Cows eat bananas in Hampi
Trip Start
Nov 04, 2007
1
38
62
Trip End
May 03, 2008
Hampi,
India
Thursday, February 14, 2008
We got up at 6.30am this morning to see Lakshmi, the temple elephant, have a bath only to discover, upon arrival at the temple, that she was in 'another place' and wouldn't be back until this evening. Tomorrow we leave Hampi at 5.30am (eeek!) so I guess we shan't be seeing Lakshmi's bath, which is a shame as she is a very lovely elephant - when we visited the temple a couple of days ago Hugh fed her bananas and gave her a rupee, after which she 'blessed' him by patting him on the head with her trunk. Hugh was then mugged by a monkey, who didn't seem to feel the need to give blessings in return for stealing a banana. The remaining bananas were fed to the baby cows outside the temple, who headbutted us into submission and threatened to stand on our toes.
Hampi is a little place full of ruins - the spectacular boulder-strewn hilly landscape is littered with them
Suspect number 1: The case of mugging monkey
. It was clearly a very big deal in the 15th century, when the rulers appear to have built more temples than it is probably possible to count (many of them are still being found by archaologists), along with palaces and gardens and bazaars. We are staying in the old Hampi bazaar area, which is dominated by an intact (and still functioning) temple and a street where the main bazaar used to be held (now full of guest houses, tourist restaurants and gift shops). Considering what a total faff it is to get to Hampi, we were surprised by just how many backpackers appear to be here. There is also an equally surprising lack of coach tours. But we are pleased with the corresponding improvement in standard of accommodation and we've got some laundry done, so every cloud and all that.We have actually gone on not one, but TWO tours - which was a bit stupid as we are now in the middle of no-where and running low on rupees (eating in tourist places is expensive...we'd not budgeted for a 300% increase in meal costs!...). Thankfully I've hidden rupees all over the place as a just-in-case, so we're now raiding our hidden supplies. We decided to go on tours because we've looked at a lot of Hindu temples during our time in India and largely have no idea what we've been looking at, what was going on or whether we've missed the best bits. So, with a few other people, we enlisted a guide to take us around the bit you could get to on foot on the first morning, and then the bit you can get to by tuk-tuk the second. There is a lot more to see - and many people hire bikes to see it. But we're running out of time and inclination to see many more temples.
We have spent quite a while sitting staring at the beautiful scenery from a restaurant called the Mango Tree, which serves very yummy food and appears to be where everyone goes for lunch
Lakshmi blesses Hugh
. We've also taken a yoga class (the teacher thought Hugh was wonderful and advised him that it was his calling in life, and very good karma, if he became a Yogi. I'm guessing not the bear either).Evenings have been spent in various restaurants around the area...the food is pretty westernised (we're not spending western prices on a curry, so may as well eat pizza). One night our restaurant was raided by the police and nearly shut down. This caused us some confusion as it didn't appear anything was amiss - we couldn't see any alcohol on sale (Hampi is a sacred place, so dry) and everyone appeared to be behaving themselves. It turns out that they'd been caught selling meat, which is also not allowed, and had to pay a hefty amount of 'baksheesh' to the police to keep the restaurant open. The police must make a very nice living here as pretty much every restaurant has meat on the menu - even if they've tried to hide it a little by using Italian words like 'carbonara' and 'pollo'. We've actually seem more meat on sale here than most places we've been to!
