Taking my Friends on a Trip to Varanasi

After celebrating the birthday of my friend in September 2004, he and his friend still had some time here in India and we decided to make a trip. My friend wanted to see Varanasi and I wanted to show this city to him – it was my favourite city when I was a child and teenager, the city that my father had grown up in. And so we made our plan to go and see the Taj Mahal and Red Fort in Agra and then take a train from the close-by town Tundla to Varanasi.

We started in the morning towards Agra and in the car it was the four of us, my doctor friend and his friend, my brother Yashendu and I. We arrived at the Taj Mahal, got out at the parking lot and walked towards the big entrance gate. My friend, the doctor, was already marveling at the beautiful architecture when we paid our entrance fee and went in. His friend however was surprisingly quiet. The moment we entered, he told us he would need to go to toilet. There was one, close to the entrance, and while we waited for him, we started taking pictures of the amazing building.

He came back and we moved on but we had hardly visited the place when he had to go again – he was having diarrhea! I can imagine more inconvenient places for such a problem, for example during a car ride on Indian roads where there is hardly any possibility to find a public toilet, but the Taj Mahal grounds are not the ideal place for this, either! Without going into details, until we left the Taj Mahal, our friend was so weak that I decided to stay with him in the car while Yashendu and my German friend went to visit the Red Fort.

The good thing about travelling with a doctor though is that you always have a well-equipped first-aid kit with medications with you – and the person who knows how to use all of them. With the help of a pill, our travel partner was well enough again until the evening when we took our night train towards Varanasi.

It was a good train connection, which is why we had decided to go up to Tundla to get into the train. We quite comfortably slept and in the morning stepped out of the train station in Varanasi. We had booked two rooms in a hotel, one for my brother and me and one for our German friends.

The rest of the trip was just wonderful and undisturbed by any bowel problems. I did find Varanasi very crowded compared to before and thus of course a little less magical than in my memory but it was still a place with a special atmosphere.

We went for a boat ride on the Ganges and watched the Ganges aarti, the fire ceremony by the river from our boat. We saw the burning ghats where dead bodies are being burnt throughout day and night. We even went to swim in the Ganges – something that I might not do today anymore but which was lots of fun with our German friends. I did feel some pain in my knee though and was reminded that I was still injured but at that moment I did not care too much. I was just enjoying this trip too much for letting my leg get into my way. I had travelled through half of Europe, why let it disturb me here in India?

After two or three days in Varanasi and visiting all kinds of sights, we sat in a train back to Tundla from where we took a taxi to Vrindavan. Arriving back home, we all agreed that it had been a great trip!