I can certainly say that among all the rivers I've seen in my life, the one that made the biggest impression on me was the Ganges.
Why? Where do I start... Maybe it's because of the Arati ceremony that I've witnessed in Varanasi, or maybe it's because of the burning ghats or it might be because of the strong emotions one goes through when they see the first body released into the water and floating away. They were all very powerful, no doubt, but the reason why the Ganges has such a big place in my heart is the tee light candles.
I'll explain.
But first let's see how I got to that moment.
It was the end of September 2008 and I was slowly making my way from Europe to Australia via Asia, taking my time and trying to savour every experience I would have come across.
I decided that the first stop had to be India, since I was a little girl reading about Sandokan and his adventures in the jungle of the Sundabarns I've always wanted to go there. When I grew up there were obviously other reasons but the common feeling of exotic mystery remained. I wanted to see something different, something that would have finally given me the possibility to confront myself with another culture.
India was not my first country in Asia, by then I had been already to China (twice), Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and South Korea (twice) and even though I've had plenty of confrontations with different cultures everywhere I went I kept on hearing from fellow travellers these amazing tales about how they got hit real bad by their travels to India, how its poverty and richness crossed your path equally every day, how its beauty was constantly eluding you in your memories of it.
They all agreed that it was the most "difficult" country to go to, although when interrogated about what the difficulties were they could not really say anything that would have pushed me not to go.
So one day I found myself facing excitement and fear in a flight that had been delayed in Schiphol for 4 hours due to a "technical problem" (remember it was September 2008, just a few weeks after the horrible tragedy of that low cost flight to Canarias, where so many people died carbonised in the explosion that followed the take off).
The dreaded technical problem! I was terrified!
And I wasn't the only one, we had all heard stories about how the passengers of the spanish flight had been told that there was a technical problem with the aircraft before they finally got off to their death. So far the sequence had been exactly the same and 4 hours of wait in an aircraft (we had boarded on time, just like them), especially in coach, well, not the best way to convey positive thoughts!!!
I bet everyone was wandering if we were going to die once the plane took off, someone was already asking if they could disembark, many were drinking alcohol as if it were water and I was staring at the wing outside, thinking. I remember asking myself if I thought I was going to die too, and considering that since every time I had taken a plane (and there had been many) and there were some kind of problems with it be it turbolence or bounces or something else I always thought:"I can't die now, I haven't been to India yet!".... ahahaha how ironic eh? Now I was almost sure I was indeed going to die on a flight TO India!
But nothing happened, we took off finally, and we landed safely, although there was nothing safe about the time we landed, at 3am in Delhi.
Ok, so I was at 3am on my own in Delhi with the address of the hotel I was supposed to meet with the other people from the tour. I had been organising a pick up from the airport but since we were so late I thought my contact would have waited a couple of hours and then gone home, I looked for someone holding a sing with my name in the hall but couldn't see anyone.
I think now that it was just a happy coincidence that I decided I needed cash and made my way to the nearest ATM, but before I actually proceeded to go I just turned around one last time, with no conviction whatsoever but with the same instinct that sometimes brings us to do things just one more time....
... And I saw it! The sign! With my name on it!!!
Just the sign though, no one was holding it.
So I went to pick it up and started to walk around the hall hoping to find its owner. After a few metres a strong hand grabbed me by my shoulder and turned me towards the owner of the hand (and obviously of the sign as well), who was looking at me with a very serious frown, not friendly at all, as if he thought I was stealing that bloody thing!
Are you kidding me??? I thought, my first night in India and I'm already accused of theft, good start Silvia good start!
But eventually another younger and much friendlier guy took over and asked me in english if I was the person on the sign, since there couldn't really have been any other explanation (unless I was a blonde cleptomaniac stealing cardboard signs with the name of random people on them) I limited myself to raise my eyebrows and tilt my head to the left.
Luckily the young guy laughed at that and told me to follow him to the car.
I arrived at the hotel exhausted just after 4am and when I switched on my phone I found 6 messages from family and friends asking me what the hell had happened and (on a more caring tone) if I was all right. By the time I had finished answering all of them, took a shower and had a bite of the sandwich I had saved from the plane, I could see the first rays of light and its glorious sunrise.
I vowed then that my first memory of India would have been that sunrise.
A few days later we took a cruise along the Ganges.
It really is a mighty river!
But if anyone has ever done a cruise on the Ganges, they would know that it's pretty uneventful. Mostly relaxing, you leave in the morning, the rowers sweat and take turns, then they stop, you have lunch (a gorgeous one we had! I had never tasted okra before but now I'm a big fan!), then they start rowing again and you talk with your mates, you play cards, you win some you lose some, you talk some more, you take a nap.....
...and then you're woken by the terrible stench provoked by the rotting carcass of a cow floating by!
You talk about it, you cover your nose, you take a couple of photos, you forget about it, you resume your nap....
...and then you're woken by the noise of a rifle being fired!
You jump to your feet and look around you and individuate the source of the shot, a boat with a couple of men shooting a dog that was feasting on a corpse! A human corpse!
First thoughts: WHATTTHEHELLL??? ok, the corpse must have been cremated and taken here by the stream, a dog must have smelled it from the river banks and swam to it and started to eat it, someone must have seen the dog and decided to shoot it. Elementary Watson?
Could this have been one of the reasons why the fellow travellers I've met told me they had been hit hard by culture shock when they went to India?
I have to say, it didn't shock me at all.
I get it! That corpse belonged to a person who was alive until a few hours before that. And that person had been loved by someone who took them to the burning ghats to have a cremation and then released the body of their beloved one in the sacred waters of the Ganges. When the man with the rifle saw the dog on top of the body, eating what remained of its flesh he must have thought of those members of the family who cried and mourned the death of their beloved father, mother, daughter, spouse and they thought to shoot the dog to preserve the body.
Of course I feel sorry for the dog, if it was me I would have probably tried to shoot in the air to scare it off, but I'm very aware that I'm just a visitor in these lands and I have absolutely no rights to judge and even less to do something about it, only because in my golden life I have the time and luxury to consider animals as living creatures.
Some would say that my first impact with the Ganges was not the most desirable one, but I say that whatever represents culture in a country that knows the word "culture" since well before anyone else in this planet is more than welcome, if I don't have the guts to face it it's my problem and I have to deal with it.
The last part of our cruise took us jus a few km away from our destination, Varanasi.
Adjectives for this place: colourful, beautiful, alive, vivid, warm, crowded, vibrant, busy, sacred, dirty, smelly, wealthy, poor, organised, chaotic.
I know that some of them are opposites, but each and every one of them fits perfectly a place that sees life and death every single day and many times per day being treated as lucrative business on the one hand and the highest form of religious expression on the other.
The few days I've spent there were very intense and physically exhausting, with next to no sleep and lots and lots of lights, incense and smoke so that my eyes were constantly sore.
But I couldn't keep them shut, I had to see, observe, take everything in, every single colour, every single face, every meaningful gesture made by the sadhus in the morning when they read oracles for the people, every prayer said by the mourners next to the burning ghats, every smell of curry coming out of restaurants, every reflection of the gorgeous bangles worn by women of all ages.
The tee light candles.
It's a ceremony to be held in the morning at sunrise. We woke up early, made our way to one of the piers, boarded a boat and sailed into the Ganges for the second time.
Our guide gave us hundreds of tee light candles to light up, put on the top of a coloured piece of paper shaped like a lotus flower, and then release on the water, letting the river take care of them and gently floating down stream.
I remember that to each and every candle I was giving to the Ganges I assigned a hope, I hope I will be safe in my travels, I hope I made the right choice, I hope I will be happy, I hope no harm would come to the persons I love, I hope my candles will stay afloat forever and reach the ocean and still go on and land on the shores of the faraway land that was my ultimate destination, Australia.
Why? Where do I start... Maybe it's because of the Arati ceremony that I've witnessed in Varanasi, or maybe it's because of the burning ghats or it might be because of the strong emotions one goes through when they see the first body released into the water and floating away. They were all very powerful, no doubt, but the reason why the Ganges has such a big place in my heart is the tee light candles.
I'll explain.
But first let's see how I got to that moment.
It was the end of September 2008 and I was slowly making my way from Europe to Australia via Asia, taking my time and trying to savour every experience I would have come across.
I decided that the first stop had to be India, since I was a little girl reading about Sandokan and his adventures in the jungle of the Sundabarns I've always wanted to go there. When I grew up there were obviously other reasons but the common feeling of exotic mystery remained. I wanted to see something different, something that would have finally given me the possibility to confront myself with another culture.
India was not my first country in Asia, by then I had been already to China (twice), Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and South Korea (twice) and even though I've had plenty of confrontations with different cultures everywhere I went I kept on hearing from fellow travellers these amazing tales about how they got hit real bad by their travels to India, how its poverty and richness crossed your path equally every day, how its beauty was constantly eluding you in your memories of it.
They all agreed that it was the most "difficult" country to go to, although when interrogated about what the difficulties were they could not really say anything that would have pushed me not to go.
So one day I found myself facing excitement and fear in a flight that had been delayed in Schiphol for 4 hours due to a "technical problem" (remember it was September 2008, just a few weeks after the horrible tragedy of that low cost flight to Canarias, where so many people died carbonised in the explosion that followed the take off).
The dreaded technical problem! I was terrified!
And I wasn't the only one, we had all heard stories about how the passengers of the spanish flight had been told that there was a technical problem with the aircraft before they finally got off to their death. So far the sequence had been exactly the same and 4 hours of wait in an aircraft (we had boarded on time, just like them), especially in coach, well, not the best way to convey positive thoughts!!!
I bet everyone was wandering if we were going to die once the plane took off, someone was already asking if they could disembark, many were drinking alcohol as if it were water and I was staring at the wing outside, thinking. I remember asking myself if I thought I was going to die too, and considering that since every time I had taken a plane (and there had been many) and there were some kind of problems with it be it turbolence or bounces or something else I always thought:"I can't die now, I haven't been to India yet!".... ahahaha how ironic eh? Now I was almost sure I was indeed going to die on a flight TO India!
But nothing happened, we took off finally, and we landed safely, although there was nothing safe about the time we landed, at 3am in Delhi.
Ok, so I was at 3am on my own in Delhi with the address of the hotel I was supposed to meet with the other people from the tour. I had been organising a pick up from the airport but since we were so late I thought my contact would have waited a couple of hours and then gone home, I looked for someone holding a sing with my name in the hall but couldn't see anyone.
I think now that it was just a happy coincidence that I decided I needed cash and made my way to the nearest ATM, but before I actually proceeded to go I just turned around one last time, with no conviction whatsoever but with the same instinct that sometimes brings us to do things just one more time....
... And I saw it! The sign! With my name on it!!!
Just the sign though, no one was holding it.
So I went to pick it up and started to walk around the hall hoping to find its owner. After a few metres a strong hand grabbed me by my shoulder and turned me towards the owner of the hand (and obviously of the sign as well), who was looking at me with a very serious frown, not friendly at all, as if he thought I was stealing that bloody thing!
Are you kidding me??? I thought, my first night in India and I'm already accused of theft, good start Silvia good start!
But eventually another younger and much friendlier guy took over and asked me in english if I was the person on the sign, since there couldn't really have been any other explanation (unless I was a blonde cleptomaniac stealing cardboard signs with the name of random people on them) I limited myself to raise my eyebrows and tilt my head to the left.
Luckily the young guy laughed at that and told me to follow him to the car.
I arrived at the hotel exhausted just after 4am and when I switched on my phone I found 6 messages from family and friends asking me what the hell had happened and (on a more caring tone) if I was all right. By the time I had finished answering all of them, took a shower and had a bite of the sandwich I had saved from the plane, I could see the first rays of light and its glorious sunrise.
I vowed then that my first memory of India would have been that sunrise.
A few days later we took a cruise along the Ganges.
It really is a mighty river!
But if anyone has ever done a cruise on the Ganges, they would know that it's pretty uneventful. Mostly relaxing, you leave in the morning, the rowers sweat and take turns, then they stop, you have lunch (a gorgeous one we had! I had never tasted okra before but now I'm a big fan!), then they start rowing again and you talk with your mates, you play cards, you win some you lose some, you talk some more, you take a nap.....
...and then you're woken by the terrible stench provoked by the rotting carcass of a cow floating by!
You talk about it, you cover your nose, you take a couple of photos, you forget about it, you resume your nap....
...and then you're woken by the noise of a rifle being fired!
You jump to your feet and look around you and individuate the source of the shot, a boat with a couple of men shooting a dog that was feasting on a corpse! A human corpse!
First thoughts: WHATTTHEHELLL??? ok, the corpse must have been cremated and taken here by the stream, a dog must have smelled it from the river banks and swam to it and started to eat it, someone must have seen the dog and decided to shoot it. Elementary Watson?
Could this have been one of the reasons why the fellow travellers I've met told me they had been hit hard by culture shock when they went to India?
I have to say, it didn't shock me at all.
I get it! That corpse belonged to a person who was alive until a few hours before that. And that person had been loved by someone who took them to the burning ghats to have a cremation and then released the body of their beloved one in the sacred waters of the Ganges. When the man with the rifle saw the dog on top of the body, eating what remained of its flesh he must have thought of those members of the family who cried and mourned the death of their beloved father, mother, daughter, spouse and they thought to shoot the dog to preserve the body.
Of course I feel sorry for the dog, if it was me I would have probably tried to shoot in the air to scare it off, but I'm very aware that I'm just a visitor in these lands and I have absolutely no rights to judge and even less to do something about it, only because in my golden life I have the time and luxury to consider animals as living creatures.
Some would say that my first impact with the Ganges was not the most desirable one, but I say that whatever represents culture in a country that knows the word "culture" since well before anyone else in this planet is more than welcome, if I don't have the guts to face it it's my problem and I have to deal with it.
The last part of our cruise took us jus a few km away from our destination, Varanasi.
Adjectives for this place: colourful, beautiful, alive, vivid, warm, crowded, vibrant, busy, sacred, dirty, smelly, wealthy, poor, organised, chaotic.
I know that some of them are opposites, but each and every one of them fits perfectly a place that sees life and death every single day and many times per day being treated as lucrative business on the one hand and the highest form of religious expression on the other.
The few days I've spent there were very intense and physically exhausting, with next to no sleep and lots and lots of lights, incense and smoke so that my eyes were constantly sore.
But I couldn't keep them shut, I had to see, observe, take everything in, every single colour, every single face, every meaningful gesture made by the sadhus in the morning when they read oracles for the people, every prayer said by the mourners next to the burning ghats, every smell of curry coming out of restaurants, every reflection of the gorgeous bangles worn by women of all ages.
The tee light candles.
It's a ceremony to be held in the morning at sunrise. We woke up early, made our way to one of the piers, boarded a boat and sailed into the Ganges for the second time.
Our guide gave us hundreds of tee light candles to light up, put on the top of a coloured piece of paper shaped like a lotus flower, and then release on the water, letting the river take care of them and gently floating down stream.
I remember that to each and every candle I was giving to the Ganges I assigned a hope, I hope I will be safe in my travels, I hope I made the right choice, I hope I will be happy, I hope no harm would come to the persons I love, I hope my candles will stay afloat forever and reach the ocean and still go on and land on the shores of the faraway land that was my ultimate destination, Australia.
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