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Published: February 8th 2008
The Long Drive to Israel
Right after the four-thousandth bikini clad goddess obliviously walked past us that day Paul and I decided that the time had come to leave the sunny shores of Goa. Somehow an entire week had disappeared on Palolem beach (I dare not guess the reason) in which we had seen very little, done very few things, been almost no places, and had learnt absolutely nothing. Sure, we’d both been having a great time and Punjabi had most assuredly been entertaining us each night with his antics but the time had come for us to move onwards and become the idealistic, consummate type of tourist that actually explores the foreign countries in which he finds himself.
To that end we said our farewells to our friends, soaked up the sun one final time, and jumped on yet another sleeper bus. This time we were prepared for the ordeal ahead of us and had prudently booked reclining seats rather than the beds. You may wonder about this choice as under normal circumstances a bed would be the preferable option for an overnight journey, but let me assure you that in the Indian backpacker world the seat is
by far the better choice. You see, on the two previous bus journeys that we had taken we had in fact booked a bed each only to discover that the bus was organised so as to have two rows of double beds. That’s right, booking a single bed on an Indian sleeper bus is equivalent to a poorly thought out matchmaking service where you are forcibly paired with a complete stranger in a curtained off bed for the evening.
Thankfully I wasn’t paired with a complete stranger; Paul and I had to share one of the beds.
Regrettably I wasn’t paired with a Swedish female volleyball player; Paul didn’t snuggle properly.
Our destination was Hampi, a small village which presides over the ruins of the great capital of the Vijayanagara Empire. This great Hindu empire began in the 14th century and controlled much of southern India until it was overthrown in the 16th century. The ancient ruins around Hampi, and I unexaggeratedly say there are thousands of them, are wonders in their own right, with reminiscent designs, styles and motifs from both Indian and Mediterranean empires, but when coupled with the obscenely weird landscapes around them the
old empire seems more fitting in a science fiction movie. The lands around Hampi are described as “boulder strewn” although in my mind the description would be more apt if it were “the remnants of a divine game of dominos”. Everywhere you look - outside the town, inside the town, on the hills, in the river. . . everywhere - there are gigantic yellow boulders strewn about, littering the landscape with an infinite supply of interesting formations. Never before have I seen a geologists dreams more correctly implemented than around Hampi.
As the bus weaved its way through the boulders and between the ruins, for the bus does actually pass through the scene, Paul read aloud from our guidebook as we sussed out which area of town we would head towards. When he got to the part about Hampi being a religious town and thus has a complete ban on alcohol we almost died of shock. It couldn’t be possible! For one thing, we were on a bus full of backpackers heading to the town and you never find that many backpackers going somewhere with prohibition. Worse still, the bus was almost entirely full of Israelis. . . ohh,
maybe we were going to be out of place there.
In Hampi we disembarked, avoided the rickshaw touts and headed straight for the ferry. From further reading we’d heard of a backpacker haven on the other side of the river, reachable by a small ferry, where the laws were less strict and the guesthouse owners were known to serve beers clandestinely. Perhaps over on that side we could find some interesting people, meet some new friends and maybe have some fun after sunset. When we got there though, things were not quite what we were looking for.
I’ll put the scene to you simply so that you can make up your own mind. We were sleeping in a small bungalow on a small street which ran parallel to the river. Along the road there were perhaps fifteen collections of rooms and bungalows like ours and they all looked virtually identical. Immediately upon arrival we sat down in the divan style dining area (a covered area in between the rooms) and ordered lunch before we started examining our surroundings. The TV was playing a movie in Hebrew and ten Israelis were scattered around the room watching the movie. Well,
Hampi Town
Viewed from across the river. Our accommodation was on the near side of the river, the ruins, old town and most of the shops/facilities were on the other. The ghats where locals bathe and clean their clothes are visible on the river bank.that’s ok, we had unknowingly ended up in an Israeli-aimed guesthouse; certainly not the end of the world. The real problem came when we discovered that every guesthouse, restaurant, internet café or shop on that side of the river was completely filled with Israelis, and because we don’t speak Hebrew we weren’t likely to meet anyone while we were there. It took a good ten hours before we met someone else who willingly spoke English (a pair of Danish guys), not counting an Australian girl who was moving to Israel and was learning Hebrew by talking to the people around her, but at least we managed to buy a beer with dinner. I’ve got nothing against Israeli people, quite the opposite actually, but when you put a group of them together they only want to speak in Hebrew which really makes it hard to meet them, and besides, why would you leave Israel if all you want to do is sit around on a divan talking Hebrew and watching Israeli cinema?
If I See Another Ruin I’ll Explode: Maybe I Should Hide in This Tipi
Exploring Hampi was an interesting experience. Once we got out of the
town, and past the drug dealers on the hillside behind it (we discovered that even with the complete ban on alcohol there are more drug dealers per capita in Hampi than anywhere else in the world), the ruins became all encompassing and we were all but surrounded by them. South of the town proper lie the old palaces, temples, baths and houses that were built for the king and his court centuries ago; they are all arranged within the old walls. Walking among the ancient buildings, I was in awe of the carved pillars, walls, roofs and shrines. Hampi really is a beautiful place.
However, after about eight hours of ruins we were rather tired of them, even though they were spread over two days. Each new ruin began to look like the last one, which indeed looked like the other four hundred we’d seen. It became impossible to really appreciate the buildings any longer. What were we to do? We had another whole day before our bus left and we’d seen all of the important buildings that we were interested in (and quite a few besides, the Elephant stables and Queen’s bath being good examples), what on Earth
Entrance to Virupaksha Temple
This temple stands in the very heart of Hampi Bazaar. It is huge, well preserved, and has a sacred pet elephant. were we going to do to fill our time?
The answer came as something of a surprise to me: we went to an open music night inside a Tipi.
At least now I can say that I’ve sat in an authentically built Native American Tipi in the middle of India among the ruins of an ancient Hindu empire while talking with a Danish guy about the music of Jamiroquai. I don’t think that has happened very often.
The IT Center of the World
Some say that India is taking over the IT world, that in the near future all of the world’s IT demands will be taken care of within the subcontinent and that the west is fast falling into oblivion. That may be a load of sensationalist media bollocks but I do know for certain that when I call up my telephone provider’s service center and ask about the weather in Bangalore I can expect an accurate answer. Knowing that, I was expecting big things from the Indian city that provides one third of all technology related exports from that country; the city known as the “Silicon Valley of India”.
When Paul and
I stepped out of our auto-rickshaw in the middle of downtown Bangalore (the shopping district around Brigade Rd.) and we surveyed the scene of dirty streets, ancient buildings, broken pavements, coffee shops, incomplete subway lines, messy power lines and seedy alleys the image of a rapidly growing economic powerhouse shattered in front of us. This was not the clean-cut, shiny new city that I had imagined, this was not the stomping ground of the nouveau riche Indian middleclass who managed international IT concerns by day and partied in neon-lit cocktail lounges by night. No self-respecting marketing consultant would be seen shopping in this kind of neighbourhood in the west, this place was little better than a slum!
Well. . . perhaps I am exaggerating a wee bit. The center of Bangalore was a lot better than the slums, and indeed it was a lot more glamorous than most Indian cities, but by western standards it was no Hollywood Boulevard. It seems that the IT boom in India isn’t nearly as effective as our media would have us think. Sure, lots of money is being saved by western companies by outsourcing, but the corresponding profits in India don’t seem to
be materialising as effectively. Paul and I wandered around the central district for a couple of hours before catching a film (Paul was feeling ill so we took the opportunity to catch up on sleep and watch our second Bollywood film) and the more we wandered the more we realised that the only visible affluence was in coffee shop form and they only really looked affluent because they covered up the broken down buildings behind them. Around every corner, in between every building and down every alley were the usual signs of the dirty, old and unmaintained reality that is India.
We left Bangalore by train, we only stopped through there en-route to Kerala, and as the train began moving through the outer suburbs I thought about the people who lived there. The people who work in the call centers, the low-down technicians who keep the IT industry moving, the programmers and the general workers, these people aren’t rich. Maybe the managers are rich by Indian standards, but compared to their counterparts in the west they aren’t and that shows in the city of Bangalore. The train slowly moved through suburb after suburb of shanty towns and slums. It
Temple on the Hill
Behind the Virupaksha Temple there is a hill which gives great views across the Bazaar, several ruins and the river. The hill is actually seems to be one gigantic boulder as there is virtually no dirt or vegetation on it. There are quite a few temples there though. was shocking to see how many people lived their lives in such places and to think of how many of them were the workers behind the Bangalorian economy. When I’m asking the telephone call center about the weather am I talking to someone who earns one dollar a day and lives in a shack? When I use my computer is the work of a thousand destitute Indians helping me play Solitaire? The possibilities shocked me.
Welcome to Jew Town
In India’s southwest there lies the state of Kerala, famed for its backwaters, its traditional dances, its colonial architecture, its mosquitoes, and as the place where Vasco da Gama landed as the first European to reach India by sea. Paul and I arrived in Kerala hoping to explore the historical buildings, experience the culture, and perhaps have some fun while we were at it; our first stop was Cochin.
Cochin was an interesting place to explore. Eating breakfast at Kerala’s largest chain restaurant, “Indian Coffee House”, where the waiters refused to write down any orders, instead using their powers of memory (it’s the little differences that count), and the food repeatedly proved less than idyllic was always
a treat, as was the ferry system across to the peninsula which can give you the most comprehensive tour of the smells and smells of an Indian harbour (it had a habit of pausing and waiting in exactly the wrong places). The old town on the peninsula was also great to wander around where we saw the Chinese style fishing nets which use an elaborate mechanism of rocks, ropes and poles to lift the huge nets from the water, the first Christian church built in India, an old cathedral, innumerable old colonial villas and businesses, and dozens of middle-aged tourists.
Despite being so rich in cultural history, particularly of the architectural inclination, Cochin did not really become exciting until we visited what is possibly the most intriguingly out of place attraction in the world: Jew Town.
That’s right, Cochin used to have a very sizable Jewish population and in a stroke of pure obviousness the section of the town in which they lived was labeled Jew Town. Nowadays there aren’t many Jews left, most of them having migrated to Israel last century, but the town still has a distinctive culture and feel to it that marks their former
home. The spice bazaars, trinket shops, handicraft stores, and tea houses all seem rather different from their counterparts elsewhere in the town, and the architecture also subtly indicates the former residents. Deep within Jew Town, just off Jew Street actually, lies the synagogue which is the heart of the district, apparently being the largest in the entire Commonwealth.
Because Kathakali is Bigger Than Life
Kathakali is a traditional dance style which is exclusively practiced in the state of Kerala so Paul and I thought that an exposition of the art would be an unmissable activity while we were in the area. Of course, Kathakali is one of those ludicrous art forms that are both incomprehensible to outsiders and really, ridiculously long and because of that we went to the “tourist version” and not the “night long feverish dancing inside a deserted Hindu temple version”. We chose correctly.
We arrived at the show early so that we could view the makeup procedure which is one of the more interesting facets of the dance. For forty-five minutes we quietly sat while the actors painted their faces in front of us, all the while listening to a monologue from
View From the Hill
Looking down at Hampi Bazaar. the director of the show. He explained to us the origins of the art, how dancing evolved from strictly religious expressions to more free expressions of wider subject matters, how the dancing style expanded from simple beginnings into a convoluted language of postures and symbology, and how the costumes and makeup related to the stories being expressed. The old man (the director) repeated the key points, emphasizing the important information again and again, as he expanded our knowledge with phrases such as (make sure to use a deep, slurred and deliberate tone of voice, along with wide hand gestures and a nervous tick of stroking your moustache, when reading these quotes):
Kathakali dancers train for many years to be able to express everything with their face. The practice moving all of their muscles. . . side to side , up and down , round in circles , eyebrows, cheek muscles , mouth, neck . . .
. . . he is playing the role of a god, and gods are larger than life, so he makes his face big, with big eyebrows. . . big eyes, big cheeks, big lips. He stretches his neck to make it big. . . he has big chest, big costumes, big skirt. . . because his character is bigger than life. . . because Kathakali is bigger than life. . .
I do believe that he said these particular lines about four times within that hour. . . I think we got the point.
There were two central performers in the show: the first made his face look devilish with strong colours of green, red, black and yellow before he lay down on the ground while an assistant completed his neck. To make his face appear larger and thus indicate his godliness the assistant glued a series of paper sheets around his
next which did two things. Firstly it did the intended purpose of making his facial area larger, and secondly it made him look like a prat. The second performer undertook a significantly less complicated transformation as he applied makeup in roughly the same way that western women do, turning himself into a peaceful looking and handsome character. It seemed unfair to me that the first man had to spend a good forty minutes in makeup while the second only need five.
After the makeup session was complete the two actors left the stage and we were entertained for another half hour with a detailed course in the language of Kathakali. By that I mean we were subjected to something bordering on creepy. A short, anorexic looking Indian man, probably in his sixties, came onto the stage wearing the traditional Indian costume which most closely resembles a nappy and waited patiently in the center. A drummer came out behind him and sat in the corner tapping out a simple rhythm and the director also appeared and began talking to the audience. He explained to us that every posture and gesture in Kathakali represents a concept or word so that the
Towards the Old Capital
In the distance are the ruins of the old capital city from where the King ruled his kingdom. dancer can read a story to you through dance. To prove his point he began saying English words that the old man on stage would then dance out to us, the idea being that we would be able to “read” his dance and understand the movements when we knew which word we were supposed to be seeing. This continued for a whole half hour while the old man convulsed on stage.
The only word that seemed to be at all connected with his dancing was “fish” but any old six year old can make a fish with their hands.
Finally, after all of that ado, the show began. We were to be entertained with a story from the Mahabharata, one of the great texts of the Hindu religion, and the director gave a brief introduction. The actor with the greed, red, black and yellow face with the paper extensions who looked like a devil was in fact the good-guy; he was playing the good prince. The other actor, the one with the handsome and softly coloured face was playing the bad-guy, or more precisely, the bad-girl; his character was an evil witch who was trying to seduce the
prince. With that inversion of characters thrown upon us the show began. The director sat in his chair explaining each new scene, the drummer drummed in the corner and looked surly, the old man in the nappy banged cymbals together and droned the words of the story, and finally the actors emerged!
The good prince entered first and danced a little introductory jig. His costume, finally revealed, was intimidatingly reminiscent of King Henry VIII and my local crossdresser (yes, he looked like a crossdressing demon but was supposed to represent a godly prince. . . I never quite understood the image) as it was a mass of brightly coloured skirts, vests and pom-poms. The witch then appeared, wearing approximately one tonne of skirts and gold jewellery, and she tried to seduce the prince. The irony of a man dressed as an evil woman pretending to seduce a man dressed as a crossdressing demon who was supposed to be a good-hearted prince has somehow been lost of the Keralan people for many centuries.
The show was entertaining, if confusing, for a good five minutes as the witch continuously tried to whisper in the prince’s ear while the prince valiantly
Greek Influences?
Some of the ruins looked distinctly similar to the architecture of the ancient Greeks. repulsed her efforts (for only the valiant would be able to say no to such a beautiful woman). At the end of the scene the witch revealed her true self (having been imitating a beautiful princess up until that point) by throwing her hair across her face and screaming like a Banshee. The expressions on the witch’s face were intriguing although rather repetitive (the infinite expressiveness of Kathakali dancers that the director had told us about was sadly lacking in the performance) and the dance was rather reminiscent of the ones that my highschool’s dance classes used to do at school assemblies so I can’t say that I wasn’t entertained, however, after five minutes and the second scene the lights came on, the actors bowed and the show was over. We’d been sitting in the auditorium for two hours and the show had only lasted five minutes.
Authentic Kathakali may be bigger than life, but after being subjected to five minutes of it that night I was convinced that a full night of dancing (for the real shows last an entire night from dusk until dawn) would be excruciating torture.
An Aussie Boat Cruise
The undisputed
Random Carving
Not only are there ruins lying around, amazingly old carvings can be found lying around on just about any old rock in the area. This carving was on the ground in the middle of nowhere! highlight of Kerala is a cruise on the backwaters. These rivers, lakes, canals and channels form a highway system of waterways which link the entire coast of the state. A boat can roam freely up and down, moving between towns and cities, in exactly the same way that cars can on our road systems. There are even “road signs” on the rivers indicating which river you should take. To come to Kerala and not cruise on the backwaters would be like visiting Sydney and not going to see the Opera House.
There are many ways to see the backwaters: you can rent a small row boat and its owner who will take you on a short two hour paddle around the rivers and creeks surrounding the town where you are staying; you can hire an expensive houseboat resembling a bamboo cocoon which encloses a fully catered and functional house that takes you on a 24 hour cruise through the idyllic lakes and rivers; you can take the passenger ferry between Alleppey and Kollam which takes most of a day to travel between the two towns via the main backwater paths and gives you a great insight into the waterside
Hampi Police Station
A lot of the ruins in the old Bazaar area (where the common people lived in ancient times) have been converted or reused for modern purposes. This building now houses the police. lives of the people of Kerala; or you can go on an organised tour.
Paul and I chose the most practical option and took the ferry to Kollam so that we would save time on transport later on. This option also had the additional benefit of having “drinks available onboard” according to our guidebook and that sounded like a splendid way to relax on the water. In the morning, immediately after boarding, I suggested that Paul check out the available drinks, to make sure that our information was correct, hoping that he’d come back quickly with a cold one. However, Paul disappeared and didn’t return to his seat! I was getting a bit worried, he’d been gone for a good five minutes which was a lot longer than I had expected, when he finally returned and sat down with me on the roof of the boat. He was carrying a large plastic bag filled with newspaper, how odd.
It turned out that the boat had absolutely no drinks on it at all! Not a single one! What kind of tourist ferry was this? Anywhere else in the Asia world, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else at all
Achyuta Raya's Temple
We walked around a bit on the first afternoon and found this temple hiding behind a hill. for that matter, you can usually expect a tourist day trip ferry to have a large cooler full of drinks ready to be sold at inflated prices. But in India, and especially in the conservative south, this sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen. Thankfully the system in Kerala is a little strange: even though alcohol is strictly controlled and you can rarely even buy it in restaurants, there are dozens of small shops on the street where you can buy beers without question. It always seemed odd to me that a restaurant would only serve me a beer if I hid the bottle and pretended it was apple juice for a charge of 120 rupees while the streetside shop would sell me a beer, open it for me, and let me walk off down the street while only charging me 50 rupees. It turned out that Paul’s bag contained a small supply of beers for the boat trip so we settled back into our chairs, looked out across the wetlands which stretched away from us, opened a beer, and relaxed the way you’re supposed to on a holiday.
The backwaters were amazing. The rivers and canals passed alongside
Rocks, Hampi Style
I said that the rocks were strewn about as though they were the remnants of a divine domino game. Do you now understand what I mean? sunken rice paddies, birds flew around us, palm trees lined every verge, fisherman, washerwomen, farm animals, playing children, and every other kind of person going about their daily tasks appeared beside us. It was like being inside a city or town where everyone and everything is visible only the entire place was waterborne.
As the day progressed the waterways changed into large lakes with Chinese fishing nets lining the shipping channels. Massive islands covered in palms appeared and disappeared. Boats came and went. For six hours we relaxingly floated through that wonderland and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.
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PedroElPedro
Paul Rubin
The Tipi Experience
You forgot to mention the other bizzare aspect of the Hampi Tipi experience, the fact that the locals there were playing didgeridoos! What a night indeed . . .