Travelling and tweeting should go together,no?

I have always wanted to visit Varanasi, it is by all traceable accounts (as far as any city can be traced)around 3,000 years old ,making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. It is a city sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists (amongst other of India's religious sects and minorities). She has sat here besides the ganges for time eternal, watching as history passed by.

Varanasi is a baffling, bewildering but thoroughly beguiling destination. To truly begin to get a feel for its admittedly strange charms you must enter its lairs (its layers) without fear or inhibition. Walk it, walk it and then walk it some more. I love walking around an unknown(to me) city. A tingling feeling born of the thrill of the unknown. What lies ahead or around the next corner? Who can say?

Every stroll in the city is an experience. A exciting new narrative composed of the sounds, sights and experiences you encounter. It's a sensory onslaught of a city. No doubt about it. One that requires and rewards patience and concentration. Don't let the heat and the dust put you off.

I have always thought of Varanasi as a grubby cracked kaleidoscope composed of the fragments of human lives, beliefs and histories mixed with a tangible hint of the supernatural too. Like a kaleidoscope, all images offered are dizzying, fractal, somewhat surreal and never the same twice, as mentioned. Mesmerising and strangely seductive.

I shall never forget the myriad lanes of this mystical city, it was sort of like entering Hansel and Gretel's forest,but do not be afraid.Just make sure you take a pocket brim full enough of bread crumbs to scatter behind you and mark your route. Or a reel of string long enough to spool out to the same effect so you can find your way back.

Varanasi is city that shifts back and forth between numerous realities and laughs with the deep dusty chest-rattling chuckle of ages past at any attempts to solidly define it. Not a city to be pinned down. Writers beware.

And yet, it is this ragged defiance of the ages that I hold most dear when it comes to Varanasi. She remains Unbroken,Unbent and Unbowed. Varanasi, at the end remains a very human city.Built up layer by layer over several millennia. Cities on top of cities. Buildings and temples stacked endless centuries deep, one on top of the other. The rich, rank sedimentary layers of human endeavour.