Things to do in Uttar Pradesh
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Yoga Training Centre
Yoga master Sunil Kumar runs two-hour classes three times a day (8am, 10am and 4pm; Rs200) at the Yoga Training Centre, on the 3rd floor of a small backstreet building near Meer Ghat. He teaches an integrated blend of hatha, Iyengar, pranayama and ashtanga, and serious students can continue on certificate and diploma courses. This place is highly recommended by travellers.
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Learn for Life Society
Learn for Life Society, which can be contacted through the nearby Brown Bread Bakery has established a small school for disadvantaged children, and travellers are welcome to turn up and help out. The charity also recently started a women’s empowerment group, offering fair-paid work to local women, some of whom are mothers of the school’s students. The women make produce such as jams and pickles which travellers can buy from Brown Bread Bakery. See the website for more details.
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Taj Mahal
The Taj can be accessed through the west, south and east gates, which all lead to an outer courtyard. The south gate is the main access and is easiest to reach from Taj Ganj, while the east gate generally has the shortest queues. The west gate gets very crowded with tour groups, but they don’t normally arrive until after 9am. There are separate queues for men and women. Prohibited items such as food, tobacco, matches, mobile phones and camera tripods can be left without charge in cloakrooms. Don’t forget to visit the cloakroom first to avoid queuing twice.
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Baba Blacksheep
Another reasonable option for silk shopping, with similar prices to Mehrotra Silk Factory.
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Brown Bread Bakery
Not only does this place lead the way socially and environmentally – it supports a local school, runs a women’s empowerment group, uses organic produce wherever possible, and refills your water bottles for you (Rs5) – but the food is also terrific. The fabulous menu includes more than 20 varieties of cheese and more than 30 types of bread, cookies and cakes as well as main courses from around the world. The ambience is spot on too, with seating on cushions around low tables and live classical music performances in the evenings. Admittedly, it’s pricier than most, but part of the profits go to the charity Learn for Life.
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Open Hand
A cafe-cum-gift shop with fresh coffee and a range of cakes and snacks plus good-quality clothing and textiles at fixed prices.
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Mehrotra Silk Facto
Tucked away down a tiny alleyway near the Varanasi Junction train station, this pocket-sized, fixed-priced shop is a fun place to buy good-quality silk scarves (from Rs250), saris (from Rs1500) and bedspread sets (from Rs5000). Turn right out of the station, take the first major left turn, then turn left just before the iway Internet cafe and it’s down a small alleyway on your left.
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Madhur Milan Cafe
Popular with locals, this no-nonsense restaurant serves up a range of good-value, mostly south Indian dishes, including dosa, idli and uttapam, and paratha. Thalis start from Rs25, and they have lassis.
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Subhash Emporium
This expensive but honest marble-carving shop has been knocking up quality pieces for more than 35 years. Watch artisans at work in the entranceway before delving into the stock out the back.
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Lucky Restaurant
A convivial place to hang out with reliable food and a rooftop section.
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The Ganges River
The River Ganges provides millions of Indians with an important link to their spirituality. Every day about 60,000 people go down to the Varanasi ghats to take a holy dip along a 7km stretch of the river. Along this same area, 30 large sewers are continuously discharging into the river.
The Ganges River is so heavily polluted at Varanasi that the water is septic - no dissolved oxygen exists. The statistics get worse. Samples from the river show the water has 1.5 million faecal coliform bacteria per 100mL of water. In water that is safe for bathing this figure should be less than 500!
The problem extends far beyond Varanasi - 400 million people live along the basin of the G…
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Pizzeria Vaatika Cafe
Sit in the shady garden terrace overlooking Assi Ghat while you munch your way through top-notch pizza baked in a wood-fired oven. None of that thick-crust nonsense here – it’s all thin and crispy, as every pizza should be. Don’t forget to leave some room for the delicious apple pie.
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Lotus Lounge
A great place to chill, this laid-back, half–open-air restaurant, with broken-tile mosaic flooring and wicker chairs, has a terrace that juts out over Mansarowar Ghat. The menu’s a mixed bag, with fresh coffee, salads, pasta, curry and even Tibetan momos (dumplings).
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River Trips
A dawn rowing boat ride along the Ganges to view the ghats and former palaces from the Ganges is a quintessential Varanasi experience. The best time to make the trip is from 05:30 when it is cool, the early morning light is particularly inspiring and all the colour and clamour of pilgrims bathing and performing puja unfolds before you. An hour-long trip south from Dasaswamedh Ghat to Harishchandra Ghat and back is popular, but be prepared to see a burning corpse at Harishchandra.
Early evening is also a good time to be on the river, when you can light a lotus flower candle (Rs 10) and set it adrift on the water. You can also watch the nightly ganga aarti ceremony at Dasas…
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Canton Restaurant
The AC dining room of Hotel Surya’s excellent restaurant has a colonial elegance, and on warm evenings you can eat out in the garden. The menu is probably a bit ambitious – there are Indian, Chinese, continental, Korean and even Mexican dishes – but the food is good, with some unusual offerings, such as fish Portuguese.
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Shankara Vegis Restaurant
Another Taj Ganj old-timer, this rooftop vegetarian restaurant does a shockingly good thali (Rs90) and comes with a laid-back atmosphere, a view of the Taj (just about) and games like chess and carrom (a table-top game in which fingers are used to flick playing pieces across a powered board and into corner pockets).
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Palace Buildings
The first of the palace buildings is the largest, the Palace of Jodh Bai, and the one-time home of Akbar’s Hindu wife, said to be his favourite. Set around an enormous courtyard, it blends traditional Indian columns, Islamic cupolas and turquoise-blue Persian roof tiles.
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Stuff Makers
Hotel Kamal’s rooftop terrace, complete with fairy lights, has an excellent view of the Taj from some tables, and of a tree from others. The menu has the usual unimaginative mix of Indian, Western and Chinese dishes.
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Joney’s Place
Open at the crack of dawn, this pocket-sized, brightly painted, travellers’ institution whipped up its first creamy lassi in 1978 and continues to serve visitors veg snacks, pancakes, toasted sandwiches and the like.
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Sangam
This is the point where the shallow, muddy Ganges meets the clearer, deeper Yamuna. Hindu pilgrims come all year to bathe and take a boat out to the auspicious spot where the two rivers meet. A rowing boat should not cost more than Rs 30 per person if you share, but boat-owners are desperate to get foreign tourists on board at inflated prices. A private boat for a half-hour trip is about Rs 200. The number of pilgrims increases during the annual Magh Mela (mid-January to mid-February).
Astrologers calculate the holiest time to enter the water and draw up a 'Holy Dip Schedule'. The most propitious time of all happens only every 12 years when the massive Kumbh Mela takes pl…
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Vishwanath Temple
This is the most popular Hindu temple in Varanasi and is dedicated to Vishveswara - Shiva as lord of the universe. The current temple was built in 1776 by Ahalya Bai of Indore, while the 800kg of gold plating on the tower and dome was supplied by Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore 50 years later.
There has been a succession of Shiva temples in the vicinity, but they were routinely destroyed by Muslim invaders. Aurangzeb continued this tradition, knocking down the previous temple and building the Gyanvapi Mosque, which still exists inside the temple complex.
The area is full of soldiers because of security issues and communal tensions. Cameras and mobile phones must be deposit…
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Residency
The large collection of gardens and ruins that makes up the Residency offers a fascinating historical glimpse of the beginning of the end for the British Raj. Built in 1800, the Residency became the stage for the most dramatic events of the 1857 First War of Independence, the Siege of Lucknow, a 147-day siege that claimed the lives of thousands. The compound has been left as it was at the time of the final relief and the walls are still pockmarked from bullets and cannon balls. The well-designed museum in the main Residency building includes a scale model of the original buildings. Downstairs are the huge basement rooms where many of the British women and children lived t…
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Agra Fort
With the Taj Mahal overshadowing it, one can easily forget that Agra has one of the finest Mughal forts in India. By visiting the fort and Taj on the same day you get a Rs50 reduction in ticket price. Construction of the massive red-sandstone fort, on the bank of the Yamuna River, was begun by Emperor Akbar in 1565. Further additions were made, particularly by his grandson Shah Jahan, using his favourite building material – white marble. The fort was built primarily as a military structure, but Shah Jahan transformed it into a palace, and later it became his gilded prison for eight years after his son Aurangzeb seized power in 1658.
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