Travel Journal - Entry 1

Varanasi 2/10/08
Arrived V. from Agra by sleeper train. Will try to make is more comfy this trip (huh?). Upside is no matter what it will take you where you want to go. Like the bus from Delhi to Agra, the light at the end of the tunnel was that is would all soon be over.

One thing is certain about some of these folks here - rich and poor alike - industrious as hell and trying to get as much as possible out of your wallet. From business owners, silk merchants, boatmen, cabbies, to children - how many rupees are in it for them? Tourists are targets simply because we are their business. They eat by how well we are swindled or forced into buying what we don;t want or need. From my hotel balcony I watch one hard at work, the poor white man trying to make sense of it all, looking around, shrugging. We are cattle stomping through their towns and cities and must be herded for maximum benefit, dumb animals that we are.

The chai guy at the big ghat yesterday was great. Some teenager caught me walking toward the burning, warned me not to take snaps and tried to lure me up and over to where all the foreigners were to stand (according to him). Feeling herded I approached the chai guy (old) brewing the milky, sugary tea in a large pot over a fire pit in front of his wooden box stand at the halfway point up the steps, over to the far left. Inquiring about chai he pointed me over to a row of wooden benches - homemade by the look of them like almost everything here. Sitting I was delivered chai in a proper glass, hot and steaming, thus sealing my bid for freedom from the teen aged terrorist who scowled nearby. Occasionally he would lean in to inform me of something so obvious even I had already figured it out.

"Those are the families of the dead", "He is boiling milk". Duh. Eventually I would have been asked to pay him for helping me wade through all this mind numbing confusion of burning bodies and chai making. I stared at him as if to say, "Bugger off", which he eventually did after my second chai arrived. No doubt I might enjoy myself more if I didn't feel like I had to wrestle with so many of these sort. The cabbies/boatmen I can somewhat understand. This is their living. A white boy usually means a job. Others are merely buzzing mosquitoes and need to be repelled.