Badami

So it was a 6 hour bus trip from Hampi to Badami. I don’t usually mind the long bus trips, I put in my iPod and look out the window. Unfortunately – or some might say fortunately – I met an Irish guy on the bus. He didn’t stop talking, he wanted to talk the whole time. I eventually decided to try to sleep to shut him up. Don’t get me wrong, some company is good, some conversation is good and he was nice enough, but 6 hours is a long time on a very bumpy bus to be making chit-chat.

Then when I got there it was a little depressing. The reason I had decided to go to Badami is because of the caves, I’ll get to explaining the caves. Rooms were crap and expensive and loud, this pissed me off, especially since I spent 6 hours on a bus to get away from the noise.

So I decided to only spend 1 night and get out of there as soon as possible. In the morning I got up and went to the caves, I was in a bad mood and generally not feeling very happy. The caves changed all of that – well, the caves themselves were just caves, caves with amazingly detailed carvings and temples built in, but still caves. It was the school kids again that saved it.

This time I sat talking to a group of about 50 high school students and their teachers, they were all really lovely. People usually want to shake my hand, and the girls like to pat my arm or you could say ‘stroke’ This group was really funny because whenever a new teacher came forward and the principal showed up at one point, the girls made a really ig deal about me shaking their hand. It was really funny.

It put me in really good spirits for the bus trip. The bus trip was another 6 hour event. I had many conversations with people and I met a group of girls from an English-speaking school. They quizzed me, they wanted to see my passport and started to read it. They asked me all about Australia and wanted to know thing like our national flower and animal etc. I didn’t know most of it. They asked our Prime Ministers name and how to spell it. They were amazing, really wanting to take advantage of the learning opportunity that I was. Now I am back in Goa.

I’ll get to a Christmas post soon

If you haven’t seen it, there is a post about Hampi below.

Hampi

So I am way, way, way behind with my blogging at the moment. Let’s start with Hampi. I went to Hampi for a few days last week, it was Ok but exhausting. To be honest, i’m not too sure why everyone raves about it the way they do.

Hampi was the centre of some empire in the 13/14/15th Centuries, so there are loads of ruins around. This is all exciting, for the first 30 mins, but after a little while it all starts to look the same and it is just sad. Why is it sad? Because most of the ruins are ruins because of religious wars. The temples (both Hindu and Muslim) were defaced so that they could no longer be used as a place of worship. No matter what you believe, I think it is sad to have people destroying other people’s images of God or whatever.

The saving grace was that I did a tour of all these ruins on a Saturday. This meant there were heaps and heaps of schools from nearby – up to 6 hours drive – doing a field trip to see the ruins. So I had hundreds and I really do mean hundreds of kids wanting to touch my skin and ask me my name and practice the very little English they know “What is your name?” “What is your country?” and then sometimes they could ask “What is your mother name?” father name, brother name, sister name etc. It was so much fun. The kids really light up talking to me, they love it – so did I for that matter.

The only person who didn’t like it was my rickshaw driver. I had paid him to give me a day tour and he saw the kids as being ‘in the way’ of me seeing the sights where as I was sitting half out of the rickshaw so that I could shake everyone’s hand.

There are some photo’s of the kids on my flickr account. They also love having their photo taken. I had planned to stay in Hampi for 1 week, but it was too noisy and I wans’t that big of a fan so I went to Badami. See the post on Badami

Oh, I also spent 10Rs (a few cents) on getting a ‘blessing’ from the temple elephant.