Holi in Varanasi, India | What You Should Know (Good, Bad, and Ugly)

Good morning. We are up much earlier than usual because we are starting our time here in Varanasi off right with a sunrise stampede.

Normally, the cows aren't too aggressive here, but I think the dog's got them inside it. We're starting this morning off with a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges River.

This is such an incredible way to start the morning. There's just so much activity going on here on the river. The Ganges that we're floating on now is the most holy river in the Hindu religion. So there's all kinds of ceremonies going on over on the bank. There's people singing. They're burning things. People are washing clothes in the river. People are bathing in the river. And in the Hindu religion, one of the ways that they bury people is by burning their body on the edge of the bank and then sweeping their ashes into the river. And that's going on as well. Just truly like nothing we've ever experienced before.

Happy? Very happy. Thank you.

So we try to keep it real on the vlog, but it's really easy to just not turn on the camera when things aren't super fun, which is what we've been doing today. After the sunrise this morning, I came back and slept until noon. And I've been drinking a lot of electrolytes. If you're catching my drinks, she has.

Td, and I also have just, like, this really bad head congestion, probably from all the color that I sucked in for the past two days. I'm not complaining about anything compared to what she's going through. And we also never want to look like we're complaining here on the vlog because, like, we have an awesome life. We wouldn't trade it for anything. But we do feel like it's important to, like, not only show the highlights, but also show the real side of travel, which is what we're experiencing today. 94. 5% of the time, it's fantastic. 5% of the time, it's not that much fun.

But I have taken a shower, and I'm feeling a little better. I haven't eaten anything today, and I haven't had coffee, which is a huge deal.

That's saying a lot.

But we have to go out today because we think this is our only day to explore Varanasi.

So I did a poor job of planning Varanasi. I didn't realize that as a foreigner, this is not necessarily a place that you want to come to to celebrate Holi. And tomorrow and the next day are Holi. And as soon as we got here, the Guy at our hotel warned us, like, don't go out at all.

He even said he wouldn't let me go out.

Yeah. He went as far as to say, if a guy, like, really wants to go, I'll let him go, but there's no way I'm gonna let a girl leave this hotel. He said everybody gets super drunk and everybody becomes really rowdy and that they would literally rip your clothes off.

Yeah. And a lady at the restaurant last night said the same thing. We hadn't even asked her.

Yeah, she said last year, like, people, people in the community to kind of like help people hung up a big banner that basically said, like, all girls stay inside today. And the police took it down after two hours because they didn't want it to, like, reflect badly on the city. So this might be our only day.

To go explore because we're leaving after hauling.

So this afternoon we're gonna go walk along the ghats and just experience that because that's one of the main things that you have to see when you're here in Varanasi. And then there's also this special ceremony that goes on every night beside the river. As long as Cara holds up, we're going to go see that.

Let's go.

Just in case any hooligans are celebrating holi early. Worn my backup holy outfit.

I'm wearing black.

So the really cool thing about the place that we're staying is like 10 steps that way is where the gots are. So we just walk down there and then we'll be able to walk across. Awesome.

So these are the gots and basically all it got is, is steps down into the river. And here they're used for all different kinds of things, but mainly for Hindu ceremonies and other religious activities. But the really cool thing about the gods here in Varanasi is that they're all connected. So you can just walk along the river across all the gods and so see all kinds of different cool stuff. We are currently on our way to a got called the Burning got, at least that's its nickname. And that's where they do the open air cremations, which is how they bury some people in the Hindu religion. We're not going to be able to film there, but we did feel like it was something that was important that we experience while we're here.

This area behind me is the burning gu and you can see all of the wood stacked right here that's used to burn the bodies. This is this far as we're gonna get with the camera. Because you're not supposed to film. And we don't want to be disrespectful, but we're gonna go check it out.

We just sat there for about 30 minutes at the GOT and just in that short time, we saw at least eight bodies come in to be burned. Some of them came from a boat on the river. Some of them are coming from the street. It's just crazy.

As we learned that just at that one specific got, they burn over 250 bodies.

Only the men attend the ceremonies, and the women and children stay at home.

We've also learned that it takes about 150kg of wood to burn a body, and to burn a body takes about three hours.

We didn't see the process from beginning to end, but we did see a body, like, before it was burned.

Yeah.

By the time we left, it was in place.

You would think after seeing that, we'd have some really deep thoughts to share.

But just kind of.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I definitely think it's something that, like, if you come is important to experience, put you face to face with death. Right.

Sun's going down, and we're gonna continue our walk on the cops.

We are actually now heading to the fire ceremony.

So the ceremony that we're about to watch is called the ganja aarti, and it's a fire original done by the Hindu priests, and they are making an offering to the goddess ganja. So from what I understand, they're going to pick these big metal things up, and they're going to be on fire. They're going to spin them around their head clockwise, and that helps bring some of the power from the deity to the fire. And then after the fire goes out, they cut their hands over the fire, splash it over their face, so they get some of that power to. To my best understanding. Also, I got a red dot on my forehead against my.

Ram.

So we thought it would be a good idea to keep, like, all of the negativity and kind of bad things that have happened recently into one video. And hopefully in the next video, we'll just be able to put all of that behind us and move forward with, like, our normal positive videos.

With that being said, the last two days have been. Is terrible. Too bad for wearing these. They've been pretty bad and a little scary. So when the last vlog ended that night, we slept. I woke up, and I was so much better. But Nate's health totally plummeted. He's had a fever the last two days, and yesterday it was about 103 all day. Felt like he was gonna pass out multiple times. At one point, he got up to go to the bathroom and came back and collapsed on the bed. And I started talking to him, and he told me he couldn't hear anything I was saying.

My ears just, like, started ringing, and I just couldn't. It sounded like I had earplugs, and I couldn't hear anything. And that was the only point where it actually did get a little bit scary. We've paid for travel health insurance for the past two years, and I've never once thought about using it. But I had her, like, looking up the closest hospital that was covered by our travel health insurance in case the hospital and geoblue.

And my first ready to go. It was. We've never had to do that before.

Yeah, it was pretty bad. And honestly, that's the first time that I've been, like, really sick in two years, so I feel like that's pretty good.

Yeah. So we're really grateful that it hasn't happened more often, but it was really scary. Needless to say, we have not left the hotel in two days.

I've just laid in bed. I'm feeling a lot better today. I think my fever is pretty much gone. I just feel, like, really weak.

Probably because you've been lying in bed and not eating.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't eaten anything except, like, a couple crackers.

But in a way, we wanted to explain why we think that Nate getting sick was kind of a blessing in disguise.

So the two days that I was really sick were also the two official holy days. And as we had said earlier in this video, the guy at our hotel had kind of warned us not to go out, especially on the morning of the official holy celebration, because things could get a little crazy. And the reason that we see this sickness as a potential blessing is because I really think I would have gotten stir crazy sitting in our hotel for two days, and I would have wanted to go out in the afternoon when he said it might be okay. And the reason we're telling you this is because we had two fantastic days of holy celebration. I feel like we really kind of, like, encouraged you all to go to holy, so we felt like we needed to offer a word of caution. So, yes, two days ago, I was sitting down in the lobby, and it was the afternoon of the official holy celebration, and a girl and her boyfriend, who were about our age, walked into the lobby, and the girl was just sobbing, and basically everything that people warn you about had happened to her. I mean, her clothes weren't ripped off, but basically she had gotten surrounded by a large group of drunk men, and they had, like, touched her inappropriately and just, like, some pretty gross stuff. And I mean, even, like, with her boyfriend standing right there, he said, you know, he was trying to push as many of them as he could off of her, you know, and thankfully, it didn't get worse than that. You know, they made it back here and they were safe, but I'm sure emotionally scarred. So I think it's just important, if you're coming to Holi in India, make sure you do your research, figure out what, where it's safe to celebrate. And one thing that we've been told is you can actually find a lot of, like, private parties. So, like, on the day of Holi, we went up to the rooftop of our hotel, and you can see people celebrating by themselves on the rooftop of their hotel, like, throwing color and stuff up there in a safe environment. So I thought one of, like, maybe the fun things we could do now that, like, we've built up a community with this channel is if you have had, like, really good holy celebration experiences or you're a local and you haven't advice for how people can celebrate holy in a safe and fun way. Go ahead and, like, leave your advice in the comments below. But before you leave a comment, make sure you read through the other comments, and if one person has already said what you wanted to say, vote that comment up so that the best recommendations rise to the top. So if you're thinking about coming and celebrating holy, maybe read through the comments and hopefully some people have left some helpful advice.

Now it's time to go get on our overnight train and have a hopefully.

Positive vlog that'll pick up in the next video.

Yes. Okay, sir.

Making some new friends.

Very nice. Happy holi.

Happy holi.

Happy holy.