Temples, boulders, falafel and a heat wave

This post is dedicated to Diane who virtually made me promise her that I would go to Hampi. I did. It was great. Thank you. 

Hampi is south of Hyderabad in the state of Karnataka and is home to some of India’s most important archaeological temple ruins. That’s all the official information that I have, and I only became aware of the importance of Hampi because they gave me a fancy ticket and I had to pay to see the sights... see the tariff picture below.

                                                                                  

The landscape is, once again, astounding. There are massive (massive-massive, not just big) boulders everywhere, stacked up like big golden jubes all over the place. The hotel I stayed in was built into the boulders. Hampi is entirely strange and incredible.  There is a gorgeous river running past the town and around the temples. People bathe, play, do their family laundry and wash the local temple’s elephant, Lakshmi, in this river. I asked one of the elephant washers why she gets washed every day. I assumed it was because pilgrims and tourists like to see a huge elephant getting a scrub down, unfortunately this was not the answer. The man explained to me that Lakshmi likes to lay down in her wee and poop, and that she starts to smell if she is not regularly bathed. I went to visit Lakshmi in her temple later and I understood quickly why she liked to lay in her waste. Lakshmi, the famous temple elephant, was chained on a platform within four walls of pillars. She couldn’t escape chilling in her poop even if she tried. Elephants are such incredible creatures, and people can be so plain awful.

Some elephant stables

The lotus temple - the most beautiful building I have ever seen, 

aside from Morris St...

Squirrel!

There was a beautiful breeze inside this watchtower. I sat up here for ages escaping the heat and enjoying the bizarre landscape.

A young boy told me a long story about how Hampi came to be covered in boulders. An extremely abbreviated version of this story is that a Hindu God needed to find medicine for an ailing Goddess, so he journeyed to the Himalayas. When he arrived in the Himalayas there were so many medicines that he didn’t know which to bring back, and rather than risking bringing the wrong medicines back, he picked up as much of the Himalayas as he could, and carried it back to Hampi. The boulders we see today are the bits of the Himalayas that he dropped along the way. Cool huh? Funnily enough I’m in the Himalayas now and there are no sign of Hampi-like boulders. This is a picture of the graffiti that the boy and his friends have painted on one of the boulders built into the roof of the hotel.

Hampi was also quite a nice place to be sick. I ailed my troubled tummy with a third course of antibiotics since arrival back in India (not bad for three weeks), and lots of hommus and falafel from a restaurant on a farm with river views. I went to see a doctor, who turned out not to be a doctor. He explained to me that he was kind of a doctor because his father was a doctor, and his father had ‘taught him many, many things’. He took payment for his medical advice by donation ‘around two hundred rupees will be fine’, he recommended more antibiotics and Imodium. On a cheerful note I found a great room that was painted fluro pink and had two showers, weird!

I zoomed around the temples and ruins for a few days on a motor bike, something I never thought I would do in India. It was so nice to be independently mobile and not to have to haggle for prices every time I wanted to move. Hampi is like the glorious Pai of Thailand, I can imagine staying there for a long time, maybe at a cooler time of year though - it was sweltering.

My friend Marco from Italia, motor bike companion extraordinaire!