Impressed by Calcutta. It is a city in West-Bengal with a population of more than 18 Mio. people. So, this is double-size of Austria’s whole population… Strange and a little bit unbelievible.

OK. I am sleeping in Sunflower Guest House, a room with fan for 500 Rs. Unfortunally no room with AC was available - would have been looking forward for one this time.

Went to see the Maidan today, this is a big, big park next to the Hoogly River. Visited the Victoria Memorial and was surprised by a really modern part of the city. Modern means, that I found many stores like “Benetton”, “Levis” and so on as well as well climated coffee-shops with good ice-coffees and shakes.

Calcutta seems to me very splitted and gapped: Poor, more poor, most poor and rich. People washing on the street next to cooking, next to washing dishes, next to living in small barracs on the pavement, rikshas with men-power as well as modern multiplex-cinemas, cars, shops and fitness-studios, supermarkets. This is strange and interesting. In my eyes, this city is developing and shows it’s poorness and gaps very very extremly.

I saw many french and english buildings due to former times and sometimes the colonial-style reminded me on Cuba: Similarities in style and oldness and not beeing renovated.

I am very tired today, going to bed after having dinner. Tomorrow I will visit the city again and finishing the day with a Bollywood-Movie in one of the cinemas.

More images maybe tomorrow… Bye…

Varanasi is one of the oldest and most spiritual cities in the world. Varanasi is famous for burning Hindu people next to the Ganges when they died.

I had a walk the whole day on the ghats of Varanasi. Ghats are places, where people can bath in the Ganges or where Hindu people are burned after their life. I went up and down and was breathless.

In the morning I first went to Manikarnika Ghat and saw many people getting burned. Impressive and cold shower on my body. Impressive. This was the place, where life ends. This was the place, where Hindu people are “reincarnated”. I have not seen this before and have to digest the seen things. Very interesting… Very different.

I went through all ghats, saw people bathing in the Ganges, people washing their clothes, cows bathing, many small boats, saw ash flying in the dirty, dirty Ganges and a lot of other things. The water in the Ganges is at the moment very very low. You can see it in the pictures, that it looks like a “desert”. In July, when the monsum is coming, the water rises up to 12 meter (!) and everything gets flooded.

Lonely Planet says, that there are 1.500.000 bacterias on 100 ml in the Ganges. Everything, which is above 500 bacterias/100 ml is dangerous. Ganges is really a dark soup and very, very dirty. Very dirty.

In the evening I went by boat to a ceremony on one ghat. It was very interesting - also did Pooja. Will see if I will get up tomorrow at 5.30 AM to have a morning boattrip.

Everything is fine… Weather is quite hot, it’s about 40 degrees Celsius. I drunk about 7 liter of water, good so.