VARANASI, friday 7 pm

I spent the afternoon on the banks of the Ganges today, recovering from a sixteen hour ordeal with Indian Railways and an unreserved ticket. Yesterday found me tired from four hours in a share jeep and really wanting to get out of New Jalpaiguri, which is a dusty hole full of vultures. So I queued up with the Indian nationals, paid rs150/-, waited three hours for the late Guwahati-Bikaner Express, and squeezed myself into a sleeper car already bursting with people. Ugh. After a couple of hours on the floor by the [smelly] toilets, a conductor had mercy on me and secured me a berth. Twenty minutes of glorious slumber were destroyed like the cabin scene in "A Night at the Opera" when at Katihar we received more people with more luggage than I could have imagined in one car, and I laughed out loud for perhaps a full minute while honestly twenty shouting Indians tried to fit into a single six-pack of berths. It's a shame that there was no conceivable way to have reached my camera through the sea of bodies. When the laughter subsided I was three-up in my berth with two Rajasthani guys, one of whom kept sneezing and only covering his nose about half the time.

But now I'm in Varanasi, a city I've barely explored, but I can tell you this: there are so many frigging animals here--cows, dogs, goats, on the rooftops, in the winding alleys, crapping everywhere. Also, a boat went out into the river at dusk to release a thousand candles, and both the Lonely Planet and the vishnu rest house say it's not safe to be out after 10:30 or so. Tomorrow I'm going to watch a cremation, visit Benares Hindu University, and buy a bona-fide reserved ticket for Mumbai, where I'll likely be studying for the next few months. I'll fill in the details later, but for now I don't want to press my luck (and fantastic luck it's been...) so hang on.

I've been reading Steinback's "East of Eden" over the train ride, and it's really beautiful and really creepy. Some of the chapters are full-fledged short stories in themselves, and the whole thing is so archetypal (based on all of the Adam/Eve/Abel/Cain stuff) that your skin crawls when you begin to see what he might be up to. I'm hoping the ending isn't as depressing or shocking as it likely will be, but suffice it to say that so far it's brilliant. He has yet to break the laws of physics, but you feel like there's a lot of extrasensory weirdness going on anyway. I feel bad I've always sold Steinback so short.

I'll try to get some more pictures up soon, or at least some good stories.Cheers.