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Guide to Varanasi India
Varanasi, or Kashi as locals like to say, is a place where you have to rethink everything you think you know about India. It’s a chaotic, spiritual, smelly, utterly awesome place to be. It’s the city of the Ganges, and honestly, the river has a personality all of its own. At times a calm, contemplative scene, at others one teeming with energy (and people), it reflects the city to perfection.

If you’ve traveled searching for peace and quiet, well, maybe you might sit this out. The streets are a maze of scooters, cows and pedestrians who somehow speak in a language whose idiom is not Hindi, English or common sense. But if you can embrace the madness, Varanasi has a charm that creeps up on you. It is, in a big ironic way, both timeless and just about to break down.
Here tourism is an exciting endeavor masquerading as culture. You can take a boat ride at dawn along the Ganges and see the city awakened. Priests perform rituals, women in bright saris pray, and boats jostle against each other in such a way that you wonder whether the early morning meditation is for the visitors or the locals struggling to outsmart the boat traffic. You will be enlightened, confused, and a little seasick all at the same time.

As you walk down the ghats, you will see life and death coexist awkwardly but gracefully. The cremation ghats are public, which is something that can make you question your decisions on things like your life choices, like whether or not you’ll come to Varanasi without Googling everything. But it’s all in the rhythms of the city. Death is not a time to be kept hidden, but rather an entire chapter in quotidian experience, and that is humbling and somehow kind of comforting.
Food is another story entirely in Varanasi. Here street food reigns and people tend to take pride in feeding you the type of snacks you never think existed. Kachoris to chaat to the sometimes delicious chai which could conjure the dead up are everywhere. There’s something exhilarating about trying to guess what you are eating and wishing you weren’t left a little too late the night after the meal. Actually a bit of digestive exploration is part of what a tourist is into.

Shopping is an extreme sport. Narrow alleyways fill with shops peddling silk, brass and incense. You will be negotiating prices while attempting not to knock over a shopkeeper, a child or a stack of brass plates. The irony is that you arrived to soak up culture, and yet now you will leave having purchased at least three things you don’t need.
At the end of the day, Varanasi will humble you, annoy you, excite you, sometimes make you laugh at yourself. It is a city that will not be conquered and will remember you well after you come back home, faint scent of incense and wonder lingered after your departure.

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