We woke around 5.30am in order to make it down to Assi Ghat in time for sunrise. Our boat, and a little lad named Raj, was waiting to take us out on the Ganges River. Unfortunately due to all the smog that was now in Varanasi following Diwali, we couldn't see the sun until it was quite some way into the sky, but it was still beautiful with multiple shades of pink and orange.

We checked out of our hotel at 12 midday but had an 11 hour wait then until our night train. We headed to a cafe called Western Street. It was pretty new, only being open a few months. We sat and chilled for a while and watched the mayhem going on outside our window. The manager came out to greet us especially and said he felt honoured as he had never met anyone from the UK before. He was a very sweet guy, but after a while, the constant stares from all four staff members started to make us feel a tad uncomfortable so we finished our pizza and headed on.

We were having problems paying for things with the Indian Rupee cash that we had. Then we heard about the news, today would go down in Indian history as overnight the Government made an announcement that 500 Rupee notes and 1000 Rupee notes were now illegal to use. All the ATMs and Banks in India would be closed for two days while they removed all the old notes and replaced with new ones. Also, you can now only draw out a maximum of 2000 Rupees a day (approx £25) and 20,000 Rupees a week! This is because the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is trying to flush out tax evaders and crackdown on the corruption of illegal cash holdings. People in India now have to deposit all their old notes into a bank account or exchange it for the new notes in the bank- therefore they can start to keep a close eye on how much money people have. The only thing is, they are taxing people 20% to deposit money into the bank. Now for the rich, this won't matter too much, but for the very poor who don't have a bank account and have all their life savings in cash consisting of the old notes, they will now loose 20% of this. That seems very unfair because the poor will only get poorer. However, everyone here seems very keen on the Prime Minister and believe he is doing India proud, and it makes sense what he is trying to achieve. Any who, we had hardly any cash left (just 3 x500 rupee notes) and won't be able to draw anymore out for two days. This would be fine but hardly anywhere in India accepts card- nightmare!!! Oh well, I'm sure it will all work out fine!

Later that evening, I found a little bakery on TripAdvisor called The Brown Bread Bakery. It looked just adorable so I was really keen to go there. Matt was happy just to keep me happy I think... he knows how important good food is to me! Well the German Bakery did not disappoint! We sat on the rooftop cafe area which was cased around to stop monkeys getting in but you could see over all the rooftops of the surrounding buildings in Varanasi. We met a nice guy from Belgium called Toby. He was telling us all about his journey and experiences in India so far which was really interesting, and he also recommended some good food places in Pushkar, one of our next stops. We spent the rest of the evening chatting to him and had yet another pizza to share- but this one was just incredible! I would say confidently it beats most of the pizzas I've tried at home too. A classic Indian music band played some amazing live music for us which ended the night really well. We said our good byes to Toby and headed back to our hotel so we could get to the train station for our overnight train to Agra.

On arriving at the hotel, the receptionist, Ram, informed us that the tourist company had in fact only booked us one seat/bed on the sleeper train and that the other seat was on the waiting list! So apparently with the sleeper trains here, they put out two lots of sales of the tickets. They put tickets on sale weeks in advance but then close this and open it again 12 hours before the departure time so that people who don't have the internet are also able to book tickets at the train station just before. There is also a waiting list, so your can provisionally prebook tickets but there's no guarantee you'll get these on the second wave of sells. Well our company messed up and only managed to get the one... oh, and didn't tell us! So the entire hour long journey to the station I felt sick as I wanted to move on from Varanasi, we didn't have anywhere to stay in Varanasi or any cash and one of us might be turned away at the station! Ram came with us to the station to take us to our platform as they are very big and intimidating if you don't know what you're doing. He spoke to the ticket officer who said we could both board the train but would have to share a bed. Although we were fuming with the tourist company, we just wanted to get on that train so we would have to suck it up and top to toe for the night! Once on the train, it was even smaller than the last one and sharing a bed was going to be more uncomfortable than we thought! With Matt's grubby bare feet in my face, I thought to myself...Oh well, here goes nothing!