says, “Well, give me some money. Otherwise, I’m going to keep this cobra hissing and spitting at you.”

And how do you experience fully the really positive things about Varanasi? So, not the snake charmers and people trying to rip you off, but all this incredible spirituality that’s happening, all these incredible ceremonies, all these remarkable scenes that you really — I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Not even anywhere else in India.

Varanasi Is Still On My Bucket List

I visited Varanasi twice. I would love to visit it again. It’s still on my bucket list. Both times I’ve visited has been a completely different experience. It’s still been an experience that I struggle to put into words. And it’s been an experience that has been created by having a great guide. Somebody who can be almost like your Baba, your Indian Baba, taking you through Varanasi, taking you through their home, introducing you to what is 4,000 years of history and atmosphere closing in on itself, and helping you make sense of these things.

We’re interested in visiting Varanasi, take a look on Kated. There are four different moments, four different things you can experience — ideas that you could experience when you’re there. But obviously what you want to experience most, that can be designed by a travel designer from India, from Varanasi. Somebody who can make Varanasi, make India, respond to your image of what you want to see, experience and really what you want to remember from one of the most intense, crazy, atmospheric, enchanting — whatever superlative I can throw at it now — places in the world.