Servas in Sarnath

I’ve always known that one of the best parts of travel is meeting the locals. With the explosive growth of the internet, this has never been easier for travelers. I spent much of October traveling around the Pacific Northwest and West Coast on my book tour staying with hosts willing to let me sleep on their couch or in their spare bedroom. I arranged these stays through Couchsurfing and GlobalFreeloaders.

Wanting to extend my experience to other countries, I joined Servas, a program that promotes world peace and connects travelers with locals willing to host them for a cultural exchange.

After leaving Delhi, I headed to Sarnath, a village renowned for being the location of the Buddha’s first sermon. There, I stayed with an unusual Servas host. Chris is of German descent though she hasn’t lived in Germany for 30 years. She’s been in India for 17 years and is married to an Indian man. She offers homestays for travelers at her basic accommodations and has, more recently, provided a place for Servas members. It wouldn’t have been my first choice to stay with a non-Indian, but the experience was wonderful and the accommodations themselves probably just as “authentic” than if I had stayed with an Indian family or basic guest house. By authentic, I mean…

No running hot water.
A simple room with a grass mat for a bed.
No insulation in the room which made for a very cold stay.
A shared toilet outside of the room.
Windows covered only in screens (no windows to keep out the chill).
Very sporadic electricity.

By late morning in Sarnath, the sun warmed everything (with the exception of my room) and walking around the small village, which I must have done at least a half dozen times over two days, was quite pleasant.

I spent New Year’s Eve in Sarnath. Chris hadn’t anticipated there being much celebration in town but two loudspeakers at opposite ends of the village competed throughout the night. When the power went out, the village’s generator kicked in and a smattering of lights flickered on.

This village was so peaceful that I felt like I was cheating in that this was not the “real” India because it appeared to be a sleepy little town. I felt eager to thrust myself into the heart of India, Varanasi, just 20 km away.

When I mentioned this to Simone, a Swiss woman (and fellow Servas member) who had spent the last month traveling through rural India with her friend, Rachel, she said that Sarnath IS the real India. Because India is so much a rural country, it’s in these smaller villages where the hard work gets done and where people turn in early and get up early to tend to the day’s agricultural needs.

Point well taken.

Whatever the real India is, I’m off to Varanasi and the ghats of the River Ganga.

Happy Travels!

You can also read about my India travels on my blog at the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

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