
Older than history itself - Varanasi
Banaras, the quintessential spiritual city of India, can be a shock to the first-time visitor. Crowded and noisy, slow traffic, beggars and vagabonds, meandering bulls and cows, overarching religiousness–you want to escape even before you have settled in. But then, it's not easy to grab the essence of one of the world's oldest living cities. As wrote Mark Twain in 1897, "Banares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of