Mysore has a very famous Majaraja's palace that was actually designed by a British architect. It's supposed to be over the top. It was. Its still in good shape since its just barely 100 years old. The one it replaced burned so this one is made of stone and iron. Many of the really colorful, elegant, multistory halls are help up by thin iron columns made to look like wood. In some ways it reminds me of Beaux Art buldings but is a classic Indo-Islamic building. There are sculptures in stone everywhere and all of the wood doors are intricately carved. Unfortunately they don't allow cameras. The audio tour that comes with the foreigner's ticket was frustrating in a couple of the museums there because things were just out of order or numbers were missing altogether. Then i got blamed for breaking the headphones when I said the headphones were broken. There just isn't a sense of customer service here unless you are in a clothing or jewelry store where there are 5 or 6 people trying to help you buy something when all you want to do is just look at something. The museums were interesting for there regal paraphernalia and outrageous furniture like carved wooden peacock chairs.
After the Palace I spend the afternoon in the Bazaar where I photographed as man flower merchants as I could in between be husled by Patchouili salesmen and kids trying to get me to come to there incense making shop and take a picture. The only other big thing I did was go to a temple up on a hill overlooking town. I've seen so many temples it really hard for me to get excited by anything.
So I took a night train to Hampi, the ruined capitol city of the Vijayanagar kings. It was destroyed by a league of 4 sultans in the 16th century. It's huge (64 square miles). Temples and buildings range from the 7th century right up to the 16th. There are small temples just everywhere. The landscape is stark with hug round volcanic boulders strewn everywhere and coconut and banana treed as rice paddies dotting the valleys like oases. There is a sacred center with many temples including the major one called Vittela or the muscial temple because many of the small pillars will ring is slapped. Then there is a royal center with palace ruins. Some things still stand there like the Queen's Lotus Palace and the Royal Elephant stables. The area must be prone to earthquakes because the construction doesn't look very tight on most of the remaining buildings especially the mandapans or pillared halls.
I spend the first day just wondering around the ruins near the area I was staying called Hampi Bazaar. The Bazaar was one of the 7 bazaars of the city, this one supposedly was the center of gold and diamond trading. This is also part of the sacred city where the major temples are. To one side of the bazaar a small tourist town has sprung up and then been partiall bulldozed. It's an annoying little town with rickshaw drivers constantly asking if you want a rickshaw ever 10 or 20 feet. The next day I took a bicycle tours of some of the royal center. It was a very hot bike ride. Most of the things we saw were pretty cool with some of them amazing. For one complex we had to buy a ticket, again foreigner's tickets cost 10 times more than for Indians. The ticket was good for the musical temple as well so after the bike tour I got some bananas for lunch and sat for a while before trekking the 3 km to the other temple. The walk was beautiful as was the temple. On the way back i walked along the river and found a little temple partially in the river. I watched the sunset from here. It was so beautiful and peaceful came back the next night for sunset after exploring some temples and a little town on the opposite side of the river. On my last day there I finally succumbed to the guesthouse owner who also owned a rickshaw. He'd cornered me a couple of times trying to get me to go on a tour with him. It got very annoying. However, that morning I went on a rickshaw tour of some of the buildings out at the periphery of the site that I'd missed. Most of them were worth seeing but as is usual I paid too much for the rickshaw. One of the temples was dedicated to Rama and is believed to be where Rama and Hanuman lived to wait out some horrible event. There was also a shrine to Hanuman where I met a priest who was getting ready to go on stage to chant for several hours (continuous chanting at this temple). He walked up to me and asked if I had a cigarette. When i didn't have one, he showed me around instead and gave me a blessing in the Hanuman temple with an orange dot on my forehead. Whenever you are blessed you must pay a token to the priest for it - it's still a little strange to me. I forgot all about the orange dot on my head until a waiter reminded my and then I noticed people were staring oddly at me at the train station when I went to leave Hampi for Goa. Thank god I still had some toilet paper to wipe if off with. People stopped staring.
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