India

We began the day with a 6 am departure via van from Rishikesh back to Delhi for a day of meetings prior to our 9:30 pm series of flights to Botswana. The sun hides behind the mountains until nearly 9 am in Rishikesh, so the sky still echoed with darkness as we gathered our belongings. The roads were blessedly quiet for a few hours, allowing us to catch a few extra moments of sleep. But by lunchtime, when we reached Delhi, traffic clogged the streets with its now-familiar tempestuousness.

From Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism, where pilgrims wash their sins away as raw human sewage dumps into the river nearby, upstream to Kanpur, where tanneries besiege the water with industrial toxins, we travel upstream again to Rishikesh. This picturesque town in Northern India lies at the foothills of the Himalayas, close to the very source of the Ganges.

The Indians have a handy expression for navigating their roads: “Good horn, good brakes, good luck.”

We are fortunate to have another day to explore Varanasi. The place is endlessly fascinating, a non-stop sensory explosion. Adorable schoolchildren dressed in matching uniforms ride open-air, bicycle-powered rickshaws, eight of them crammed along the benches, backpacks hanging from a hook out the back. Today we saw them all hop out at a slight rise of a bridge over the river to help their driver push.