Take the boat at dawn. Think hard about the evening aarti.
The dawn boat is the thing. You push off in the dark, the ghats come up grey and then gold, the city is washing and praying and doing its laundry, and it is entirely unperformed. An hour, quiet, and nobody is doing it for you.
The evening aarti is the opposite proposition. It is a genuine ceremony and it is also, now, a very large event with a very large audience, much of it on boats packed gunwale to gunwale at the same stretch of river.
That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to decide what you want from it. Watching from a boat at a distance, slightly upriver, with somebody explaining what the priests are actually doing, is a different evening from being in the crush on the steps with a phone above your head.
And if you only have one evening, there is a case for the smaller aarti at Assi rather than the main one — less spectacle, more ritual, and you can hear it.
Dawn is non-negotiable though. If your schedule in Varanasi does not have an early start in it, the schedule is wrong.
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