Beautiful India

Hello from Varanasi.....We arrived in India yesturday afternoon and I love it!!! Pigs, horses, cows, donkeys, chickens and dogs fill the streets and eat all its garbage mmmmmm!!! We stayed near the Ganges river in a lovely guesthouse where I slept on the floor with rat feces, dirty (but supposedly clean)sheets and bugs all around...met a few people on the plane and hired a boat to take us along the ghats after dark where the bodies are cremated and people bathe in the holy water of the Ganges.....Muff kindly let us know a statistic on the cleanliness of the holy river the day before....

"Every day about 60,000 people go down to the Varanasi ghats to take a holy dip along to 7km stretch of river. Along this same river, 30 large sewers are continuosly discharging into the river....Samples from the river show the water has 1.5 million feacal coliform bacteria per 100ml of water. In water that is safe for bathing this figure should be less than 500."

So by the end of this tour my body was covered in bits of feacal matter, from the splashing water of the oars...luckily I had my hand sanitizer to cover my body with!!!! We woke up at 5 this morning and hired the boat again to see all the activity along the ganges.... rituals, washing of clothes, hair cuts, bathing, and cremations (we even saw a man fishing right in front of where the bodies are burned and then tossed into the holy river). We spent the rest of the afternoon searching for a non rat infested hotel and are now in a moldy smelling room of a semi fancy hotel next to the Radisson...until tomorrow night when we take a 12-14 hour overnight train to the Taj Mahal!!! We've been several places (malls) today where women enter through one door and men another....men search men and women search women...this is the same in the airport and it sure makes waiting in line ups a lot quicker as there are a lot more men out and about so we dont have to wait!!!

Okay so Im off to see a bollywood movie tonight!!!! Should be fun!!!