Three flights to Varanasi

So here we are in Moscow now, slowly sorting out the photos we made during our trip to Varanasi and writing posts on our stay there. Here's the first one, how we got there in the first place.

The road to Varanasi started from Moscow Domodedovo airport and through Doha - by Qatar Airways. First we have booked the seats online beforehand and printed out the boarding passes.

Then we were perplexed to see a strange Terminator-like metal structure in the illuminator - it was spraying our plane with some de-icing chemicals.

Qatar Airways boasts a cool back-seat in-flight entertainment for every passenger with movies, soap operas, some basic games, news and a lot of other things that make you poke the seat, sometimes causing   slight disturbance with the passenger seating in a row before you )

It also has a wide array of maps, showing the position of the airplane. Good for those, who need to keep up their geography studies.

And then we arrived to Doha airport. If Doha is not your final destination, and it is mostly so, you will have a yellow-colored ticket holder, and you will need to disembark from the bus, that takes you from your airplane, on the first stop.

Duty Free shop at Doha. A lot of really cool stuff at good prices - cashew nuts, Al Fakher and other brands of tobacco, alcohol, jewelry and toys.

Clear blue skies above Qatar

Yummy in-flight meal! I love this!

Arriving to Delhi, fasten seatbelts!

We spent a couple of hours in Delhi waiting for the flights to Varanasi, which start departing around 10 am. Not that we could find any convenient place to rest inside the Delhi International airport, but it was quiet and clean, so we just settled in one of its comfortable cafes and whiled away the hours there. Actually, there is a launge to sleep in, but they charge ridiculously high - USD 100 for 3 hours of sleep. If you are on a budget and need a nap, just check in into your flight and pass all the security checks to find a spare and nice looking horizontal chairs, where you can surrender to sleep. Though I would not recommend doing that if there is no one to wake you up for the flight :) 

On a flight to Varanasi

Hello, Varanasi!

Wait, it's a strangely familiar logo, this can't be real!

Checking in the Temple on Ganges hotel on Assi ghat

Our first thali in Varanasi. Crunching papad

Are you ready for street painting in the sacred city?

To be continued...


We would like to thank again our partners, Qatar Airways, and Moscow based Indian travel agency IMS-Service, and personally Inderaj for bringing us to India for this art project.

Dasashwamedh Station, Varanasi

So we have finally accomplished our first wall here. We hope it will serve as a prominent landmark for Russian tourists in Varanasi - the text in Russian above the painting says "Station Dasashwamedh" and has a direct correlation with the big M which stands both for Moscow and for Moscow subway.

Not only the Moscow sub­way sym­bol looks as if it belongs in Varanasi. Artyom also looks more and more like a devoted pil­grim here )

Wall painters arrive in Varanasi

We have successfully made it to Varanasi with the help of Qatar Airways and IMS-service. We are really grateful for them that they have made the trip doable!

3D view of our flight

Delicious!

Flying high on Qatar Airways

We will publish a more detailed report later on, because the Internet connection in Varanasi is rather slow, and downloading pictures take a lot of time.

The city of Varanasi welcomed our arrival with smooth weather, even a little chilly in the mornings and evenings. What can I say about the changes in city from the first glance, well, now Varanasi has more quality big format outdoor advertising, both in terms of constructions and printing. The ghats have more lightning during the evenings, so they are easy to navigate, I barely used my flashlight going from Dasashwameth to Assi ghat. To my surprise I saw children playing not only cricket, but also badminton! Totally amazing.

A night view from Assi ghat

The traffic stays the same, the streets are crowded with riksha-wallas and chai is still a major treat here.

The central ghat and other ghats around 500 meters from it were cleared of all advertising paintings in November for the Dep Devali celebration. Our announcement was also removed, but we are not discouraged, we will do a real wall painting, not just an announcement )

As for the graffiti, we have met everyone we needed on the second day of our arrival, including the owner of the ghat Mr. Mishtra, so today at 11-00 we started our long awaited and long air-flighted wall painting.

You can follow us on twitter.com/govaranasi to learn the latest news first.

Varanasi graffiti trip - update

We have received Artyom’s passport in Moscow, now Inderaj from IMS-Service has done almost impossible, booking tickets and delivering all the documents for visa to the Indian embassy, so now we just wait.

The flight is scheduled on November 25, Varanasi, here we go!

Turbulence zone

We believed that we had reached the final stage in our graffiti project, that already took almost a year to happen. We thought we just had to come to Varanasi and start actually drawing on the wall. Evidently, we made all arrangements in summer - we chose the winners, we booked the tickets to Delhi and Varanasi with the help of Qatar Airways, we confirmed the dates.

But making plans with Varanasi is not that easy, as you probably now, and the city itself has suddenly made a move. Interesny Kazki informed us a month before departure, that they would not be able to make the trip on the arranged dates, since they are busy with some very important art event in USA in November. Oops.

We can't change the dates of the trip, because we can't change them in the tickets. So we just loose them - two tickets to Delhi and two domestic to Varanasi. Anyway, we are very greatful to Qatar Airways - guys have really taken all the pains to deliver tickets on the exact dates we requested, despite Kazki's changing plans a couple of times. Qatar have even booked us a return trip in December, a high season for India.

So we had a situation - artists would not go, and two tickets went down the drain.

Alright, we needed plan B. Plan B is Artyom Semyanenko with his esoteric Moscow subway logo. His work has won a lot of appraise both from the Jury and from the special forum on India travel from Russia and CIS indostan.ru.

We call him and yes, he is ready to go, but he doesn't have a foreign passport. Artyom quickly gets all the necessary documents and submits them to the Russian Migration Service in his hometown Rostov-na-Donu, because the departure is already scheduled for November 25th.

Then we face another challenge - we have the artist, but no tickets for him.
We turn to our Indian friend Indar, who works in Moscow providing for tickets to India, domestic flights and railroad tickets there. We have booked tickets through him for many-many years and we know him from some of our best friends, who also travel to India with his help. His agency is called IMS-Service and is well known among Moscow offices of airlines, who fly from Moscow to India. He has also promised to provide a free of charge visa for our project and a ticket, if we need one.

So we tell him about our predicament, and luckily he says he will help us and book Artyom a free ticket to Delhi. Thats pretty amazing, thank you Indar for your trust in our project! Seems like Varanasi comes through really nice people anywhere on Earth.

So we hope it all go well, though the Universe can once again change our plans, because if Artyom receives the passport later than November 18, he won't be able to get the visa in time.

A few words about Artyom. He is 19, he lives in Rostov-na-Donu and he has never been to India. He studies in Architecture Academy, majoring in Restoring of art in architecture.

Here are more of his works

Qatar Airways offers cheap Moscow-Delhi flight

Qatar Airways has a nice special offer for those who want to get to India from Moscow in comfort this autumn. Only for 357 euro you can book yourself a flight to Delhi through Doha - cool and modern airport whith a lot of things to buy in its large duty free shop.

The offer is valid until August 31.
Grab the moment!