TOOTING cars, scattered laneways, buffalo poo, squalid Arabic mansions, aggressive rhesus monkeys and mange-ridden street dogs — there isn’t much to see or do in Varanasi. But forty thousand foreign tourists visit the city of one million in north Central India each year.

Why? They come for the dead.

For locals, Varanasi is a holy place; many Hindus believe time itself starting ticking in the ancient city’s Ganges stretch.

They also believe Moksha takes place there — a transcendent state liberating their souls from the otherwise endless cycle of death and rebirth. People from all over India come here to die so Varanasi is filled with terminally ill people and dozens of dead bodies are, in turn, publicly cremated there each day.

People who can’t afford cremation are put into the Ganges after they die. So along with watching public cremations, there are opportunities to take a canoe ride and see, just like I did, fresh corpses with rotting, sickly-off white skin, protruding from the river’s chilly, mist-laden silver-brown polluted surface.

I came to Varanasi, a 12-hour train ride west of Delhi, to explore the frontiers of dark tourism — and I have to admit, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I was also drawn to the spectre of seeing my first ever human corpse.

“Dark tourism” is an attempt to conceptualise the growing swathes of international tourists who visit sites and memorials involving death, disaster, and catastrophe. Dark tourism is part of the adventure tourism industry, which has grown by 65 per cent annually over the past four years; expanding dark tourism’s geographical boundaries and for some, crossing a few ethical ones.

Traditionally, the term had referred to popular tourist places like the Taj Mahal, The Holocaust Memorial, the Pyramids, Hiroshima, Alcatraz and the Jack the Ripper museum in London.

But the industry is getting more and more organised. You can now go on a tour to Osama bin Laden’s former compound a bleak valley in Abbottabad, Pakistan or more recently, the Libya: After the Revolution Tour.

Here in Australia, before a public backlash led to its cancellation, a tour group proposed taking people to the Belangalo state forest in southern NSW — the infamous place serial killer Ivan Milat buried seven of the people he stabbed to death.

Dark tourism companies also now offer war zone tours, slum tours and tours of drug-cartel controlled areas in Mexico.

This to me appears to be an industry and consumer shift. Perhaps fuelled by the reach and popularity of “out-there” documentaries, extreme travellers no longer simply visit sites commemorating death, disaster, and suffering, people want to hear the bullets, smell the smoke, and see the facial expressions — right up until the final moment — for themselves.

In Varanasi, I was searching for Australian tourists to ask them why they wanted to see the city’s death rituals. So I headed over to the city’s burning Ghats.

Now for you to imagine what a Ghat looks like all you need to do is think “India” — a Ghat is one of the nation’s most enduring images. “Ghat” just means a set of concrete or stone steps leading down to the river; where locals wash themselves and their clothes on the river banks.

In Varanasi, Ghats are also the source of city’s pervasive backyard BBQ smell: the place where human bodies openly burn on large piles of wood.

“It’s f**king brutal isn’t it!”, said one young Aussie tourist. He’d been standing behind me, fixed in a concentrated stare at the spectacle before us: the corpse of an elderly man on a wooden stretcher alight with flame.

His “brutal” comment actually came after the corpse’s arm slipped out from outside the burning silk, catching alight: the skin began to melt off like plastic, revealing a batch of red raw flesh.

Mr Young Tourist, first name Steven, was certainly very forthcoming, explaining how he had been travelling through Asia for eight months. He’d already gone to see the war museums in Vietnam, live-fight-to-the-death-dog-fighting in Cambodia (which he said he immediately regretted after seeing one fight) and also trekked across the Himalayas.

“I love it in Australia, I really do” he said “There are just so many rules everywhere … It feels so clean and like overly-contained or something … People rarely talk about the deeper stuff, you never really see any death.”

“Coming here gives you a fresh perspective on things.

“It’s no big deal, really is it?” Steven said. “I mean he’s an old man, he lived his life, it’s over now, he looked at peace before he was wrapped in that silk … I guess we are all headed that way.”

Steven pulled out a cigarette, put in his mouth and it remained unlit as he said “If you are looking for something that will REALLY blow your mind brother, you should check out the Aghori cult.

“The Aghori — they’re cannibals, it’s one of the other things I came here to see. They fish dead human out of the river and eat their flesh, and they eat dead dogs sometimes too,” he said taking a drag from his cigarette.

Now I am not sure whether it was the line about eating human flesh or eating dead dogs, but it was at that moment I would have donated my succulent right arm just to see one of these so-called cannibals in action.

Notwithstanding my own morbid fascinations, the ethics of dark tourism loomed as a live issue: some people consider Dark Tourism exploitative, shallow, and vulgar and perhaps another symptom of Selfie Culture. Other people disagree and say Dark Tourism is exciting, educational and even spiritual.

Last year, Russian travel agency Megapolis Kurort began selling packaged holidays to war-torn Eastern Ukraine, replete with bodyguards and armoured carriers. Megapolis Kurort is now trying to organise the Assad Tour, a four-day tour of war-affected areas in Syria.

Already, a 54-year-old retired Israeli Defence Forces colonel has a spot for you on a mountain range in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights near Damascus: Grab binoculars, your smartphone and take a seat on the rolling green hills to see smoke, hear mortar rounds going off and even catch a glimpse of the slaughter.

I remain agnostic about the question of whether dark tourism was ethical or not — I guess I think it very much depends on the situation and whether or not you are encouraging these acts or simply witnessing them.

In any event, I found it hard to locate the Aghori. I searched all over town, and all I heard again and again from the locals was “stay away from them”.

Eventually, I met an elegant French man turned-Hindu yoga master, with a messy grey beard at a dusty, half-functional internet cafe. He must have been in his late 60s, dressed in a set of orange monk robes. I asked if he knew about the cannibal cult, and he told me the Aghori are only a few hundred years old, worship a Hindu God of Destruction named Shiva and they believe transgressing conventional Hindu taboos brings them closer to God.

Eventually, sheepishly, I built up the courage to ask for his help. Mr French baba revealed a few Aghori had wandered in from the tribal mountains of India’s wild northeast that month. Yes, he said he could introduce me to a few of them (in exchange for a small fee), at 11pm at Varanasi’s Ghats. He added I wasn’t the first western tourist he’d taken to see Aghoris in action.

In the meantime, I sent an email to Dr Philip Stone, who founded the University of Central Lancashire’s Dark Tourism Institute in 2012. He told news.com.au that understanding people’s motivations (and the explanations they provide about their own motivations) for visiting sites “might include the wish to pay respect and reverence to the deceased ... or acts of curiosity, serendipity, or an inherent inquisitiveness about mortality and the dead”.

Hence, he explained, making any simple statements about dark tourism’s ethics is problematic.

“There is even an argument that contemporary dark tourism is a form of secular pilgrimage”, Dr Stone suggested. “So when tragedy strikes, we often turn first to the internet and tourism for answers rather than to the priest.”

When my date with the cannibal arrived, the Ganga seemed still in the night’s darkness, the Ghats had stopped burning and the mange-ridden dogs slept tightly-knit in large groups. I have to admit, I felt sheer delight when I saw the Aghori man — on-the-steps, silhouette-like — with the faint street light behind his dreadlocked head preparing some kind of mixture in a large steel cup.

The Frenchman tiptoed over to the Aghori to see if he would do anything with me resembling an interview. Two minutes later, the French man whispered in my ear that the Aghori had agreed to answer one question.

Without a second thought, I foolishly spent my only question in a heartbeat.

“What are you drinking?”

The French man translated: it turned out to be a mixture of alcohol, hashish, corpse ash, “a hallucinogen, maybe mushroom” and cobra poison.

So, I asked for a teeny-tiny sip.

The Frenchman asserted that without “the help of a guru” (like him?) the potion could induce a temporarily acute psychosis. “The potion transports you to other worlds, you physically leave your body, do you understand? You leave your self so you can see all the horrible aspects about yourself ... but people can get lost in their own darkness.”

How much of that is actually true, who is to say?

But the warning might be at least treated as a metaphor for exploring dark tourism’s expanding frontiers — you could always get more than you bargained for, and experience something you would prefer to forget.