Varanasi

Was it standing on the banks of Marnikarnika Ghat, where the worker explained that it took three hours and 120kg of wood for a human body to burn completely? Or him mentioning that the three apartment blocks behind us were full of people waiting to die and be burnt right there, the smoke and stench of the funeral pyres filling their nostrils just as it did ours? One of the Doms (outcasts that handle the bodies) stoked the fire just metres in front of us and a head and torso jumped out of the flames, its skull staring at us through eye sockets, hollow and bubbling and black. Just behind, another Dom bends two legs back until they break and fall in to the fire, a fire that was lit by Shiva two and a half thousand years ago and has been burning ever since.

Maybe it was seeing the faithful bathe, brush their teeth and do their washing in water that is septic. No oxygen exists, just 1.5 million fecal coliform bacteria per 100ml of water (anything over 500 is considered unsafe for bathing). Dead bodies, excrement, anything of the physical realm cannot possibly harm them when they believe the water is so pure, so holy.

It could also have been the morning chai with the sadhus, street kids and the homeless out the front of our hotel. All of us feeding twelve puppies - smiling and laughing at the simple joy these little furry creatures brought to all of us.

Then there is the light and the way it plays upon the river, the mist, the buildings and your retinas so you're certain that if everything in the place was obliterated tomorrow, it would somehow still be holy.

It could also be the constant array of prayer, puja and ritual that surrounds you, so that in any given place at any given time you are sure to be faced with something bizarre and baffling happening before you.

I think seeing a family stand in solemn silence over their just departed Grandmother (whom they had taken down to the auspicious river for her last moments), draping her Sari over her face had a lot to do with it.

Along with winding our way up the old town, sharing the Galis (narrow walkways framed by decaying buildings and hole-in-the-wall shops) with a constant stream of pressing bodies, motorbikes, hobbled donkeys, road-blocking buffaloes, mad charging cows (that send people flailing out of the way) and a bull that rammed me from behind as I chatted with a local. The actual streets provide little respite, sharing these with striking boatmen shouting slogans with rifles casually slung over their shoulders, haggling touts and rickshaw drivers and a travelling procession of wound up Muslim boys brandishing swords and mock fighting with bamboo poles.

Framing all of this chaos is the tranquil flow of the Great Mother Ganges. Rendered even more serene by the boatmen's strike, it takes on the persona of a wise and graceful old matriarch lovingly tolerating the antics of her beloved children.

It could have been any one of these that left me reeling in bed with a pounding heart, a racing mind and restless sleep - but it was most likely the sum of the whole. Varanasi, Benares, is India distilled into 2km of river bank. It is where life and death co-exist brazenly along side one another and out in the open for all comers to see. It is also where you'll be enthralled, captivated and confounded by a culture you'll never really come to understand.