WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE SPRING 2014
This issue features stories that illustrate a range of emotions. From death on the Ganges River to the joy of renewal in Utah, the stories in this issue are entertaining and thought provoking. WDT takes great pride in our wonderful writers and gives them the rare opportunity these days to write in-depth length stores rich with information, detail and personality. Our many thousands of our readers have come to expect this kind of travel journalism and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. We’ve grown again with this issue, publishing more than 90 pages of solid editorial content. We’ve grown because WDT is fortunate enough to attract some of the very best travel and food writers in the industry. In this issue, the talented writers who have contributed since our inaugural issue last year are joined by some veteran talent making their WDT debut. Among them are two Brits, Mark Moxon and Amy Laughinghouse, evocative writers who can make you laugh out loud or maybe just reflect.
This issue features stories that illustrate a range of emotions. From death on the Ganges River to the joy of renewal in Utah, the stories in this issue are entertaining and thought provoking. WDT takes great pride in our wonderful writers and gives them the rare opportunity these days to write in-depth length stores rich with information, detail and personality. Our many thousands of our readers have come to expect this kind of travel journalism and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. We’ve grown again with this issue, publishing more than 90 pages of solid editorial content. We’ve grown because WDT is fortunate enough to attract some of the very best travel and food writers in the industry. In this issue, the talented writers who have contributed since our inaugural issue last year are joined by some veteran talent making their WDT debut. Among them are two Brits, Mark Moxon and Amy Laughinghouse, evocative writers who can make you laugh out loud or maybe just reflect.
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commission; we just sat there and refused<br />
to budge until he started his motor up<br />
again and took us where we wanted to go.<br />
This infuriated the hotel owner who pretended<br />
to take our snub as a comment on his<br />
hotel (“Rooms very nice sir, just five minutes'<br />
walk to the river, very clean”) but I'm not going<br />
to fall for a rickshaw driver's trick this<br />
far into my Indian experience... so eventually<br />
we found ourselves dropped somewhere<br />
else entirely, though exactly where, we<br />
couldn't work out; the rickshaw driver told<br />
us he couldn't drive right down to the ghats<br />
(a lie, I later found out, as rickshaws ran over<br />
my toes right at the top of the steps) so we<br />
were left to fend for ourselves. It took us a<br />
long time to find what we wanted, but it was<br />
well worth the effort.<br />
The guest house I chose, Ajay's Guest House<br />
overlooking Rana ghat, was right on the river,<br />
and from its roof I got a bird's eye view of<br />
the banks of the Ganges (Chris and Martina<br />
chose a slightly more luxurious hotel away<br />
from the river). What surprised me most<br />
was how one-sided Varanasi is; the east bank<br />
of the river is totally untouched by buildings,<br />
and the few shacks built by the water's edge<br />
are temporary to say the least.<br />
The river is perhaps 200m wide in this, the<br />
pre-monsoon season, but there's a very wide<br />
silt strip on the east bank that gets totally<br />
flooded in the monsoon, more than doubling<br />
the width of the river. It's no wonder<br />
the east bank is unpopulated if every year<br />
you lose your house, but it still surprised<br />
me that even on the permanent part of the<br />
eastern bank, where scrubby trees line the<br />
horizon, there were no houses at all. I would<br />
soon discover why Varanasi is perched on<br />
just one bank of the river...<br />
Ghats are central to life in India. As part of<br />
their religion Hindus wash regularly – the<br />
Indian version of “cleanliness is next to godliness”<br />
– and the ghats are the place to wash<br />
bodies, clothes, crockery and anything else<br />
that gets dirty. But as I discovered in Hampi<br />
during the tika-scrubbing of Holi, the ghats<br />
are not just communal baths, they're the In-<br />
24 Wine Dine & Travel Spring <strong>2014</strong>
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