Country
India
Coordinates
25.32° N, 83.01° E
Best hour
The forty minutes before sunrise, from the water
Continent
Asia
Three thousand years of ritual happening on a riverbank, in the same light every morning.
You photograph Varanasi from a rowing boat, at dawn, facing the ghats as the sun comes up behind you and lights the entire west bank at once. There is no other angle that works and there never has been.
The river is also a species story. The Ganges river dolphin — functionally blind, echolocating in water you cannot see a hand through — still occurs upstream. It is one of the most endangered cetaceans on earth and it lives in the middle of the most densely populated river basin in the world.
The wild neighbour
Gharial
Gavialis gangeticus
Gharial persist in the Chambal, a tributary of the same river system.
