Hampi

A friend of a friend mentioned to my friend who mentioned to me that Hampi looks like where the Flintstones live.  The friend of my friend who relayed this to my friend who told me was quite correct!  Minus the dinosaurs the landscape was all there.  It even seemed to repeat the same 4 scenes as you walked by just like when they are off for a run or drive powered by Fred's feet!

The place is boulder heaven, or rather boulder earth, in boulder heaven all the boulders would probably get leighed as they arrived.  Although some might look like they are wearing Leighs as the Hindu festival of Holi just passed I am pretty sure the rocks don't know up from down and are vibrating at another level than us.


So picture mountains made of boulders and heat so hot the eggs fry inside the shell.  It is even reported that a gecko dropped 3 eggs 2 of which were cooked inside!  The ideal time to be awake in Hampi is between 5am and 10am as well as 6pm to 10pm although I was rarely up that late!

To get to Hampi we took a bus at around 10am leaving Ooty for Bangalore, which we reached around 7pm.  We found a night bus to Hampi laving a few hours later and had some grub and an internet break.  The night bus had beds like a sleeper train and was quite comfy!  Of course the bus couldn't go to Hampi, it stopped in Hampi's bastard brother town Hospet, controlled by the Tuk Tuk Mafia so you could pay another 100 rupees to go to Hampi.  Then when you reach Hampi you need to hire a boat to cross the river to get to the guesthouses!  Yup, another Mafia...apparently someone tried to build a bridge that mysteriously collapsed!

So we crossed the river and settled in at some incredibly early hour.  The first day was appointed a do nothing day in the hammocks and it was fine!

Hampi was a one day on one day off schedule, fully necessary.  We stayed at Goan corner, as suggested by Ido, a friend from Thailand and he couldn't have been more right!  The food was great, the atmosphere relaxed and ample room for hammocks outside every room which all seemed to be quite clean!

Our first trip was to explore all the ruins, which is the main attraction of Indians to Hampi.  There used to be a huge civilization, kings and all...temples, bathhouses, markets and more temples, even giant elephant stables!
Vishnu (I think) withthe head of a lion:



















Lotus building:















Underwater Shiva temple...right out of the legend of Zelda!

We saw more than enough of it in the heat and headed back across the river and home.  Home also had a wood burning oven where they made delicious pizzas!  I should have told them about bagels too!

(Hey Lumer how am I doing with shpeleeng??)

Seeing a sunset on the rocks was another fun adventure, and a beautiful moment.  We also headed to a giant resevoir blocked by a huge dam... this was fun but what a shvitz we had!  Days started in Hampi with early morning yoga followed by a rest, food and another rest,  then time to do something... By this time it was toohot and this led to great difficulty in peeling the hammocks off ourselves, creaming u and heading into the sun...It actually felt like heading into the sun.  Talking to my dad who asked the temperature I said it was somewhere just over 30C.  Then I found out it is closer to 40 than 30!  That explained a lot!
So to go to the reservoir we decided to rent bikes, not the ones with motors!  Sarah and I were both a little unsure about safely returning to the starting point in one piece on a motorized vehicle...

So in above 30 temp we headed out for a 40 minute ride uphill, except for one drop towards a river that we had to bike up the other side!  What a trip!  And when the dam was insight there was one final uphill challenge to get to it!  At this point we found some shade beside a building and lay down for over an hour!  After much focus we mustered the willpower to get up and head towards a spot where we could hop in the water...  The area was full of boulders and flooded so you need to find one protruding from the water at a shallow enough angle to climb back out.  One of us made it in and the other was a bit of a princess, and since I left my tiara at home I was the lucky one to go swimming!  (This moment actually helped inspire my next destination...the ocean!)

Heading back was easier as it was all downhill minus the climb up the river bank, only a couple hundred meters of difficulty.  If you ask me what I did that night I would tell yo I have no recollection, but I bet the sleep was real good!

The main focus in Hampi for westerners is rock climbing, or more specific here, bouldering, something I wanted to but never got around to doing.  In the morning yoga always won out and in the afternoon I was too tired to learn a new sport...  so that is still on the to do list...

The last thing we had to do was see a sunset at the Hanuman temple... he is a monkey god and of course after climbing 600 steps to the temple it was covered in monkeys!  The temple was small but beautiful and the view was the best I had seen in Hampi...  I was trying to decide where to go next, to some caves north of Mumbai or first to the beach... I am typing now 200 meters from the ocean...it wasn't really a choice!

Ooty, or Udhagamandalam if you prefer

We arrived in Ooty and began the hunt for a guesthouse... after a pricey one we found the green view (or green valley) guest house.  As soon as we took a room an Italian, David, asked if we wanted to do a  hiking trip the next morning... I was quite game, as that is what we came to do.  Then a guy I had met at the ashram came walking down the hall with his yoga mat and we had a funny reunion...what are the odds that we would be in the same hotel on the same floor right across fro each other 1 week after last meeting?!  He let me know that the roof was great for yoga (the asanas part...there are many other parts of yoga other than the moving of the body!  There is also a big part involving not moving the body or mind for that matter and also on how to conduct yourself... if you are bored or interested look up yamas and niyamas)

That night the German from the ashram (Yan) and his friend, the Italian and his friend (Sarah) and Sam and I all went out for a feast that couldn't be beat and didn't get up until the very next morning to start our hike!
Actaully we started with some yoga and breakfast and then met our guide.

Rajiv was/is a super interesting fellow.  He knows lots about the local flora and fauna and even more about everything.  It was hard to find a topic he couldn't converse about and he took a real pleasure in showing us around.  We were so excited about the cooler temperatures that we didn't realize the sun was equally strong as in the rest of India!  We all got great burns but it was worth it!  The scenery was completely unexpected, beautiful mountains and grasslands and we walked through a tea plantation, picking some for ourselves...

There were many people working with giant baskets hanging on their backs strapped to their foreheads, and they were moving a little faster than us...  All tea comes form the same plant, white, green and black that is, obviously mint is something else!  It depends what part of the leaves you use and how it dries...if you take just the one new budding leaf that will be for white tea which is what we did and it was really yummy!

After that day we were quite tired but agreed to go for another hike the next day!  That night was dinner and bed again!  Somehow I was quite allergic to my room and couldn't stop sneezing all night...  During the days it took a couple hours for my nose to stop running too...it was pleasant and unpleasant for me in Ooty!

The second hike was even more incredible than the first...we walked through rolling hills of grassland, something I have always wanted to do!  Not to need a trail but not being in a flat field, it was just beautiful...
Both days we stopped to visit hill tribes who served us chai and we relaxed and saw where they lived... On the first day we got carrots picked right out of the ground, they were incredible! The best part was how juicy they were, almost like a fruit!

It was hard to decide if I should head back south into Kerala where there are beaches and the other Sivananda ashram in the south or head north towards Hampi, but in the end Hampi won and I set off with Sarah, a British lass who had been sharing the guest house with us in Ooty...

Ooty was really beautiful and there was much more to explore in the city that I didn't get too.  Lots of Indian tourists go there as well, so there are shopping districts and restaurants on the mountainsides. If there weren't cows roaming the streets and rivers of poop and sewage lining the roads it could almost have been a city not quite entirely unlike something you would find in BC...  That might have made it sound a little smelly, which it was, but no worse than anywhere else...what I was really trying to say is that if you are in India got to OOTY!