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Hampi is one of these places you know you'll get to, when you still plan your journey. It came to my attention due to somewhat tragic circumstances - an Israeli traveller drowned in its lake about a year ago. I remeber myself sitting to lunch with Shahar B. Inbar and Tali, my ex-colleagues, as I read about it in the newspaper. I later asked other people about it and was told Hampi is "a quite place with huge stones, cool lake and beautiful sunsets". Enough for me to include it in our plan.

So we took the night bus from Goa to get there. Although we're talking about a Sleeper Bus, the one you can lie down full-body in, we hardly slept during the 12 hours ride. Lets say that it's a bit difficult to do so when your head meets the upper shelf every now and then. It was a bumpy road, no doubt about that...

We arrived Hampi a bit dizzy and tired and immediately crossed the river via a fish boat, to settle down in the backpackers ghetto. It is one long dust road with many guesthouses and restaurants, loaded with Israelis and other backpackers fleeing Goa due to the latest alerts.

The next day we explored the famous ruins, built by the empire which controlled South India during the 14-16th centuries. The size of the site is huge and it took us half-day to go around it with an auto-rikshaw . Although impressive, we both agreed that nature sights are more apealing, so from then on, we started exploring the surroundings by foot. The most amazing thing here were the huge boulders placed one on the other as if someone set them that way, in some mysterious way.

Hampi was found to be a very shanty-shanty place, with beautiful rocky nature, amazing sunsets and a cool lake indeed. Altough many backpackers stay for longer periods here, we felt the four days we've spent there were enough. It's a nice place to relax but the food and the accomodation were not as good as Goa's, so we took another head-cracking night bus back to the beach town. Our days left in India can now be counted on a single hand so we had to rush :)



The Title is taken from Rolling Stones' classic "Rock and a Hard Place". (Lyrics).

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