A first-timer's guide to the Varanasi ghats

The first time you walk down to the ghats in Varanasi, you will be tempted to keep walking. The steps stretch on in both directions, the river is wider than any photograph has prepared you for, and there is a low, constant sound of bells and boat engines and prayer that makes it feel as though something is always about to happen just around the next bend. Do not follow that feeling. Sit down somewhere near the water on a stone step, on the wooden bench of a docked boat, on the corner of a dhoti-clad priest's platform if he will let you and let the city arrive to you. It will take about ten minutes. That is when Varanasi truly begins.

There are eighty-eight ghats in all, running for roughly six and a half kilometres along the western bank of the Ganga. Some are ceremonial. Some are for washing clothes. Two are for cremation. A handful are private, attached to old royal residences from Nepal and Gwalior and Jaipur, whose kings once kept apartments here so they could die within sight of the river. You do not need to see them all. You do not even need to see most of them. What you need is a way of walking through them that lets each one land, and a rough idea of what each one is for.

Start with Assi. It is the southernmost of the main ghats, and where most of our guests find their feet on day one. The steps are wider here, the crowds thinner, the light softer. There is a small aarti every evening at seven a gentler cousin of the famous one further north and a chai stall at the top of the steps that has been there for longer than anyone remembers. Sit for an hour before you do anything else. Watch a family of buffaloes wade in. Watch a boy fly a kite that is mostly tape. Watch an old woman fold a wet sari into precise squares on the stone. This is the ghat as living room, not as monument, and it will teach you how to look at every other one.

By day two, walk north. The riverfront path sometimes stone, sometimes brick, sometimes a plank thrown across a gap in the wall carries you past ten or twelve ghats before you reach Dashashwamedh, the ceremonial heart of the city. Along the way you will pass Tulsi Ghat, where the poet Tulsidas is said to have written parts of the Ramcharitmanas; Kedar Ghat, painted in vertical bands of red and white and dedicated to Shiva as Kedarnath; Harishchandra Ghat, the smaller of the two cremation ghats, where fires burn quietly and continuously and where you should slow your step and lower your voice; and Chausatti Ghat, whose sixty-four yoginis in a small temple at the top are, depending on who you ask, guardians of the tantric path or simply very old stones.

Dashashwamedh itself is best approached from the water, though there is a stubborn pleasure to arriving on foot. The ghat's name means the place of the ten-horse sacrifice a myth in which Brahma performed the yajna here to consecrate the city and the platform at its base was rebuilt in stone in the eighteenth century. The famous evening aarti happens every night at around six-forty-five in winter, seven-fifteen in summer, and involves seven priests, seven multi-tiered brass lamps, incense, conch shells, and a great deal of choreographed circular motion. It is not subtle. It is not meant to be. If you can, watch it from a boat moored twenty metres offshore the perspective is better and the crowds are somewhere else.

Save Manikarnika for when you feel ready. This is the main cremation ghat, and it is not a spectacle. It is a working place Doms tending fires that have burned continuously for more than two thousand years, families carrying stretchers wrapped in orange and marigold, priests performing the last rites, boys sorting logs of sandalwood and mango. Stand at a respectful distance. Keep your camera in your bag; there is a strong local convention, and in some cases a hard rule, against photography here. If a guide offers to take you closer for a fee, refuse. Let the moment teach you what it wants to teach you, and leave when you feel it has.

Panchganga Ghat, further north, is a good counterweight. It is quieter, older, marked by the Alamgir Mosque built by Aurangzeb on the ruins of a Vishnu temple a piece of layered history that Varanasi wears matter-of-factly, without much comment. In the month of Kartik, wooden lanterns are hung from bamboo poles along its steps, and pilgrims light small lamps to release into the river at dusk. It is not on most tourist itineraries. It should be.

The northernmost of the main ghats is Raj Ghat, near the road bridge, and by the time you get there the city thins out and the river feels bigger again. This is a good place to end an all-day walk not because it is spectacular but because it lets you turn around and see how far you have come, and how much of the ghat-life you have missed even after seven hours of trying. That is Varanasi's real lesson: you cannot finish it. You can only start.

A few practicalities. Wear shoes you can slip off you will do it twenty times a day, at every temple, at every private ghat, and often for no clear reason at all. Carry small notes; nothing on the ghats costs much, but nothing has change either. Do not drink the river water, do not swim in it unless you are with a local who insists it is safe here and not there, and do not accept a garland from anyone who has not first told you their name. Photograph people only after asking. A small nod and a lifted camera is often enough; sometimes it is not, and that answer is also fine.

On the boats: rowboats are quieter, motorboats are faster, and shared boats where you buy a single seat for a fixed fare are the cheapest and, in some ways, the friendliest. Sunrise rides leave from around Assi and Dashashwamedh between five and five-thirty. Sunset rides leave in time to catch the aarti. Ask your host to book directly with a rower we know; the pier price is usually inflated for foreigners and the middleman rarely improves the boat.

On the touts: they are unavoidable and mostly harmless. If someone tells you the ghats are closed today because of a festival, they are lying. If someone tells you a particular temple can only be reached through their cousin's shop, they are lying. If a self-appointed guide walks alongside you offering commentary you did not ask for, a firm no thank you and continued walking usually ends it within a minute. Do not be rude the city rewards patience but do not feel obliged either.

On the sound: bring earplugs for the first night. The old city does not sleep in the way most cities do. There are temple bells at four, boat engines at five, hawkers at seven, and a wedding procession with a live brass band somewhere within earshot at least once a week. By the third night you will not hear any of it. By the fifth, you will miss it when you go home.

On the smell: incense, marigold, wet stone, wood smoke, cardamom, diesel, cow, river. In that rough order. It is not always pleasant. It is always specific the exact air of this exact place and you will find, weeks later, that a stray whiff of sandalwood or damp jute can put you back on the steps at Assi at seven in the evening with no warning at all.

If you have three days, do this: Assi and the southern ghats on the first evening, a sunrise boat and Dashashwamedh's aarti on the second, and a slow walk between the two on the third no plan, no itinerary, no phone if you can manage it. If you have five, add a morning at Sarnath (eleven kilometres north, and a completely different register quiet, Buddhist, green), an afternoon at the Bharat Mata temple, and an evening at Panchganga during Kartik if the timing works.

If you have a week and we think a week is the right length leave a day empty. Sit at a chai stall on the ghat outside your home and do nothing. Watch the same boatmen row the same tourists past the same steps for the fourth morning in a row. It will not feel like tourism. It will feel like being somewhere. That, in the end, is what Varanasi is offering. Everything else is decoration.