Hampi
December 1995
I spent six days at Hampi in the end, and although i wasn't very active, partly due to feeling ill most of the time i was there, i wandered around the place a little bit, mostly with Jenny.
We climbed to the top of a hill at the opposite end of the main bazaar from the temple. There were two paths to the top, on different sides - one made with very wide steps that looked kind of important and ceremonial, and in fact it faced the direction of the palace area. The other path was narrower and had the appearance of being the back way up the hill. At the bottom of the narrow path there was another, ruined, temple and a ruined bazaar stretching down to the river. There were some buildings at the top of the hill, including, i think, yet another temple.
The people who built the place must have been religious nuts, as there were little temples, religious figures carved into rocks and religious stonework scattered around everywhere, in a kind of demented way. It was really amazing just wandering around among the rocks - the entire site was covered in mounds of gigantic boulders - and finding things carved into the side or the top of rocks everywhere you went. They were generally either images of gods and associated figures, or weird sort of stone domes that were surrounded by a usually square indentation which had a channel running out of one side and down the rock to drain liquids away. They poured some kind of liquid over them for ceremonial purposes for some reason. I can't remember what these things are called, although i'm sure Jenny told me.
But wandering through this strange landscape was almost like you were tripping - rock figures and things would suddenly emerge out of the stones. The fact that everything was carved into or made out of the same stones that lay all around gave it a kind of living, organic feeling. Sort of like it had just spontaneously emerged in some way and could just as easily flow back into the landscape and emerge as something else.
Overall, i liked Hampi, but it wasn't India. It was a european tourist colony and the food was awful. It was a real contrast with southern India, which surrounded it and where you could get good cheap food everywhere. In Hampi it was really hard to find decent indian food, although some of the foreign food - like pasta, falafel, humus, chips etc - was good. It was quite expensive compared to everywhere else we'd been recently.
The other problem with Hampi was that just being there was making me sick. I never did find out what it was, but the day we climbed to the top of that hill by the back way up, we went down the other side and walked to Kamalapur. After this walk, i was feeling more healthy, but when i arrived back at Hampi Bazaar i started sneezing straight away and began to feel ill again. Whatever it was wasn't just in the beds obviously.