I was up early to see the sun rise at the Sangam. No transport. Fortunately I decided against taking the bike.
The Pics are the tent town, well part of it, a small part of it !
The publicity says 80,000 people were there two days prior on Anniversary day. It that was 80,000 then I am astonished. I reckon there must have been more than half a million still there.
I rode into the "camp" and after a Kilometer was nowhere near the river so I headed back and looked for the bridge out of town. It was just bewildering how big this site was.
I frankly still have trouble believing the size of this riverside campsite. If it was a misprint and there were 800,000 then it would not suprise me.
I was heading for Veranasi where the sacred Ganges flows past the Gats, where Pilgrims wash and float their dead and so on. So as usual I rode right past the city and NOT A SIGN DID I SEE. So being the sacred being that I am I took this as a sign and kept on going.
I was fortunate because I had several hours of beautiful rural riding.
Then I paid. The usual truck jam at the usual rail crossing and 40k of horrible road in the dark to find a dump called a Hotel with rude staff. I think they practice rudeness. Every question is met with a blank expression. After repeating the same question often more loudly there comes the reponse which as far as I can tell is exactly what I had been saying. Then a type of communication takes place.
Now that I have left I can say frankly if there is not an anti white resentment alive and well in India then I am totally mislead. I have not in all my travels mixed with a more humourless, sourfaced, unhappy unhelpful, people. Their arrogance that they speak english and what ever I speak is not, is frankly bewildering.
So I stayed a night in Patna with increasing optimism that my India ordeal was nearly over. The truck is "broken down" and there it sits with the driver asleep in the shade beside it.
nzl04
