The enlightened ones

Ok ok ok where to start? Let's begin with a simple story of three wandering pilgrims...

Left Calcutta a few days ago for the supposedly peaceful little town of Bodhgaya. This is the place where the Buddha sat under a Bodhi tree and meditated until he received enlightenment. The tree (or some tree anyway, I'm assuming this one isn't 2,500 years old) is still there behind a gorgeous Buddhist stone stupa and the town was very quiet. Apparently in winter the Dalai Lama and most of his Tibetan buddies comes to hang out for a few months and then it's CRAZY with people on pilgrimages, but right now there was us and probably about 3 or 4 other tourists in the whole town. And it was HOT. I know I said Calcutta was hot, but the temperatures in Bodhgaya made Calcutta feel like Iceland.

Anyway lets cut to the chase. After a couple of days of serious sweating we decided it was time for us to get some enlightenment, so we nipped into the International Meditation Centre run by the cutest old bald wrinkled Indian guy full of wise sayings like "You are fighting a var! Ze mind iz your greatest ally AND your vorst enemy!" and we checked in for three days of Vipassana. You know - the buddhist meditation tradition where you don't speak, write, read, eat after midday or look anyone in the face for usually a ten day period. We didn't have that kind of time so luckily he let us do just 3 days. But it is full-on. A 5am wake up and then alternating one hour of sitting meditation with one hour of walking meditation until 10pm. Me keeping quiet for 3 days...?

But it was awesome, a really interesting time. You can't even think or reflect, it's all about not letting your mind wander at all, but just being totally in the present. So leaving yesterday and taking a train to Varanasi was a complete shock to the system. Suddenly at midday we're allowed to talk again and are thrown from this tranquil environment which is clean and beautiful and nobody talks to us to, well, to India:

We shared the train station waiting room with a few hundred families camped out (or living) on the floor, gangs of men staring obsessively at the girls and a giant black cow that dreamily pissed a lake onto the tiles. Small beggar children grabbed at us ceaselessly on the sweatbox train until I chased one particularly insistent boy away by threatening to beat him with my raised thong. Then we were free to gaze dreamily out the window at the beautiful scenery of throngs of Indians squatting by the railway tracks, shitting their little hearts out. Bless.

And then arriving at Varanasi with its air too polluted to take a deep breath without choking, its tiny narrow alleys coated in shit and thundering with bikes, motrobikes and cycle-rickshaws all on a collision course with each other, us, and the various livestock wandering the streets. Streets which were completely unlit from what is apparently a permanent power outage (I read in the papers that an angry mob ransacked the power company headquarters yesterday and beat up all the employees because they haven't bothered to restore power to parts of the city in months). It was so dark that Sarah literally walked INTO a cow.

Oh, did I mention its 44 degrees today?

Are all these stories starting to sound the same? I guess we'll acclimatise at some point.