Hampi - land of giants

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So, from Goa we headed up to Hampi. Train was very late

but we just managed to get a guest house in Hampi before

everything closed. Hampi is actaully really small, just

a few tiny streets, which is nice. It's a very chilled

out place with lots of roof top cafes and amazing

scenery.

We went to Hampi for the ruins of ancient Hindu templed

and palace. It really is an awsome place. The whole

landscape is covered in huge boulders. You kind of have

to see it to belive it (photos will apear soon). It

looks just like a load of giants have just picked up the

boulders and thrwn them around a lot. We did spend a

long time speculating as to how some of the boulders got

to where they are (e.g. on top of eachother, stacked up

in unatural ways etc).

First day were just walked round Hampi Bazzar near where

we were staying. We saw and amazing temple that look

just like someting out of ancient greece (lot os

pillars) which had a hugeeeee stone Ganesh inside. From

here we walked to another more complete temple then went

exploring! This invloved climbing ove boulders and

around bushes. We headed for a hill, which after some

time we found the steps up too. We got so far but

stopped when the steps turned into a hloes in a huge

rock with nothing either side to hold on to. We sat and

admired the view for a while but unusally bad vertigo

got the better of all of us pretty soon. Now i'm not

great with hights at the best of times but here is was

really bad. Racheal also got that feeling that the rock

we where stiing on was about ti slide down the hill.

It's a wierd place becuase there are rocks on all sides

and i got the horrible feeling they were all about to

fall and slide and we were going down with them. So, we

went back down the hill where the vertigo left us very

soon.

On our second day we decided to be energetic and hire bikes to see the rest of the ruins which are very spread out. It was a great ride up to the main palace complex and really fun looking at all the ruins. We cycled right through the palace area whic took most of the day and ended up at the main attraction of Hampi which is a very well preserved temple. The best thing about this one is a stone chariot in the courtyard which has stone wheels that actaully go round. All the temples are covered in carvings and some pretty impressive bas-realifs showing stories from the epics.

Getting back to Hampi Bazzar was fun. It was pretty hot by then and we are all exusted. Little did we know that the 'path' marked on the map invloved lots of steps where we had to carry our bikes. We were exusted by the time we got back to the guest houes but a couple of painkillers, a bottle of water and meal later and we were all fine. It was a great day, definatly one of my favourite in India i think.

Take care all, happy valentines day etc etc.

Jen

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Photos

Our Bikes
Mine called Cobra, Racheal on Razor Back and Sam on Hercules