Hampi: Day 20 & 21
Day 20
- Arrive in Hampi around 7 in the morning, rickshaw to hotel, hire rickshaw driver to show me around for the day, check-in to hotel, settle in.
- Rickshaw picks me up around 9, and the day begins. I agreed to pay him 100 rupees per hour of touring, and the plan is for an 8 hour day of sight-seeing. Hampi is an incredible place. To start with, you are surrounded by these hills of giant boulders. Don't be mistaken, they are not grassy hills with boulders on them......it's literally giant hill-sized rocks, with other smaller, but still huge, boulders piled on top. Some of these boulders are perched in such a way that they seem to defy physics. On top of that, there are ruins......everywhere! I traveled to Hampi thinking the ruins might be outside of the city area, I was wrong, they are throughout the city, surrounding the city, walk in any which direction and you will run into ruins. None of them are fenced, and while several important areas have says saying vandalism is punishable, climbing on them and through them is entirely allowed. I spent all day climbing around the various sights. Basically, I felt like India Jones in a foreign world exploring alien ruins. It's amazing. I probably took about a million pictures the first couple hours I was there because it looks so.....strange.....awesome.......astonishing....more like something you would imagine coming out of sci-fi than reality. Did I mention the crazy amount of awesome ruins?
- To finish off the night, my rick driver too me up to this one hill top which is renown for the view. I get up there, and as I hike up to the tippy-top, I come across a little temple. A priest is standing out front, so I wave hello, and he calls me over. He takes me into the temple, which is a cave, and shows me around, provides a little explanation, and of course, gives me a blessing. I head out an watch the sunset. It wasn't the most clear night, but beautiful view none the less.
Day 21
- Wake up around 6:30, try to figure out how to bus to Goa.....unsuccessfully. - Have the hotel owner arrange my overnight bus to Goa, regrettable, for that night.
- Make my way across the river to Tom and Jerry's.....a couple of guys who run a bouldering outfit. BTW, their real names are not Tom and Jerry, but these names are easier for tourist to remember. This using pseudo names is not an uncommon practice in Hampi, since a large portion of it's inhabitants are westerners.
- Reach the outfit just in time to depart on their morning 3 hour bouldering class. Bouldering is kind of like rock-climbing but much more technical. Basically, instead of climbing a large rock face, which are typically more jagged, and have more holes, to use to climb up the face, in bouldering you have to maneuver up the top of a boulder by using the tiny dimples and finger tip-sized ledges to hoist, push, and pull yourself to the top. You can start from a standing position, but if you really want to challenge yourself, you started seated......which is nuts. It takes a lot of endurance, especially from a seated position, and its easy to wear your arms out if you don't do a lot of arm excersices. It's pretty challenging physically, but it's also a mental work out, in so far as you kind of have to plan out where and how you will move your various appendeges in advance given that their aren't an infinate amont of dimples and ledges to utilize. It's kind of addicting......wish I had another day to reattempt some of the boulders I didn't complete that day.
- Lunch at Laughing Buddha with random guy from Texas. Interesting guy, a little older, and avid traveler. He is business consultant who works contract jobs here and there, and travels most of the time. We chatted for a couple of hours. He was the first american traveler I have met while abroad, and it was nice to bond over how things are done in the good ol' U S of A.
- Visit temple and take picture with temple Elephant.
- Pack up, and head out. Board sleeper bus to Goa.
Story-Time and Reflection:
Hampi is awesome. Super cheap, almost unreal scenery, and a west-coast-like laid back feel. For these reasons, the place is crawling with back-packers, which honestly, felt a little weird. It was the first time I had seen so many white people in India......not sure how I feel about that. Literally, at any given moment, you could spin around, 360-degree, and see at least one white person, if not only white people. It was nice to be able to chat with almost anyone, as nearly all of them spoke english, but it took away from the western-fraternity I have found in other parts of India. All the foreigners just blended into the background, and the special bond of hailing from the west was lost.
I also realized that I'm quite different from many of the other young travelers here, which I never noticed when it was a one-on-one interaction. There are sooooooo many dirty, hippy-looking, young 20-somethings here, many of which are wearing loose, linen eastern-style pants, and other Indian clothes, particularly the kind you don't even see Indians wearing. Don't get me wrong, everyone I spoke with was very friendly, and many remind me of friends of mine from the States, but place me, in my Eddie Bauer travel pants, which are light weight, water repellent, quick-dry, and anything else that makes them the most practical choice for a traveler who will be navigating all types of terrain and urban settings, along with my basic black or gray v-neck, among these throw-back, hippy look-a-likes, and it's quite obvious that one of these things is not like the others. Honestly, at times, I felt more out of place amongst them than when I'm the only white guy amongst a bunch of Indians.
Overall, amazing place, but between the scenery and the foreigners......it's really, REALLY, strange.
