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.
You look amazing! I can’t wait to catch up with you and hear al about your travels.