Varanasi.

We learnt an important lesson upon arriving at Varanasi station. The overly friendly taxi drivers who can speak really good English are the ones we shouldn't really trust too much.

Our taxi driver said there was a festival so he couldn't take us near to our guest house. So he stopped at the edge of the old town and found us a little old guy to guide us through the winding back streets.

The old guy was really fast but didn't lose us out of his sight because we were going to give him some rupees. But suddenly at one point he stopped at a junction for over 5 minutes, looking confusedly from left to right. After a while I went up to him and told him where we were going. He looked relieved, and continued. I think he had forgotten where he was taking us. Bless him.

It turned out that there was no festival on that day. So we are not quite sure what the taxi driver was talking about or what his motives were.

 Cow falls in love with motorbike.

 Our very kind and colourful guest house.

 Kiyomi's favourite Varanasi game - dodge the cow.

 Unfortunately, one night we were heading back to our guest house and a cow that Kiyomi was passing suddenly decided to go to the toilet. It was like a sudden waterfall. Poor Kiyomi got her feet a bit wet.

 The famous ghats.

 Sadhus - Holy men.

 Sometimes Varanasi is like a very smelly open air zoo.

 How to turn s**t into gold. Drying dung for making burning fuel.

 A varanasi miracle, a cow with no head an two bodies.

 Varanasi sunrise.

Kiyomi was very courageous on this morning. She had seen the dog chewing the human foot the night before and was terrified that some bodies would go floating past our boat, or we would fall into the delicious ganges water. But we were okay, and we marvelled at the people bathing and our boatman swallowing down his medication with ganges water.

We can't show with photos, but the smells of Varanasi are at times overwhelming, varying from very foul to gorgeous insence. The presence of death is very prominent. It is not a place for the faint hearted, and not somewhere you could understand with your reasoning mind.