A few of us got up early one morning and took a cab to Varanasi to watch the sun rise
on the Ganges river. The Ganges in Varanasi is deeply sacred to Hindus, and Varanasi
itself can make a claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth.
The entire city front is lined with steps like these, called ghats, where people bathe
and perform religious ceremonies. There are two cremation ghats, not shown in this picture,
called "burning ghats",
where people are cremated and their remains given to the river. This is an almost
continuous process, and during our brief boat tour we saw one being prepared on one
ghat while the other was being cleaned for the day's work.