India part 24b: Varanasi

Here they are: the Varanasi highlights. Steps feature heavily (not the band). Drying clothes, too.

India part 24a: Varanasi

Leaving Lucknow (coincidentally, this is also the name of the made-for-TV sequel to Nicolas Cage boozeathon Leaving Las Vegas) was more stressful than it should've been, because I left the train ticket printout at the hotel and made the mistake of asking the railway staff to help me out instead of just dashing to an internet cafe to print another one - which I ended doing anyway. The culmination of the railwaymen's frenzied attempts to help me find out which train we were on and which carriage we were supposed to be in was being marched to the tourist office - despite the fact that we were in danger of missing the train - to sign the visitors' book and record in writing how helpful they'd been.

The journey was peaceful, though, and I made a sizeable dent in Gregory David Roberts' absolute rainforest of a novel, Shantaram, which is required reading for any India travelling cliche - we've encountered it at every turn - alongside Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. It's a page-turner, even if there are 936 of the blighters, but physically painful when he starts banging on about the mysteries of fate or talks about a woman's eyes - "the colour of sunsets peppered with the fragrant yellow pollen that floats past the smiles of innocent children playing in apple orchards, the pupils daubed with the specks that spoke of the grief of the recently bereaved" (NB this is not an actual quote, but you get the picture).

Before my mum and dad arrived in Varanasi - parents in India, I know! - Sarah and I did a huge investigative traipse along the river to see the ghats and, inevitably, ended up at a few overlapping funerals. It's a 24-hour business, and walking through the backstreets of Godaulia, you're bound to have to stand aside to let stretchered corpses past. We saw a couple of bodies covered in shawls; our Australian friends Jacob and Laura, who we'd met in Dharamsala and bumped into along the ghats, said they'd seen a pair of feet sticking out of one of the pyres as it burnt. The feet were unceremoniously shoved back in with a stick by one of the attendants. "It was intense," said Jacob.

In many obvious ways, Varanasi's incredible, as you might expect from a place old people go to die. The similarities with Bournemouth end there - it's also a bit of a Lonely Planet theme park and easy to get a full house on the traveller bingo card: one Englishman getting annoyed by urchins trying to sell him candles, two Westerners chatting to a saddhu and hoping people will notice, three boatmen bidding, five Japanese tourists off in their own world, ten pairs of fishermen's trousers, 20 SLRs, HOUSE! But of course, there's lots of stuff you won't see anywhere else, and you will - pictures to appear in tomorrow's post.

Signs I have seen #365

It's just a baffling place sometimes.

India part 23: Lucknow

Our afternoon stop in Chandigarh was short and sweet. Our journey to Lucknow was long and painful. A bitter wind swept through the carriage and under my ultra-thin sheet, while an unruly bunch of men on our bunks kept striking up conversations in the night, listening to music out loud on their phones, and cracking jokes like they were 12-year-olds at a sleepover. One was even smoking beedis in bed.

Still, Lucknow had its moments. It was here that I realised I had come to love gulab jamun, a sort of Indian sticky toffee pudding with added sweetness, although at the sweetshop/restaurant where we ate, the waiter initially thought I'd ordered soundalike veg chow mein, an entirely different proposition.

After food, we went to see the Shah Najaf Imambara, the tomb of one Ghazi-ud-din-Haidar, who doesn't get a very good write-up in the Rough Guide: "decadent and profligate", apparently. He had a good taste in tombs, though.

In stark contrast, we then tried to go and see The Green Hornet at the cinema, but we'd missed the start, so got a rickshaw back to our hotel. Generally Sarah and I are all about the walking - our stroll in Amritsar led us to a great little tea stand, this place, plus what we thought was a man weaving turbans, but which we later realised were kites. But when your feet can't take it any more, there's nothing like a good autorickshaw ride through a busy city, and our trip back provided a feast for the eyes: two men having a surreptitious conversation by the roadside; a pair of white donkeys sharing a meal of garbage with a dog; a cyclist in a pink shirt and woolly orange tank top; lone women looking stately in the back of cycle rickshaws; fed-up fruit and veg vendors; carts loaded up with freight ten times their realistic capacity... Lists like this could go on for pages, the stolen moments stack up until there are too many for your memory to hold. 'Feast for the eyes' is wrong, actually - it's more like speed-eating tapas.

India part 22: Chandigarh

Thought Antony Joseph (he of Ooty Thread Garden fame) was a nutty maverick? Meet Nek Chand.

Okay, that isn't actually Nek Chand, it's a sculpture built by Nek Chand and his team, one of hundreds housed (or gardened) in the famous Chandigarh Rock Garden. Our guide book told us it's "said to be India's second most visited tourist site, after the Taj Mahal", to which I say: "Who 'said' that? Because it sounds like bollocks to me." Not that it isn't massively awesome, though.

Here's the story. In 1957, government worker Nek Chand sneaks onto some private land, and using discarded junk, industrial waste, broken plates and ROCKS, starts building bridges, castles, courtyards and weird statues, creating the kind of rock garden mainly seen in the post-cheese dreams of madmen. He continues this illegal secret activity in his spare time. For 13 years.

One day in 1976, Chandigarh's city government find out about this surreal art-installation-cum-gardening project, possibly due to the fact that it now covers 12 acres of land - 12 acres! Nowadays, they would've burnt it down, seized his Twitter account details and sent him to rot in prison, but this was the '70s; the authorities realised they had an amazing, weird, unique piece of outsider art on their hands, so they gave him some money and workers, and told him to keep going. For the win.

An influence on Gary Larson, perhaps? The exit is funny, because you walk through one of the archways (it looks like any other), and you're suddenly outside and it's all over. We weren't the only ones who made a little disappointed noise when we realised this sad truth. Someone should stand by the exit taking photos of people's faces as they appear, and put them all on a blog, captioning each picture with the word: "Oh."

Still, you can always grab a cup of chai to drown your sorrows. Unbelievably, the tea place is not called the Hard Rock Cafe. Disgraceful.

India part 21: Shimla

*Searches diary for stuff about Shimla, finds nothing.*

The Viceregal Lodge, so-called because it houses the Indian branch of Vice magazine.

More Viceregal Lodge action. Probably the setting for at least one Sarah Waters novel.

Indira Gandhi statue, looking a bit Airfix.

Christ Church at sundown...

Christ Church not at sundown.

Finishing with a couple of ker-classic Shimla buildings. The first one reminds me of Cheshire.

Manali afterthought

It wasn't until we got to Varanasi a week or so later that I came across this wonderful line in Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries, but it reminded me of our spell in Manali, so here it is:

"Alberto, unmoveable, was resisting the morning sun's attempt to disturb his deep sleep, while I dressed slowly, a task we didn't find particularly difficult because the difference between our night wear and day wear was made up, generally, of shoes."

India part 20: Manali

Eleven hours on a state bus wrapped in blankets. Facing a blizzard in sandals. Falling over in the snow and losing my wedding ring. Wet clothes, no coat. Not finding the ring. Returning to a freezing bedroom without a heater. A very upset stomach. Wife getting her face cut by a falling coathanger...

These were just some of the highlights of our visit to Manali. Okay, so it probably wasn't very bright to turn up in January without any warm clothes, but still. "Whole town is close," the bus conductor kindly told us as we rocked up after the mammoth journey, with the snow falling and the dark rising. Thankfully, we'd misheard him: "Old Town" was closed, which is the traveller enclave further up the hill - Model Town and New Manali were fine, and probably a hell of a lot more picturesque than they are without their winter coat.

On the plus side - and we did eventually see the plus side - SNOW YAY. I hadn't really imagined such a thing in India (hence the inappropriate clothes).

On the second day, having shivered through the night with my head wrapped in a scarf, things improved with the purchase of a cheap pair of trainers which I later found out to be Japanese-made badminton shoes and, with my dark blue jeans, made me look like Craig David. Also a coat, which we judged "UK-acceptable", i.e. an item that can be worn or used back home without looking like a dick, unlike much of the produce sold in traveller bazaars and markets (talking to you, man sitting in his lounge wearing fishermen's trousers and playing bongos).

A bit more snug, we made it up to the Hadimba Temple, where the enthusiasm of the Indian tourists, engaged, as usual, in numerous silly photoshoots, started to get a bit more infectious. And there was no denying the existence of a bit of a Narnia vibe.

The sun came out the following day and the snow began to thaw, causing mini-snowfalls as the warmer temperature scattered it from the eaves and ledges. We finally made it up to Old Manali, and lo, everything was closed.

(It was January.) Who needs restaurants and cafes, anyway? Instead, there were loads of kids skiing, sledging and skidding down the streets, some at alarming speeds. Alarming to us, not them, it seemed. By the time we turned round to walk back into town, the thaw was in full swing, and it was as if the trees were throwing snowballs at us. Then, in an unsually un-Indian like act of aggression, a person threw a snowball at us, more specifically at Sarah, so I defended her honour by chucking one back, like that bit in Groundhog Day, as he whimpered, "Sorry! Sorry!" and hid in a doorway.

In summary, then: one million off-season bonus points.

Signs I have seen #327

"Actually, I am, you didn't give me time to answer."

Made-up Indian jokes #12

And finally...

Q: What was the Buddhist Monk's favourite Seattle-based '90s grunge band?
A: Soundgarden.