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Published: December 1st 2007
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Overlooking Badami
Just looking onward... see where we have gone and where we shall go. On our way to Badami we had to switch busses twice. On our second transfer we were in Bijapur and with a few hours to kill we took a rickshaw for a tour of the city to see some cool sights. Our driver spoke no English, out of all the drivers at the bus stop that did, we somehow ended up with the one that didn't. He just sat there, drove and when asked anything wobbled his head, identical to a bobble head car ornament. This, according to the Lonely Planet, can mean yes, no, maybe or something else in India. We stopped at some tombs where we had to take our shoes off (quite normal for any temple in India), walk clockwise around the tombs, rub smoke on our face and ashes on our neck. We then headed to some other palace type tombs with beautiful gardens.
Our third sight was much more interesting, the Gol Gumbaz, a temple of course, with tombs of course, but with the second largest dome roof ever built. When we climbed to the top balcony, that wrapped around the circular dome ceiling inside, you could whisper against the wall and hear it echo
Happy Lion
Best sculpture so far!!! Who says Lions are scary? about 10 times and you could hear it clearly from the other side which was about 40 meters across. This however was impossible at the current time as many people were there screaming, yelling and stomping to hear their noise over top of eveyone elses. It was cool, I took some video of it in hopes to catch the audio of the echoing. It sounded to me just like an indoor pubic swimming pool that always has that echo noise of swimmers talking and yelling. Our driver than offered to take our photo with our camera, which was nice, but unfortunately he didn't know how to use a camera and just pointed it at our feet while he looked straight at us and clicked the shutter. Thankfully some people who knew what they were doing stepped in and corrected the photo. So we took our driver out for lunch and headed back to the bus stop to catch the next bus down to Badami.
Badami, cool place, small, quiet and very friendly. The whole next day we spent sight seeing while children would run up and ask for school pens, chocolate, or their photo. They were all friendly, it
Badami Pano
A shot of Badami from the heights of temple caves. reminded me of Africa where 10 or 20 kids would just swarm you and follow you around. So we saw some beautiful caves with gardens, watched the women wash clothes the in water tank (looked like a large man made lake) and saw a couple temples. We met a nice man there as well, he took us around, skipped rocks with us, took pictures for and with us and just called every good photo sight a "Super Scene". In the end didn't ask for anything for spending the whole day with us. So we took him out for dinner and gave him a few rupees for his friendly time.
That evening after dinner we boarded a bus further South to Hospet that continually bounced us 3 feet in the air of which I numerously hit my head on the roof. From Hospet we hailed a 30 minute rickshaw ride to Hampi to spend 2 days there biking around the ruins.
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