Day Four: April 8 - Varanasi
The smoky sky is the same color as the river. Bells clang while mystical music plays. Our guide rows us past tall stone buildings towering over the river at the top of steep stairs. These stairs are called ghats, and each of the 84 sets has a holy story behind it.
Several temples are smothered in sex poses. But one of the most unsexy temples is getting all this morning’s traffic: The Shiva temple.
Women in bright saris clutching metal tea pots and tiered tins of food climb the temple steps. Water is poured and petals scattered around the temple’s perimeter and on the shelves of shrines built into the sides. A dog follows the women around the shrine, lapping up their discarded holy water.
Inside, I dodge an Asian man with a giant camera. Outside is the Asian woman who comes with the Asian man. She also has a giant camera.
“Hello, picture?” an Indian family asks her.
She complies, and the family gathers to look at her picture.
“Yay!” the kids scream.
One of the sexy temples is caged in green bars. I take a picture of an Indian man sitting inside the temple. Inside, the man asks me the usual questions.
“Hello. What country?”
“America.”
“USA?”
“Yes. You?”
“India.”
The man takes me around the temple, pointing out notable carvings, such as: “Lady sex, lady pregnant sex and lady dog sex.” He also shows me a lady with a scorpion crawling up her leg because her sex is that dangerous.
“Picture?” the man asks as he points to each carving.
I don’t have any small bills, so I give Shiva his second choice: rupees. Two, to be exact. Then the guy asks me for a tip. I refuse.
On my way out of the Western temple group, I am approached by a young Indian man with long hair parted in the middle who is wearing sunglasses and clunky white basketball shoes.
“Hello, I know your friend,” he tells me. “She went back to the hotel.”
How does he know my friend? He tells me her name’s Diana and she’s Chinese. That’s enough for me. He tells me he’s meeting her at 4 at an Italian place. I say I don’t want to go there. He asks me where I want to go and I say I don’t know, I am sick.
He says he’ll help me and takes me to a fruit stand. I buy a pineapple juice and a bunch of bananas and we talk. He says he knows Vicky — the guy from Delhi — and he’s just a playboy who wants girls and their money.
Then he asks me about the temples. Which carving did I like best? Did I see the man and the horse? Oh, and had I had love in India? He likes talking openly about love, he tells me.
Next we pay a visit to Super Mario Kashmir Goods, the shop of a guy he calls his brother, but who looks old enough to be his dad. Super Mario spends half the year in Kashmir and half in Khajuraho.
The young dude — 22, I find out — tells me to sit down and he’ll bring me green tea with cardamom, good for the stomach. I ask if I’ll have to pay him.
“Why would you say that?” he asks in a voice coated with shock.
Because I don’t know him, I begin. And because I’ve been constantly accosted by Indian men wanting tips for every little thing.
He’s not like that, he says, coming to sit next to me. Ask anyone! He doesn’t want money from tourists. He’s happy having only a little money. OK. we have some tea. Meanwhile, Super Mario starts in on the usual questions.
“What country?”
Super Mario has a lot of friends in America, he says, pointing to their pictures on the post behind him. He shows me a stack of letters and photos from these friends and a guestbook with raves in several languages. His customers love him, he says, because he sells real kashmir, unlike many of the town’s sellers. He tries to interest me in a shawl, but I decline.
Meanwhile, the young dude is telling me he can show me all of Khajuraho’s sites for free. Have I ridden on a motorcycle in India? Do I want to go with him? He can take me up in the mountains.
Maybe, I say. Don’t say maybe, he says. Say yes or no. I don’t want to say yes or no, I reply. I want to say maybe.
He’s quiet for a while. Then he starts back up, telling me he wants to be a tour guide so he can meet lovely people like me. Barf.
“I wait for no one!” he says.
“Good,” I reply, shaking his hand.
On the way back to the guesthouse I run into another young Indian guy with long hair parted in the middle and a red dot on his forehead. He is older and classier than the last guy. He shows me the way
back to the hotel and asks me to have chai. Maybe later, I say. Now I want to rest.
When I go outside later for a soda water, the older guy’s there. He buys me a water and then tells me to ask if I need any help. His name’s Baba. He lives in Spain part of the year, and so he knows not to pressure tourists to visit his shop.
Day Seven: April 11 - Khajuraho
I take a rented bicycle out to the rest of the Kama Sutra temples. The bike’s too small and the brakes don’t work. My knees come above the handlebars when I pedal and I almost plow into a foreigner.
I meet another playboy on the way. He’s tall with vibrant green eyes and a blue scarf covers his long hair. He points me in the right direction to the temples and tells me he’ll escort me around.
After ensuring he doesn’t want any money – “I don’t take money from women” — I consent.
We walk around the temples, some Kama Sutra, some Jain.
We also tour two villages with squat houses and inhabitants belonging to each of India’s four castes. I can’t tell the difference between the houses.
I politely examine the “found objects” (aka junk) that a couple of his friends sell on carts near the temples.
One of the sellers, a boy who walks on all fours and gets around with a hand-pedaled bicycle, follows us across a bridge to the next set of temples.
“He loves you,” my escort says.
Like the other playboys I’ve met, my escort is all about love. “Love is everything,” he says.
He is constantly spouting cheesy rhymes and sayings. Example: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I have one true love, and that is you.”
He tells me he only wants to be my friend, but then feeds me loads of barfy lines, like he wishes he was my bag so he could touch me, and that the sunset is beautiful, but not as beautiful as me.
When is my birthday? I should spend it with him in India. There would be lots of candles and a little love.
I finally leave the guy with a promise to meet him at a restaurant later for local wine. I show up an hour late, and he’s not there. He probably never showed.
On my way to the restaurant I pass a group of guys. One guy calls out to me.
“Hi! Remember me? Sit down, have chai.”
No time, I say.
Come on, he says. In India people always have time for chai.
Two young boys, maybe 10 years old, accost me on the way back to the guesthouse. They’re learning English. English is very important, yes? They ask me what languages I know, and then tell me they’re collectors, do I know?
“We’re having a collection at school to see who can collect the most foreign money,” they tell me.
“Euros, dollars… do you have any? No? Well, we also collect Indian money.”
I laugh, but don’t give them any money.
Day Eight: April 12 - Last day in Khajuraho
I check out Matangesvara, a free temple with an 8-foot-tall phallus that represents Shiva.
A small group of people is gathered around a shrine outside the temple. An old man approaches me with a spool of red yarn he wants to tie around my wrist. “Shiva,” he says. I wave him away, as well as the young boy who offers me a leaf piled with red and yellow flowers.
In the early evening I join Baba and his guru on red plastic chairs in a parking lot. We watch a cloud of parrots descend on a trio of trees in the fading light. The small winged creatures sound more like cicadas or crickets than birds.
I give Baba 50 rupees to buy local wine and whiskey before meeting him at an Italian restaurant for dinner.
Over spaghetti and tomato salad Baba tells me that his dad is both mayor and part of the mafia that runs the town, along with his brother. This means everyone knows Baba and he can get whatever he wants.
Despite his pleas for us ”to have a beautiful time together,” Baba is less heavy on love than the other playboys. He uses a cheesy pun to sum up India’s love epidemic.
“Does India have malaria?” I ask him.
“No, “ he says. “But it has love-aria.”
I wake at 6:30. Breakfast is leftover chips, chai, toast and two “vegetable cutlets” (potato and vegetable hashbrowns) I will spend the next week regretting.
We arrive in Varanasi in mid-morning, but don’t get to a guesthouse until afternoon. Diana and I and two other tourists catch a supposedly pre-paid taxi to a “Lonely Planet” guesthouse. The driver and his assistant want us to stay somewhere else though, at a guesthouse they can’t stop talking about.
They’ll take us by this guesthouse and ours, they say, so we can compare them. To do this, we’ll have to walk, since the cobbled roads are too narrow for cars.
The assistant says the trip will take only 20 minutes, but it seems to take twice as long for the three of us to wind through the twisting maze of people and hulking motorcycles honking to get by. The streets are lined with shops, houses, freshly molded clay pots and the occasional guesthouse.
Signs for the assistant’s guesthouse are painted on every corner, but there aren’t any signs for ours. After 20 minutes of walking, the assistant says “Oops! Wrong way!” and we turn and churn round the maze some more. It seems as if he’s trying to get us lost. Finally we get to our guesthouse, which is disappointingly small and run by people who act disinterested in our business. It also looks too deep into the maze to ever find again.
We return to the taxi and a driver who refuses to give us our bags until we pay him an extra 20 rupees for a parking ticket he got while waiting for us. After much yelling, we finally get the bags for half the price of the ticket.
Next we strike out on our own, sort of. We follow a local who says he can take us to a guesthouse. We reject the place and choose our own atop a giant staircase above the Ganges, but the guy won’t leave.
We repeatedly tell him to go, but he stays in the alley outside the guesthouse, peering in the window and yelling that he can help us with any kind of service we need.
The vegetable cutlets start their assault on my bowels in early afternoon, and I spend the rest of the day in bed. I miss the walk along the Ganges at sunset, when people perform holy ceremonies.
Day Five: April 9 - Varanasi, night train to Khajuraho
I make up for missing last night’s festivities by waking at 6 to tour the Ganges by rowboat. I’m accompanied by Janna, a German tourist who is sharing a room with Diana and me.
Before we leave shore, a young girl sells Janna and I a lotus flower candle each, which we release into the river to bring good karma to us and our families. The girl pockets her 40 rupees and goes on to the next boat. Our young rower pushes off.
“Five fifty-seven. Half an hour, OK?”
We’re afloat in the Ganges — one of the top five most polluted rivers in the world. But it’s holy, so lots of people bathe and play in it and bring their dead to live in it.
All these people make the water really dirty, but looking at it gives only a hint of its dirtiness. Tinged army green, the river’s surface is coated with ash.
The smoky sky is the same color as the river. Bells clang while mystical music plays. Our guide rows us past tall stone buildings towering over the river at the top of steep stairs. These stairs are called ghats, and each of the 84 sets has a holy story behind it.
Men and sari-ed women gather high on these steps near open umbrellas. At the base of the steps, shirtless men suds their bodies clean. Nearby, women clean not their bodies, but their clothes. Other women loose lotus flower candles into the river. Boats loaded with tourists float past.
We’re back at the start by 6:27. At the top of the steps, a yellow-faced man wearing a matching glitter-specked costume greets us. Would we lovely ladies like to pay 100 rupees to take his picture? Not me. Janna gets his portrait for 10. (She later shoots the back of him for free.)
A couple guys lounging at the top of the stairs ask where we’re from and if we want to see a burning ghat. (Where dead bodies are burned.) I kind of do, but Janna says it’s far away, and I’m hungry.
After a day spent laying about, Diana and I catch the night train to Khajuraho, the city known for its sexy temples. Maybe you’ve heard of the Kama Sutra. Well, so had the carvers of these temples, built between 950-1150.
As I step onto the train I nearly collide with a replica of the yellow-faced man Janna and I saw above the ghats. Only this guy is in orange. He comes at me with a “Namaste” and a red thumb. Before I can dodge, the thumb is smearing a goopy red paste between my eyebrows and he’s chanting in a language I can’t understand. Namaste, indeed.
“God bless you,” he says, ending the chant.
I didn’t ask for this blessing, but I still have to pay for it. I put 10 rupees in his basket and climb onto my top bunk, where I can hide from other money grubbers.
Four men in khaki uniforms sit on the bunks below, loading what I assume to be bullets into huge black
guns which I assume to be rifles. One of the men, who I assume to be a police officer, assesses me with his eyes. I say hello. He doesn’t respond. Another officer offers me his giant, sliced cucumber. I decline, and the uniformed men exit the train.
Day Six: April 10 - Khajuraho
We step off the train in Khajuraho into a swarm of auto rickshaw drivers. It’s only 6:30 in the morning, but they’re already out in full force, Cambodia style. These guys are harder to swat away though. Finally we jump in a cab with a French guy and hit it.
On our way into town, we pass women, men and children stooped over on the sides of the tree-lined road. They are plucking fruit from the ground and putting it into large baskets. The makings of local alcohol, our driver says.
After a semi-BRAT breakfast (banana rice and ginger tea) I make like a baby and head out… to the sexy
temples.
Several temples are smothered in sex poses. But one of the most unsexy temples is getting all this morning’s traffic: The Shiva temple.
Inside, I dodge an Asian man with a giant camera. Outside is the Asian woman who comes with the Asian man. She also has a giant camera.
“Hello, picture?” an Indian family asks her.
She complies, and the family gathers to look at her picture.
“Yay!” the kids scream.
One of the sexy temples is caged in green bars. I take a picture of an Indian man sitting inside the temple. Inside, the man asks me the usual questions.
“Hello. What country?”
“America.”
“USA?”
“Yes. You?”
“India.”
The man takes me around the temple, pointing out notable carvings, such as: “Lady sex, lady pregnant sex and lady dog sex.” He also shows me a lady with a scorpion crawling up her leg because her sex is that dangerous.
“Picture?” the man asks as he points to each carving.
Inside, he shows me a stage for dancing and a central shrine with a giant carved ball. The man rubs his head on the ball and tells me to do the same for good luck. Foreign currency is scattered below the ball.
“Shiva likes foreign money,” the man tells me.
I don’t have any small bills, so I give Shiva his second choice: rupees. Two, to be exact. Then the guy asks me for a tip. I refuse.
On my way out of the Western temple group, I am approached by a young Indian man with long hair parted in the middle who is wearing sunglasses and clunky white basketball shoes.
“Hello, I know your friend,” he tells me. “She went back to the hotel.”
How does he know my friend? He tells me her name’s Diana and she’s Chinese. That’s enough for me. He tells me he’s meeting her at 4 at an Italian place. I say I don’t want to go there. He asks me where I want to go and I say I don’t know, I am sick.
He says he’ll help me and takes me to a fruit stand. I buy a pineapple juice and a bunch of bananas and we talk. He says he knows Vicky — the guy from Delhi — and he’s just a playboy who wants girls and their money.
This guy's not like that, of course. But he still thinks love is crucial. When I tell him I don’t have a boyfriend, he asks me how I can survive my life.
Then he asks me about the temples. Which carving did I like best? Did I see the man and the horse? Oh, and had I had love in India? He likes talking openly about love, he tells me.
Next we pay a visit to Super Mario Kashmir Goods, the shop of a guy he calls his brother, but who looks old enough to be his dad. Super Mario spends half the year in Kashmir and half in Khajuraho.
The young dude — 22, I find out — tells me to sit down and he’ll bring me green tea with cardamom, good for the stomach. I ask if I’ll have to pay him.
“Why would you say that?” he asks in a voice coated with shock.
Because I don’t know him, I begin. And because I’ve been constantly accosted by Indian men wanting tips for every little thing.
He’s not like that, he says, coming to sit next to me. Ask anyone! He doesn’t want money from tourists. He’s happy having only a little money. OK. we have some tea. Meanwhile, Super Mario starts in on the usual questions.
“What country?”
Super Mario has a lot of friends in America, he says, pointing to their pictures on the post behind him. He shows me a stack of letters and photos from these friends and a guestbook with raves in several languages. His customers love him, he says, because he sells real kashmir, unlike many of the town’s sellers. He tries to interest me in a shawl, but I decline.
Meanwhile, the young dude is telling me he can show me all of Khajuraho’s sites for free. Have I ridden on a motorcycle in India? Do I want to go with him? He can take me up in the mountains.
Maybe, I say. Don’t say maybe, he says. Say yes or no. I don’t want to say yes or no, I reply. I want to say maybe.
He’s quiet for a while. Then he starts back up, telling me he wants to be a tour guide so he can meet lovely people like me. Barf.
I tell him I’ll come back to his shop if I want to go on a moto tour with him. But he shouldn’t wait for me, I say.
“I wait for no one!” he says.
“Good,” I reply, shaking his hand.
On the way back to the guesthouse I run into another young Indian guy with long hair parted in the middle and a red dot on his forehead. He is older and classier than the last guy. He shows me the way
back to the hotel and asks me to have chai. Maybe later, I say. Now I want to rest.
When I go outside later for a soda water, the older guy’s there. He buys me a water and then tells me to ask if I need any help. His name’s Baba. He lives in Spain part of the year, and so he knows not to pressure tourists to visit his shop.
Day Seven: April 11 - Khajuraho
I take a rented bicycle out to the rest of the Kama Sutra temples. The bike’s too small and the brakes don’t work. My knees come above the handlebars when I pedal and I almost plow into a foreigner.
I meet another playboy on the way. He’s tall with vibrant green eyes and a blue scarf covers his long hair. He points me in the right direction to the temples and tells me he’ll escort me around.
After ensuring he doesn’t want any money – “I don’t take money from women” — I consent.
We walk around the temples, some Kama Sutra, some Jain.
We also tour two villages with squat houses and inhabitants belonging to each of India’s four castes. I can’t tell the difference between the houses.
I politely examine the “found objects” (aka junk) that a couple of his friends sell on carts near the temples.
One of the sellers, a boy who walks on all fours and gets around with a hand-pedaled bicycle, follows us across a bridge to the next set of temples.
“He loves you,” my escort says.
Like the other playboys I’ve met, my escort is all about love. “Love is everything,” he says.
He is constantly spouting cheesy rhymes and sayings. Example: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I have one true love, and that is you.”
He tells me he only wants to be my friend, but then feeds me loads of barfy lines, like he wishes he was my bag so he could touch me, and that the sunset is beautiful, but not as beautiful as me.
When is my birthday? I should spend it with him in India. There would be lots of candles and a little love.
I finally leave the guy with a promise to meet him at a restaurant later for local wine. I show up an hour late, and he’s not there. He probably never showed.
On my way to the restaurant I pass a group of guys. One guy calls out to me.
“Hi! Remember me? Sit down, have chai.”
No time, I say.
Come on, he says. In India people always have time for chai.
Two young boys, maybe 10 years old, accost me on the way back to the guesthouse. They’re learning English. English is very important, yes? They ask me what languages I know, and then tell me they’re collectors, do I know?
“We’re having a collection at school to see who can collect the most foreign money,” they tell me.
“Euros, dollars… do you have any? No? Well, we also collect Indian money.”
I laugh, but don’t give them any money.
Day Eight: April 12 - Last day in Khajuraho
I check out Matangesvara, a free temple with an 8-foot-tall phallus that represents Shiva.
A small group of people is gathered around a shrine outside the temple. An old man approaches me with a spool of red yarn he wants to tie around my wrist. “Shiva,” he says. I wave him away, as well as the young boy who offers me a leaf piled with red and yellow flowers.
In the early evening I join Baba and his guru on red plastic chairs in a parking lot. We watch a cloud of parrots descend on a trio of trees in the fading light. The small winged creatures sound more like cicadas or crickets than birds.
I give Baba 50 rupees to buy local wine and whiskey before meeting him at an Italian restaurant for dinner.
Over spaghetti and tomato salad Baba tells me that his dad is both mayor and part of the mafia that runs the town, along with his brother. This means everyone knows Baba and he can get whatever he wants.
Despite his pleas for us ”to have a beautiful time together,” Baba is less heavy on love than the other playboys. He uses a cheesy pun to sum up India’s love epidemic.
“Does India have malaria?” I ask him.
“No, “ he says. “But it has love-aria.”
Emily, your travel adventures have entertained us most heartily for the past year or so. Sorry we have not commented but want you to know how much we have enjoyed your tales -- and your sense of humor!! Renton Reporter had been stifling you; we had no idea. But many thanks for all the laughs. I'm still chuckling at the gal who's hair looked like it was washed with gasoline and honey.....
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