La Gringa y Su Esposo: Otherworldly Hampi

February 8, 2019

After our short stay in Mumbai we set out for another 12 hours of travel to Hampi in the state of Karnatka. Noon Uber to the airport (yes, Uber is a thing here), 1.5 hour turboprop flight to Hubli, 3 hour train to Hosapete (2 hours delayed), then autorickshaw into Hampi, arriving at midnight. A lot of time waiting around in terminals and stations, trying to stay awake while still recovering from jet lag. Hubli is a regional transit hub (read: few tourists), so we kept getting approached like celebrities. Learned that if you say you’re from Canada it’s much less interesting than being from the States. Vancouver it is!

Hampi was the former capital of a great Hindu empire that spanned all of Southern India from the 14th to 16th centuries. The city was a world-renowned metropolis of 500,000 people, 20,000 horses, 5,000 camels and 900 elephants. It was destroyed in 1556 after 5 Deccan sultanates banded together to defeat the Vijayanagaran army. They looted and razed the city for six months after which it remained largely uninhabited until the expansive ruins were rediscovered by the British in the late 1800s. Some ruins are still being excavated, with significant discoveries as recent as 1984.

Present day Hampi is home to about 3,000 people and probably a dozen curious cows. It’s a Hindu city, so the cows just roam free – no owners – causing traffic jams (the honking isn’t helping, people) and nosing into restaurants before getting shooed away. The town is built in the middle of the Unesco heritage site, and probably over ruins. It’s pretty surreal to be casually surrounded by so many relatively ancient structures.

Three way traffic jam and one obstinate cow.

Our first day we rented bicycles and headed toward the Hampi Waterfalls. Supposedly only a few kilometers away along the river, we got lost and ended up in a banana plantation. A nearby local picked us up and started guiding us, walking barefoot over the rock and streaming Indian radio from his phone to bluetooth speakers. The river causes crazy rock formations and it was a scramble over the boulders to get to the “waterfalls”, which are a series of swimming holes formed by the river and granite.

A 4.5m tall monolithic Ganesh

The next day we signed up for a bicycle tour of the ruins, riding around in the mid-90s heat (we were informed this isn’t “hot”) while our guide described the many temples, statues, bazaars, and royal palaces. We learned that Hindus do not worship at or restore defaced statues, instead turning them into monuments. Seems the Sultans knew this, and often only inflicted enough damage to ruin the spirituality of the statue or temple. Makes sense, as they were doing all that looting and razing by hand using stone axes. We also learned that the Vijayanagara punished treason by crushing the offender with an elephant. Creative! The main temple is still a place of worship, with tens of thousands of people arriving to celebrate some religious festivals. The base is original, the yellow is rebuilt.

We spent about 4.5 hours exploring the ruins, only seeing a fraction of the thousands of sites, after which we were exhausted. We were served thalis by a local family, then we biked back to our room, cleaned up, read and sorted photos, then passed out and slept through dinner, waking up to grab a few snacks from an already closed convenience stand.

Up early to hike to nearby sunrise point for a beautiful view before packing up and heading back to Hosapete for another long day of trains. Next stop: Mysore.