It took another marathon trip to get from Darjeeling to Varanasi, but we successfully made the journey in four stages (jeep, overnight bus, train, auto rickshaw) and very luckily missed having to spend the night in Patna — which our guidebook cheerily mentioned was worth never seeing.

The first trip of the journey involved a hired jeep to bring us down over 2,000m from the Himalayan mountains (once again, twelve passengers inside and two outside). You can also see how the jeep operaters manage to suspend the laws of gravity when it comes to luggage storage.