'WL'

Namaste!

It has been two full weeks. I have been looking forward to writing about my recent excursion but I didn't get the chance last weekend and decided to leave it for when I was back at tranquil Shanti Bhavan. Ladies and gentlemen, Hampi, India is a gem. It is a place where time has stopped, where people and animals cohabitate in soothing harmony, where the plants are as green as can be and the sun shines so bright that you can see a perfect circle reflected on the cobble-stone streets.

But before I tell you about my experience in this place I must begin by describing our very eventful journey to get there. So we all got ready to leave on Wednesday afternoon. A nice taxi driver picked us up in a car somewhere between the size of a smart car and a VW golf, an "indie car" as they refer to them here. The five of us, Derek, Neil, Suparna, Elsa (a nice girl from Malaga, Espana I had yet to mention) and I crammed into the small car, excited to begin our trip. We drove directly to the Bangalore train station, expecting to quickly buy our tickets for the return trip and then have a nice dinner before the train left at 10:00 pm. Well, let's just say the night didn't turn out as planned.

Our e-ticket that we printed out the weekend prior had all 5 of our names on it, a couch number and seat numbers, and then peculiarly, it had the letters WL printed at the top of the page. We all must of thought they stood for the name of the company or something. Well, it turns out that the letters stood for WAITING LIST! OH CRAP! What to do now?? We were so confused as to how the system worked, and needless to say the people at the counter in the train station were anything but helpful. We were numbers 6 to 10 on the waitlist and for about 2 hours we sat around checking a small, beat up computer screen that sat next to the counter to see if the numbers decreased.

Finally, the three females got confirmed but unfortunately the males didn't make it. I went up to the counter with this pretend-petrified look on my face and said: "Hellooo Mr. (the hello with lingering ooos descending in tone and volume level), the girls in my group made it but the boys, our dear friends, did not make it on the train." Apparently the oooos helped since he proceeded to tell me that if we all wanted to travel together, that we could just share a tier ("bed") on the train and that no one could say anything. "Hmm, well that sounds sketch" I thought "but it might make sense, since the train tickets were only $15 each, even though it's a 10 hour train ride"...I told the group and they were like "OMG, lets do it"...we had received an email confirming that we had paid for all five of them, so we didn't feel terrible about it, but we indeed continued to doubt whether or not we would be A. allowed on the train, B. comfortable, and C. safe. By that point however, all we wanted was to have something to eat and to board the sketchy train to get to beautiful Hampi.

We figured out which platform the Hampi express train departed from and then grabbed a quick bite to eat at the train station restaurant...not bad for what you would expect, seeing as how the train station is crowded, loud, smelly, and dark. After dinner, it was still about 9:30 so we waited for our train sitting on top of our squished luggage witnessing how people would get in and out of the two trains preceding ours. While boarding, there were men helping women onto the moving train by throwing them on by their waists, YEP, scary! And there were people elbowing each other in the face as they tried to arrange their luggage inside, while others waved frantically through the windows, at the family members staying behind. All this just concerned us a bit more but it was certainly an experience to be riding an over night train in India, so we kept telling ourselves that, until finally, our train arrived.

Now for the funny/ridiculous part of the story, boarding the train was not terrible, but once inside, we were so confused as to which seat turned into what bed, and which three beds were ours. Meanwhile all the native Indians were laughing hysterically at our frazzled expressions. We basically sat in whatever spaces we found empty, waiting for the "DT" to come and tell us we were in the wrong place. From this point forward, the order of events went something like this: He came, he yelled, I hid my face behind my backpack as I tried to cuddle into a corner of the tier, Indian ladies chuckled, Derek stepped up and asked if there was a "tax" that we could pay, the DT obstinately said "200 rupees"! (AKA $5), we gave; we got 5 beds...talk about cheap bureaucracy! By that point it was about midnight but we still got to comfortably relax in our five "WL" beds and sleep for eight hours. Then at long last we arrived at the Hospet train station, just a 30-minute auto rickshaw ride from Hampi.

A bit of historical background on Hampi: In the Hindu legends of Ramayana, this area was the realm of the monkey gods; still today many of the city trees are crowded with "red face monkeys", timid but very nice monkeys, by the way. The Telugu princes founded the city in 1336 and over the following two centuries, the city grew into one of the largest Hindu empires in Indian history. The city's busy bazaars were centers of international commerce, overflowing with precious stones and merchants from far away lands. Then in 1565 the city was pillaged by a confederacy of Deccan sultanates, and the empire sadly fell and was abandoned for centuries. Today, a battle remains between those who want to protect what is left of the ruins and those who live there. The city was declared a world heritage site in 1986 but only some of the monuments hold protection status.

The city is divided into sections: The Hampi Bazaar is a village crammed with budget lodges, small shops and restaurants which all surround the huge Virupaksha Temple. Among these establishments are small cottages where the local people still live. The bazaar has either coble stone streets or dirt streets in which cows, goats, roosters and monkeys linger freely. Among them, children in their traditional Indian dresses play with pebbles or hang around asking tourists to take their picture, it's amusing. We stayed in this area of Hampi. When we arrived at our budget lodge, the Gopi Guesthouse, we went straight up to the roof top restaurant/garden where the staff greeted us delightfully. There was a table of French people, a table of northern Europeans (so good looking), and then there was one man sitting alone whom I must describe. I couldn't decipher where he was from, he was a middle-aged man, dressed kind of ruggedly, carrying one of those hiking, wood sticks...he looked wise, for a second he reminded me of Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings (yes, I do like that trilogy). He was looking out into the endless rock boulders in the distance and his face looked like a comprehensive encyclopedia of bliss and no he didn't seem to be on any sort of altering substance, he just seemed to be in an enviable state of satisfaction with the world and with himself, maybe it was Hampi, I thought. I didn't get the guts to chat with him; he just seemed to be on a different level of consciousness and I didn't want to interrupt.

After having a great breakfast we had to register in the police department. I thought it was odd but once I saw "the book" I thought it was awesome. Every tourist that has roamed this city has signed up in "the book" and it holds signatures from ALL OVER THE WORLD! I didn't check to see whether there had been someone from Nicaragua since the book was thousands of pages long, but it sure felt great to write down my country's name on it.

After that, the activities began. That day we walked through many of the ruins surrounding the bazaar and then walked down to the river where we took a "bamboo boat" ride through caves and huge granite boulders, it was amazing. We then went to an awesome restaurant where we ate great food citing on mattresses in which we then NAPPED for a couple hours. The falling asleep was the best part as we enjoyed the breeze blowing from the river banks and the sound of monkeys and birds in the distance harmonizing with the soothing sound of a sitar that one of the waiters was playing a few mattresses down.

When we woke up, completely rested and in the best of moods we took an auto rickshaw to the Hanuman or 'monkey god' temple. We climbed up 670 steps in the company of wild monkeys who were surprisingly good hosts to the temple visitors. Once at the top of the hill, we were all mesmerized by the beauty surrounding us. Contemplatively and in silence we sat watching the sunset next to about 50 monkeys, surrounded by acres of green rice paddies, banana tree plantations, and huge, sporadic granite rock boulders. I love high altitudes... The next day we woke up at sunrise and took a yoga class up in the rooftop of our lodge. The instructor was not that good at instructing, he was just someone that knows Yoga really well and decided to instruct in order to practice it more himself. Anyways, it was awesome to have done yoga before the long and active day ahead of us.

After breakfast, wee took a tour of the 50-meter high, Virupaksha temple and visited Lakshmi, the temple elephant. The Hindu temple is dedicated to god Shiva and it was built around a special small stone, referred to as a Shiva Lingam, basically a phallic object worshiped as a symbol of this god, representing also divine generative energy. People were praising the stone: some poured water on it out of a gold pitcher while others threw flowers and food around it; it was certainly an intense sight. As for the elephant, she seems to have come to terms with the fact that she is chained to a wall waiting for people to take her picture, but it was a sad site. It would have been way cooler to see her freely wandering through the green lands of Hampi. After that we biked about 6 km through the bazaar and the ruins of the royal centre (another section of the city), and although it was extremely hot, we had a great time. The ruins were intense; there are some huge rock monuments that sit hidden among banana trees; it felt like playing "Legends of the Hidden Temple", haha. That night, completely exhausted, we went to a restaurant, The Mango Tree, where again we sprawled out on floor mats, had amazing food under the soft light of kerosene lanterns, sat below an enormous mango tree and looked out into the river and the boulders once again is awe of the amazing view.

The next day we walked for hours deep into the middle of nowhere to find small waterfalls and rock pools that surround an area of the city. On our way we ran into Namu, a man who seemed to have lived out there in the wilderness for most of his life. He apparently has seen many tourists get lost in search of the waterfalls and he has now assigned himself as the guide for people he finds on the trail. The waterfalls were not huge since the monsoon season is now over and the water level has decrease significantly in the past month, but it was awesome to be out there where all you could see was untouched land and all you could hear was naturally running water and talkative wild animals in the distance.

That afternoon we lingered around the city for a while, played a game of Karam, which is an Indian game similar I guess to pool, except without the poles. And that night we took an overnight semi-sleeper bus back to Bangalore, since again our train tickets were "WL". It was a ten-hour ride and the driver was a wacko that made it seem like we were off-roading in a very unstable bus that needed its shock absorbers changed, it was horribly uncomfortable. But in the end, the traveling hassles were all worth it at the chance to see the paradise that is Hampi for three days.

Until next time!
Much love.