Goa to Bangalore

Day 6: The Tour de Hampi

25th September 2009

The fun part of any trip to some old temple town is to see the place after you have been taken the rounds by the customary guide is to do it again on bicycles and to our great joy (not so much for our rusty bones) it is great fun.

 The bazaar offers bicycles for 40 rupees for the whole day and after a day of strenuous cycling you can chill out at Mango Tree (a beautiful rock cut restaurant situated in the middle of a banana plantation facing the Tungabhadra river) or at any of the rooftop cafes. 

For our money, Durga café was the best with its quite good food and very friendly host. Kishkinda, the ancient name for Hampi in olden times is treated as the birth place of Hanumana and the hill top where he is supposed to be born is situated across the river at a place called Anegudi.  This was our last day at Hampi before taking the night train to Bangalore.

Goa to Bangalore

Day 6: The Hampi Chronicles

September 24th 2009

With more than 500 world heritage sites dotting the ruins, it is very difficult to see all of them in a span of 3 days of even a week, so for half a day we hired a rickshaw guy to show us the main sites across the place (600 rupees). Don’t do that. Much of the fun in seeing these ancient monuments is to know a bit about their history. 

 Ask some of the ASI guides to show you around the place and they usually divide the tour into two parts, the temples in the first half of the day and the Royal enclaves in the second half. (HS Krishna Kumar 08394 – 241411, 9449981479). The Virupaksha temple complex inside the Hampi bazaar is the only live temple and daily pujas are offered here and one of the shrines here can be rented our for marriages. Lakshmi, the resident elephant, blesses each one and an underground temple, the only one of its kind in the country, has both the statues of Vishnu and the linga. 

The main temples here have impressive wall carvings and beautiful ceiling paintings depicting various avatars of the Hindu gods and ancient tales. The Vitthala temple complex to the north of the hampi has beautiful carvings, musical pillars, remnants of huge ancient gold bazaars and the Kings’ balance – a stone weighing scale for the king to sit on and weighed against gold and precious gems. The Vijaynagar empire which flourished under the reign of Krishnadevraya was also famous for its sewage and water connection works and a visit to the stepped tanks, monolithic platform offer the visitor a peep into its wonderful past.

Goa to Bangalore

Day 5 - Marching into Hampi

23rd September 2009

Hampi is about 200 kilometres from Badami and covered in about 4-4.5 hours (1600 rupees for a drop) and is about 12 kms from the nearest town of Hospet which has the railway station. Hampi, from Pampa, the old name for the Tungabhadra river which flows through the town is the world’s second biggest heritage site after Rome and has about 200 temple structures strewn across the place with some of them inside homes and in fertile fields.

Representing the height of the Vijaynagara empires in the 16^th century, the temples and the sculptures here have a lot in common with the ones found in Aihole and Pattadakalu. November to March is the peak season with the Hampi festival taking place in January. Inside Hampi town or the bazaar as it is popularly known is a tiny lane with some shops selling curios, cold drinks and trinkets and has some rooftop cafes and guest houses. No vehicles are allowed inside the bazaar, except for dropping and picking up tourists and Hampi is quite well connected with Hospet by bus services which leave every half hour or by local rickshaw (150-500 rupees depending upon your wits). Much of the visiting population in Hampi are foreigners as it is also the bouldering capital of the country with huge boulders strewn around the place and a cursory glance on the menu cards of the main cafes can give you an eerie feeling of reading the same stuff across establishments.

Please book well in advance if you are traveling in the main season or you will have to shack up with some kind soul inside the bazaar for 100-300 rupees a night depending upon the demand (just bedding) or hoof it up from Hospet which has some decent establishments as well as the high end. The Shanthi Guest house (Paul: 9448678729) has some very clean rooms with 200 rupees for the ones without a loo and 350 for the ones with clean bathrooms. Mosquitoes are very liberal from Om Beach to Hampi and please carry generous doses of Odomos along with medicine supplies as Hampi does not have chemist shops.