recap: Varanasi
The spiritual city, maybe. I guess it depends on your background and point of view...personally I don't find throwing bodies tied with stones overboard into a river to be overly spiritual. Definitely interesting though!
We stayed in a guest house right on the Ganga's banks and also right beside a ghat (where they burn corpses). There are about 30 Ghats in Varanasi along the riverside - all seemed quite busy. There was definitely a Varanasi smell, which mostly comprised of burning body/insense and general rubbish - it stayed in my towel for 2 washes after leaving! And Indian washes tend to be fairly hardcore.
The Ganga is renowned as a spiritual river which the locals use as their lifeline. They wash in it, beat clothes with its water, swim in it, drink it and of course dispose of their dead in it. It touches every day and every milestone in their life. It also happens to be so polluted to be labeled toxic and even some priests/Brahman cancel religious festivals to protest its pollution. I guess the pollution is inevitable when it touches so many Indian's life’s on its journey from the Himalayas through India to the sea.
Cruising down the river on a boat at dusk was interesting. We saw the body collectors (always from the lowest caste, the untouchables or the outcastes) gathering the bodies which had surfaced and beaches on the opposite river bank - they simply get sunk again, hopefully to decompose before rising again.
I think that's enough dead body talk for now 
Check out the flickr set for more photos.