The Great Driving Challenge

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11:03 PM

12 August 2009

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Benares once more.

Posted By radhika

With Bharath complaining about how everything was wrong in Benares, I started getting a little apprehensive. My favorite city in India might not be the same. I had taken away such a idyllic memory back in 2005, I began to wonder if it made sense to come back and ruin it.
As we headed from Lanka after the long narrow roads and crazy traffic into Assi, the first ghat, I began to relax. It was just as I remembered. A ton of people, the smells, the voices, the chanting.

What I love about being here is the absolute chaos. Benares, I think, is the absolute celebration of life. A complete mix of life and death, music and silence, ancient and modern. A blur of people and animals with a backdrop of the Ganges, Benares has an ancient energy running through and like it or not you become part of it.

Walking along the ghat I see a confluence of all that life offers. A man lying in his boat and singing about his Benares, the Indian child trying to sell me a candle with an English lilt to her voice, the Sadhus walking along chanting ( and some desperately conning the foreigners) and the celebration of death which runs absolutely alongside life. The mix of people where some foreigners are more Indian than I and some Indians more foreign to India than should be but walking along the same narrow path with the Ganges running along one side is as simple as life should be.

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Pouring all the way from Agra into Jaipur

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In Varanasi, walking along the ghats and looking at the Ganga

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In Varanasi, just got back to the room after the ganga aarti. Stunning.

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30kms from Varanasi and its pouring..

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Superbly bad roads on route to Varanasi. Soaking in the last sights of Madhya Pradesh.

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Passing through the Panna Forest Reserve..stopped on a bridge..

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Heading from Khajuraho to Varanasi..

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Sitting at Raja Cafe having a European thali.. :)

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Back at the hotel after seeing the absolutely stunning temples of Khajuraho.

About us

Being best friends with Bharath has been my biggest challenge to date. Constantly arguing about most topics under the sun and having diametrically opposite perspectives to life makes us such good friends.

Having met at photography school, our shared passion for travel, culture, music, books and art made us drive off to different places on photography ‘assignments’. 5 years down post-grad school we still make spontaneous trips to feed our wanderlust.