A weekend in Hampi

Hey all,

This post is coming out a little bit late as I have lots to talk about from this weekend, which in case you couldn't tell by the title, I spent in Hampi. Hampi was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire many years ago and is filled with all sorts of fantastic ruins. It is also not a very well known place, which means that it is not as touristy and busy as Mysore was. A quick summary of the weekend is that it was a *fantastic* time. Now for the slightly longer summary.

Our train left at 10:30pm, so we met at the office at 9:00pm. This may seem like a lot of time to catch a train, but it turned out we needed it because I forgot to leave the one key the Tracy, Nels, and I share for Tracy! We had to have our auto-rickshaw (which was stuffed full with myself, Nels, Prasad, and Rob) turn around, drive by the place Tracy was eating, and hand her the key out of the side. Despite this rather long detour we managed to make it to the train station with plenty of time to spare and got situated in our train. Just like the trip to Mysore we were in 2nd class sleeper with air conditioning, which basically means we had four bunks in a compartment that we could close off with a curtain (oh, and it got *really* cold because of the A/C). The surprising part of the night was that as we were settling in we saw some other Americans in the space next to us, who asked us if we new Christian (who was originally going to come with us, as was Pavol, except they both became sick)! It turned out he had met them previously at an 'expatriates club' event and had told them about the trip. Their names were Sonnett, Natalie, and Nick and we all hung out together for the whole weekend. This began when the seven of us all packed into our part of the car, played a little uno, chatted, and had some beers that Prasad and Rob sneaked onto the train (which is not strictly legal, at least the drinking of the beers...). The phrase of the night, and really the theme of the weekend, was "Cloak and Dagger."

The train ride was 10 hours, and the beds are fairly small and uncomfortable. However it passed uneventfully, with Prasad vigilantly (but unnecessarily) guarding our valuables from thieves. Our train actually went to a town called Hospit, from which we took a 45 minute auto-rickshaw ride (it was pretty cool going through all the different small villages, having children run up to the rickshaw to wave and say "hello" to the white people, and going back at the end of the weekend we even saw a parade with a band and lots of cows horns pained and covered in jasmine [smelled awesome ^_^]). The most amusing part of the ride was when the driver suddenly stopped, seemingly at random, wandered off to take a leak, then hopped back into the car to keep going. It is definitely the case that people have no problem using the sides of the road as public toilets here.

Once we got to Hampi we were hit with a crowd of people offering us rooms (incidentally, it was incredibly nice to have Prasad mediating for us all weekend, as he can actually speak the Kannada [the language here] and he does not seem like an easy target for scamming). I forgot my backpack in the auto-rickshaw!!!, but nothing happened to it and I was able to get it back without any problems (^_^). Once we got settled into our accommodations (and took ice-cold showers without any soap) we had breakfast. While the food ended up being good, the actual breakfast process to something like 1.5 hours (once we ordered the lady there sent her son to go get food!). Once we got the food we began touring around Hampi. We started with the only remaining active temple (the only one that had not had its idol desecrated by invading armies hundreds of years ago). All the different temples seem to have the same style of architecture, but that architecture is different from anything I have ever seen elsewhere in the world. Anyway, the main temple was really neat, and I got blessed by an elephant! There was an elephant with its forehead painted, you give it a few rupees, it gives them to its handler, and then puts its trunk on your head for just a moment. It was definitely a cool feeling ^_^.

After the temple we started wandering around ruins of the old temples and bazaars outside of the working temple. It was all *beautiful*, even in its ruined state. It was even more incredible because some of the stuff was from like 1000AD! I will try to post pictures soon, but facebook has been being problematic lately.

At this point of the day we were getting hungry, so we went to a *fantastic* resturant called "The Mango Tree". You sit on grass mats outside and have a fantastic view over the river that goes by Hampi. Also, the food was amazing ^_^. While we were there we met a couple of Englishmen that had been in Hampi for a few days. They were spending a few weeks in India and just traveling around Asia in general, taking a break from graduate studies (the guy I talked to was in med school).

After lunch we began a long odessy to see Hanuman's (the monkey god) temple, which is a ways away from Hampi and across a river. We walked to the river, going through several other temples (and I aquired a bindi [the red mark on the forehead. No, it is not for unmarried women, it is a bleessing that you can get a most temples. I had the powder rubbed on my forehead and then was hit up for money. This is a rather frequent story]). We then took a boat a little ways down the river that goes by Hampi. This boat was certainly... unique. It was a bamboo framework with tarred animal skin on the outside. It basically looked like part of a coconut, which we stuffed 10 people into! We floated down the river and were dropped off for a little while to see another temple. The unique feature of this one was its musical columns. It has a whole bunch of small columns that, when knocked on with a fist, emit different musical notes! I have no idea how they were constructed, but apparently there used to be traditional dances at this temple with all the music provided by people tapping these columns!

Once we were done with the musical columns temple, we began the final part of our journey to Hanuman's temple. We first had to cross the river, which almost didn't happen because the people who ran the boats wanted all their money up front and we really didn't want to be abandoned on the other side of the river. We eventually made it across, though with feelings of distrust toward the people rowing us. At this point everything in the trip took on a general aura of sketchiness. Once across we had to hike over a few kilometers of random path through fields before we ended up at the bottom of the massive hill that the temple is on top of (right as it was getting dark). We made it to the top (in several groups as my knee had started bothering me and another person in the group also has bad knees) just before dark. The view from the temple is spectacular, and the sunset is supposed to be amazing (unfortunately it was too cloudy to see that day :-( ). The highlight of Hanuman's temple (other than visiting the birthplace of a god!) is that there are a whole bunch of monkeys up there that you can feed (that is one of the pictures that is going up ^_^). By the time we finished feeding the monkeys darkness had really fallen.

Thus began our trip to get back to Hampi. We hiked down the hill/mountain, then had to be guided back along those tiny paths in the dark to the river. If I had been doing this by myself it would have been *exactly* what you are not supposed to do when traveling abroad, and the whole thing felt pretty sketchy. However, once we made it back to the river the coconut boats were wating for us and (after sitting in a pool of water in the bottom of one) they took us back up the river (the poor guys had to work *alot* harder against the current). Once up the river we had "just a little ways" to the place outside Hampi we were going for dinner. This turned out to be about a half hour walk, for a whole group of tired people. It didn't really help when dinner (at this place recommended by the lonely planet) didn't have any light, took 2 hours to cook, and tasted terrible. After we got back to the hotel and slept like the dead!

I think I'm going to stop this post here for now. I'm getting tired and this is starting to get a bit rambling. I'll talk about Sunday in Hompi sometime later ^_^.

Cheers,
Jason