Varanasi, here we are.

So, we left Shillong reluctantly, and took a 3 hour jeep taxi ride down the most winding road we had driven on in all of India. We all took motion sickness pills in advance, and Britt still got sick. Cars are weird now. Shillong was amazing. It is my favorite part of India so far. The Khasi people that live there are very friendly, and much more laid back than the rest of the Indians. Also, they don't look like Indians, they look much more like eastern Asian people. Shillong was the first time I saw any women in India wearing blue jeans, and it was pretty awesome.

When we arrived at the Guwahati train station, we ran into a bit of trouble. I hadn't printed our train boarding passes, because the printer at the hotel wouldn't work that morning. Turns out, you seemingly can't get them reprinted at the train station (although Lonely Planet, and our actual e-tickets say you can for a 50 rupee charge). I finally found a guy who spoke English, and he took me to about 10 different people at the train station, explained our situation, and asked them to print out our tickets for us. Turns out nobody would help us. Indian efficiency at it's finest, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand (or it's five fingers) are doing...ever. Anyway, the guy was very helpful, but he had to get on a train before we could resolve it. I ended up leaving the train station, grabbing the nearest rickshaw driver that could understand what I needed, and having him take me to the nearest internet cafe to print up the tickets. I ended up getting back to the train station with only about 15 minutes to spare.

The train, like most everything else in India, was not what I expected at all. It was pretty run down (like most everthing else in India) even though we were in the nicest compartment in the train. There were quite a few cockroaches crawling on the walls for the duration of out 27 hour train ride, and the freaked Britt out a bit. The highlight had to be when a huge rat grabbed one of the food trays and dragged it over to the corner to have some lunch. Mark got a real kick out of that one.

Now we've arrived in Varanasi, and gotten a pretty nice hotel suite on the banks of the Ganges. In the first two minutes of arriving at our hotel, I had already doubled the number of white people I'd seen in India since leaving Pondicherry. That's, of course, not including the rickshaw runners. There are tourists completely filling out hotel, though I doubt none of them have experienced the India we've experienced. Tomorrow we will take a sunrise boat ride up the Ganges that should be fantastic, then another 18 hours on the train in the afternoon. - Mike