Haridwar, Rishikesh & Varanasi, India...

From Amritsar we took an overnight train to the holy city of Haridwar, as usual accompanied by the little idiosyncrasies of Indian train journeys - like men sleeping on the floor/end of your bed and beggars at the windows. It's usually at about 5am that you get a visit from the eunuchs. Eunuchs are men who have been castrated (either as a child, so their families can make money) or by their own choice as an adult. They dress up as women in sarees (not very convincing as they're usually sporting stubble) and come round the carriages with their masters clapping very loudly and demanding money to make them go away. They always get it too. In Hinduism eunuchs are very bad luck. They'll often gatecrash weddings, dancing about and making a general nuisance of themselves until the families pay up to get rid of them so as not to curse the new couple. Luckily, they leave us Westerners alone, as they know we don't believe it.

So we pulled up in Haridwar, currently the site of the biggest religious festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. It happens only every 12 years, when Sadhus (holy men who have abandoned their homes, families, possessions, everything, to wander India on a spiritual quest) descend upon Haridwar, and 3 other cities in India in their millions. It was very strange to see hundreds of similarly dishevelled, bearded men, sometimes naked, but more often in orange robes, wandering the city and its makeshift camps, collecting alms (and in the case of one chap, absolutely out of it on opium. Spiritual indeed).

The same day we pressed on to our final destination, Rishikesh, catching a rickshaw to the nearby bus station and then picking up a bus for the 30km to Rishikesh City, before taking a final rickshaw to Laxman Jhula, a beautiful town in the mountains, known for its hanging bridge and Hindu temples overlooking the beautifully blue Ganges river, which up there in the mountains is sparkling clean. We spent the next few blissful days wandering through the sandalwood incense-scented streets, where meditative Hindu music fills the air, shopping for trinkets in the Tibetan market and lounging at the Ganga beach cafe, sipping ayurvedic tea and gazing out at pilgrims taking dips in the holy waters.

Rishikesh is also known as the Yoga capital of the world, with more ashrams than you can shake an incense stick at, so we took our own pilgrimage to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where the Beatles once stayed and wrote the White Album. The ashram has long since been abandoned (the Maharishi moved to Switzerland before he died). The Beatles eventually became disillusioned with stories of him being a little over-friendly with young devotees (John Lennon later sang 'you made a fool out of all of us,') but it wasn't hard to see the appeal of the place. Set right on the banks of the river, the once grand building with its winding lanes through (now overgrown) gardens and forest, dotted with meditation cells and lecture halls must have been a very peaceful and pleasant place to be.

We also visited the Saint Sewa ashram to take yoga lessons, but most enjoyable of all waere the meditation classes. Led by a young Indian man who clearly felt a deep, genuine peacefulness he encouraged us to ask questions at the end of the session and patiently (long after the class had ended) told us all about how Sadhana (the quest for enlightenment through yoga and meditation) had changed his life for the better, explaining that he no longer felt any anger or envy towards others, and that it could be achieved by anyone, without a guru, no matter what religion or age they are, all the while maintaining a normal domestic life and work. And although I'm sure I was having a crazy moment, he seemed to keep answering the questions that I had in my head, just as I was about to ask them! Anyway, I've vowed to practice yoga once a week and make time for 15 minutes of meditation a day, and am reading some books on the subject by a famous Indian spiritual man named Osho. So hopefully a little of our teacher's contentedness will rub off on me.

All too soon it was time to leave the peace of Rishikesh (peacefulness in India is a very, very rare thing) and head for Varanasi, the oldest and holiest city in India. It didn't start off too well, stepping off the train still half asleep we were in the midst of a crowd of rickshaw touts clamouring for our business when I fell off a high curb, twisting my ankle, and my enormous backpack came crashing down on top of me. Then, typically, it took an age to find a bed in the intense heat and tiny, windy backstreets of the old city. But finally we dumped our bags at Eden Halt guesthouse on the banks of the (now very dirty un-blue) Ganges at Raja Ghat.

The room was very basic but fine, apart from the fact that it came with approximately 1 billion mosquitoes. But as we soon found out, there is absolutely no escaping the bugs, flies, mozzies, etc etc in Varanasi. They are everywhere. Probably because of the stillness of the Ganges here and also the many piles of litter and rubbish (and enormous cows and endless stray dogs) that line the old windy alleyways. That night we went to Dharawasmedth ghat to watch the nightly 'puja' ceremony where hundreds of Indian pilgrims place offerings of flowers and candles into the Ganges, along with lots of singing and dancing.

The following morning we rose at 4am to head down to the ghats to take a dawn boat ride, the quintessential Varanasi experience. We soon found a boatman who rowed us on his little boat all along the many ghats, including the main ghats where hundreds upon hundreds of Hindus come to wash, or take a sacred dip in the morning. It's a very, very surreal experience. Watching the women wading into the filthy river (right by the corpse of a dog), praying and then managing to wash themselves in their sarees (bearing in mind a saree is made up of a very tight cropped blouse called a choli, and 6 metres of fabric that is wrapped around them without any fastenings, and that of course they can't at any point be indecent). And the crazy thing is that these women wash this way every morning, and go to the washing ghats to scrub and thrash their clothes against the rocks, and then lay them out to dry on the cracked, dusty land, and yet somehow they always manage to look clean and elegant. It's nothing short of a miracle. Anyway, our boat guide showed us the grand buildings on the banks owned by Maharajas (who will come here to be cremated when they die) and the place where the father of legendary Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan was recently cremated, as well as Nepali and Shiva temples and more. And then it was time to visit Manikarnika, aka the major 'burning' ghat.

A guide from a 'home' by the ghat where the poor and destitute come to die (hoping to be cremated here and thus released from the endless cycle of resurrections) showed us around the rather spooky set up. (At one point a big puff of ash went into the air and landed in our hair, ugh!) Huge bundles of wood (banyan is the cheapest, and sandalwood the most expensive) are bought by the families, 85kg is enough to burn the average body, and the body is placed within it with all their clothes and most sacred possessions, so that their soul can be released from their body. The only exceptions to this, as our guide and later our boatman explained to us, are children. As their skin is deemed too soft and sacred to be burnt, they are simply wrapped in string and their bodies dropped into the lake. It's the same for lepers, as it is believed they will be reborn without leprosy. Sadhus too, go into the river whole as this is the most holy state. Strangest of all are people who have been bitten by a cobra. For some reason that I couldn't quite fathom, their bodies are placed on banana leaves and floated down the river Ganges.

And still, despite bodies melting into the water right there, a young man was in the water, scrubbing himself clean with soap. I asked our boatman if he ever washed in the water and he said 'Yes of course, and I will drink it sometimes if I get thirsty.' Water that is safe for bathing should have less than 500 faecal coliform bacteria in every one litre of water. Samples from the Ganges have shown 1.5 million, thanks to all the untreated sewage, dogs, bodies and such in the water. Finally, I asked him if he minded swimming when it was so dirty. And I will never forget his reply, 'Oh no, the Ganges is holy! And anyway, someone comes along after puja every night to clean up all the flowers.' Bless.