With less than two weeks until Sarah arrives, I don’t have much time to get back to Delhi, but I wanted to break my trip up into smaller pieces. I wanted to go to Bangalore, but all the trains for the next four days were over-booked. So, I decided to go to Hampi as my first stop. In Hampi are the ruins of a city, which was the capital of a Hindu empire until the middle of the 16th Century, when it was sacked.
The only train I could get left around two in the afternoon. It got me to Guntakal, where I needed to change trains around 11:30 at night. I took a tiny, grimy retiring room at the station, happy just to have a place to lie down. At 6:00 the next morning I was on a train to Hospet, the nearest railhead to Hampi.
I found Hampi to be beautiful, and annoying. The ruins are scattered all around a rocky landscape. Huge boulders perch improbably on top of each other. A small city has grown up in and around the ruins, with some shops actually in the structure which was the old bazaar. I found it annoying because absolutely the only industry here is tourism. I am discovering that I don’t really like the places where tourists congregate.
On my first day, I met a Japanese girl who spoke Hindi (and virtually no English). It was wonderful to discover that I could actually carry on a conversation in Hindi without relying on English. It was also nice to meet somebody else who was connecting more with the culture than the average tourist.
The next day, which was thankfully cloudy, I roamed around the ruins. I discovered a wonderful huge Ganesh statue. At one point I met a group of local art students practicing their water color skills by painting the buildings and rocky landscape.