Hampi

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted, and we've been on the move. First, we went to Hampi, an ancient temple town, with Lauren from Macromedia and Harish, who's also in software here in Bangalore. We took the night train, which was a new experience for the two of them, and arrived early in the morning on Saturday. Lauren had to fly back to the US on Monday, so she and Harish left that evening on the return train. We still had time to visit many of the sites, mainly the Royal Center, on bicycle. It was beautiful and very striking from a geological point of view, but we were pretty hot. It is the low season now and there were not very many tourists, which was nice. Only a few brave (and sweaty) French families and German hippies were walking around. The city is clearly set up for tourism, with tons of signs in Hebrew and European languages, strange menu items like nutella chapatis, and people asking if we want to smoke various things.

Saturday night we stayed at the not-very-charming state hotel, but on Sunday we moved to a little cabin next to a rice paddy. It was on the North Side of the river, and we got there by riding in a motorboat for 10 rupees each. Apparently the river crossings used to all be done in coracles, the round traditional boats that look like floating baskets -- they don't seem particularly seaworthy but we had a good time riding in one in Srirangapatna. We rode across with a group of obnoxious American students - I'm guessing that they were some sort of Jewish youth group, though I'm not sure why. A local told us that the people who live in Hampi are annoyed by this new boat because it is twice as expensive as the coracles and has somehow driven the coracles out of business through a government contract.

We spent Saturday visiting the Sacred Center of Hampi, which was not that exciting, except that we got to see our first trained elephant: it accepts rupee coins in its trunk, hands them to its owner, and then "blesses" the person who gave him the coin with its trunk.

We were a bit concerned that we wouldn't find anything to eat on the North Side of the river, so we stopped by a place that advertised itself as a French Bakery to ask how late they would serve. A man in his 50s told us to come anytime. He had clearly studied English for Specific Purposes with some of the Hampi tourists, because he added "man" at the end of every sentence. When we arrived around 8 the family was watching Indian movies on television. There was no menu, just the friendly man we had already met asking us how spicy we wanted our dinner. It seemed that the French part of the bakery was closed for the low season, and instead the owner's wife served us what the family had eaten that night: dal, rice and chapatis (no nutella). It was nice, except for the mosquitos. When we were leaving we saw four frogs clustered beneath the same streetlamp, waiting for their dinner of mosquitos and flies.



Back at our cabin, we were treated to a beautiful show of fireflies over the rice paddy. The sky lit up with bright sparks of light dancing against the dark sky. Definitely the best fireworks show we've seen so far!