A few hours on a plane and we land in Varanassi. I have to mention before I go on that this is day 3 in India and the only Indian food I've had is on one plane ride.

The hotels and restaurants they took us too have all specially prepared their food to please our bland taste
buds. I find myself thinking "I can't wait to get back to America and have some real Indian food."

The problem is there isn't much opportunity to do anything on your own… you're loaded on a bus with
the other 70 kids and escorted around. They drop you off somewhere like a fancy, expensive store or the place of Buddha's first sermon in India and say "ok you have 40 mins here". And of course everywhere they took us was a tourist spot swamped with street sellers and beggars… not real, normal Indian people who you can talk to without being harassed for money.

The beggars aren't even real beggars as I concluded while watching two women with children in their arms walk off laughing after I handed them some apples. I guess I felt like visiting India from a giant air-conditioned bus was a sell out. It felt like I was watching everything from a TV set and when I stepped
out onto the entrance of a building being entered only by white people, I was being greeted by a very specific group of people who don't truthfully represent the masses of Indian people.

I felt pretty cut off from what was actually out there. I guess I'm also bitter about missing all the pictures I could have taken if I was not on a bus. I like to talk to people and get to know them before and while I
photograph. I feel dishonest if I just show up for 2 mins, snap some pictures and go. It's also annoying trying to take a picture without 70 blonde, blue-eyed Americans in my way… it just doesn't say India to
me like that.

But I was expecting most of this and I'd do it all again just to see the Ganges River. The Ganges is the most holy of rivers for the Hindus. Every river is holy (and female) but the Ganges is special as it is the river from which life began.

It flows south to north as very few rivers around the world do. Hindus flock here in the dawn to pray and bathe in the river. The bodies of the deceased are burned ceremoniously. The soul is released with the flames and the ashes are "reintegrated" into the waters from which their life began. All Hindus are cremated but there are exceptions to the rule. For example, pregnant mothers are not cremated if they die because two souls cannot be burned together... so they are placed in the river with a rock to hold their bodies down.

What I'm saying is that it's not uncommon to see bodies floating in the river. The waters are full of all kinds of microscopic things that would kill anyone, except maybe those of strong faith (and generations
of immunity).

So that evening, shortly after our arrival in Varanassi, our tour guide informed us that we could take a special trip on rickshaws (carriages driven by men on bicycles) down to the river and watch the cremation
ceremony from a canoe. So we loaded up two people to a rickshaw and off we went bouncing up and down, in and out of potholes in the dirt road as our 90 pound driver cycled profusely for about 10 minutes.

We passed stores upon stores of beautiful saris in every color of the rainbow, shimmering with silver and golden threads, dozens of fat happy cows calmly making their way across busy intersections and
dozens more people selling fruits and vegetables and images of the gods and none of them very amused to see 30 rickshaws driving single file full of mostly light skinned Americans towards the holy river.

On the shores of the river as our guides negotiate canoes for us, we were bombarded with children selling little homemade floating candles. They are like small candles of hand poured wax in a bed of flowers on a
round light paper (kinda like coffee filters). Twenty rupees buys me a candle to place in the river for the souls of my deceased love ones.

We are rowed for a few minutes in the cool black night towards the cremation sight so that we can watch from the river. It's a open, brick building with arches and "sections". When it is raining they light the fires under the roofed arches, otherwise they can also use the completely open area in front. There were at least seven fires blazing as we watched.

Thankfully everyone was silent as we watched and the only thing you could smell was the smoke and its pleasant scent as the bodies are covered with fragrant oils before the cremation begins. Many families also place a few drops of Ganges water in the mouth of their deceased relatives, even if they are being
cremated at another river.

The experience was calming and remarkably peaceful. Our tour guide told us that John Lennon was also cremated and here and his ashes sprinkled over the Ganges. I have to say, both of our tour guys were a bit entertaining. One of them kept calling us "semester". He addressed us as "semester" whether he was talking to us as a group or individually… "all you semesters come over here."

I can't really say I remember their names because we all started calling them semesters too. Every time one of them boarded the bus or entered a room everyone would scream "semester!"

So all of us semesters headed back to the bus on our rickshaws, enjoying the bit of unleashed Indian lifestyle we were allowed to bump up and down with. And off to our 5 star hotel we headed for a hot shower and a few hours sleep before our pre-dawn trip back to the river to watch the sunrise rituals.




Our rickshaw driver.