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Apart from the dubious benefits of the journey, i'd begun to like Madras, now i had a place to escape from it when it got too much to handle. I began to think i'd enjoy spending a bit of time in that city and i might even find something interesting to do or get involved in.
That evening, i was sitting on the roof, having a beer with Jenny just after sunset and a canadian woman came and joined us. Just to make things confusing, her name was Jenny too. Larry came up later and the four of us spent a few hours sitting around, chatting and cracking jokes. The great thing about hanging around with Jenny and Larry was that we were constantly laughing, joking and taking the piss out of each other. Fortunately the other Jenny had spent a couple of years in London and understood the weird british sense of humour. If she'd been fresh out of Canada, she wouldn't have stood a chance!
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Jenny and Larry left early on Tuesday morning to get the boat to Port Blair, which is the capital of the Andaman islands. I decided i'd had enough of staying in that dorm and got myself a single room at the back of the hotel, overlooking the mosque park. It was on the first floor and was smaller than most of the other single rooms there, but it had a great view from the window. Almost all you could see was greenery. There was a big tree, maybe a hundred feet away, and in front of that there were loads of little trees and shrubs. You could see a few houses a fair way off in the background and if you went right up to the window you could see the mosque.
And as well as being able to see the mosque, you could certainly hear it! Every morning at about half past five, the muezzin would start up the call to prayer "Allaahaaaaaaaa akbal...." and this was repeated three more times during the day. However, apart from the rude awakening, the chant from this mosque was much better than any i'd had to listen to in Indoesia or Malaysia. For a start, there was no distortion, which was amazing enough on its own. Then, on top of that, the muezzin had a great voice and it was actually a pleasure to listen too. It was a pleasant change from the rest of the ones i'd heard, who obviously don't care how ugly they make the sound of allah's name.
One of the main reasons i wanted a room of my own was so i could start using my computer and catch up with this writing. I'd been writing on paper since i left Maldon, and i don't like the work of typing it in to build up too much. I didn't feel safe bringing it out in a dormitory and advertising the fact that i've got a valuable piece of easily stealable electronic equipment sitting under my bed. As it was, i was a little nervous about leaving it there when i went out.
Over the next few days, i became quite good friends with the other Jenny. She was in India for a year, on a grant from some educational fund, to study temple and hill fort architecture as part of an art history course she was doing at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
One day i went with her to the library at the University of Madras, where she was hoping to find some material she needed in the manuscript library there. She didn't find what she was looking for, but one of the assistants there showed us some incredible old Tamil manuscripts which were written on sections of palm leaf, about two inches wide by eight or ten inches long and bound together in bundles between two strips of thin wood. These were, i think, about two hundred years old, but the assistant was handling them incredibly carelessly and managed to do some kind of damage to every one he showed us! However, it was nice of him to take the trouble to show them to us at all, and it was really interesting looking at them.
Jenny was going to Senji, a small town in the hills about a hundred and fifty kilometres south west of Madras, at the end of the week. I decided i'd go with her as it would be nice to have a couple of days out of Madras and breathe some real air.
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The bus was a typical south indian bus - no glass in the windows, only blinds that presumably could be pulled down in the wet season to keep the worst of the rain out. This is a sensible arrangement and it's a shame the buses in northern Australia aren't the same. But Australians like to think they're in Europe and such obviously tropical design might give the game away, i suppose!
Senji, which is also spelled 'Gingee' was a really nice little town. It was basically two streets which crossed each other in the town centre. We got there after dark and walked out of the bus station into the main street to look for a hotel.
Being there was a very pleasant change from the noise and pollution of Madras. The street was crowded, but apart from the occasional bus going into or out of the bus station, there was an almost complete lack of motor vehicles. There were hundreds of people wandering along and standing around in the street, which was more or less a market place with a row of shops behind the stalls on each side, there were also biycles, hand carts, bullock carts and pedal rickshaws.
We went to the Shivasand hotel, which was across the road from the bus station, but they said they didn't have any rooms. They told us there was only one other hotel in Senji, the Devi Lodge, which we'd passed in the bus on the outskirts of town, so we took a rickshaw out there, as Jen's pack was too heavy for her to want to walk very far with it.
The rickshaws here weren't like the ones you find in Madras and Delhi and other large towns, which have one wheel at the front and two at the back, with handle bars and a bicycle saddle for the driver and a double seat behind the driver for the passengers, with maybe a hood over it to keep the sun off. These ones were like little covered wagons. The back part had a flat floor, about four feet long and wide enough for two people to sit side by side. It had covered sides and a roof which was high enough to sit up straight under and there was a little step at the back to get up into it with. We sat on the back with our legs dangling over the road and there was plenty of room inside for our bags - or chickens, children, sacks of rice, goats, or whatever it is country people carry around with them in rickshaws. In front of the wagon part, there was the usual bicycle seat and handlebars for the driver.
The Devi Lodge had a couple of single rooms, but we could only have them for one night - the following day they were fully booked out. We checked in and then went back to the Shivasand to see if we could get a room there for the next night. They told us they were fully booked the next day too, as they had a wedding party there, but it was possible they might be able to accomodate us if we came back in the morning. We ate in the vegetarian restaurant that was part of the Shivasand and had a beer in the bar there and then went back to the Devi Lodge to bed.
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The next morning we checked out of the hotel at eight o'clock and walked round to the Shivasand. They said there was still nothing available, but if we came back at three that afternoon there should be something. We left our bags at the reception desk and went to get some breakfast.
In southern India, there are generally two types of restaurant, called "vegetarian" and "non-vegetarian". Vegetarian restaurants do "meals" in the middle of the day and in the evenings. They put a large banana leaf on the table in front of you, which it's normal to sprinkle a little water on and rinse before you use it. Then they put two or three mounds of different curry-type stuff at the back of it with a little blob of lime pickle, or something like that, and usually a poppadum. Then they put a big mound of rice on the front part and pour some runny dhal or some other type of sauce over it. You then use your hand to mix it up and eat it with. You can eat until you're full, as they keep coming round and topping it up if you want more. These banana leaf meals cost somewhere around twelve rupees, which is about enough to buy a small bag of crisps in Britain.
As well as meals, and at other times of the day, they serve a variety of snack-type food including idli, which is a round, white cake made of rice and black gram; vadai, which is something sort of similar, but different and fired to a golden brown colour on the outside; bonda, which are soft, spicy balls of something-or-other, fried golden brown; masala dosai, which are thin, crispy rice flour pancakes folded over with some fried potato and vegetable curry type of stuff in the middle; plain dosai, which are just the pancake with no filling; oottapams, which are like thick, spongey pancakes, made from rice flour and different sorts of vegetables. There are other things as well and the range varies a little bit from place to place. These are all accompanied by a little dish or a dollop of some vegetable curry as well as a couple of other "chutney"-type accompaniments. There are variations in the food from one restaurant to another, but the food's invariably excellent and cheap.
We went to the Shivasand's vegetarian restaurant for breakfast and had, as far as i remember, masala dosai and coffee. Then we went to visit Senji fort, which was a kilometre or so outside town and was the reason we were there.
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The fort was built around 1600 by the local rulers and incorporates three hills which form a triangle. There's a long wall running between these hills, which makes the perimeter fortifications, and another wall inside, around an inner fortified area. On the highest hill, which is accessible only from a path rising from the inner fort, there's another whole fortified area which looks pretty impenetrable.
Inside the inner fort, there's a mixture of ruins and complete buildings, some of which are in good shape. Others are crumbling a bit and some of these have been restored. There's also a tank, which is what Indians call a reservoir with stone steps all round the sides. It had a covered walkway around the edge too. There were also two or three large banyan trees which had a whole load of monkeys running around in them.
We spent a few hours wandering around the place but we didn't do the climb to the hill fort, which we thought we'd do the following day. Jenny took a lot of photos and we had a good look around.
It was really nice to be outdoors, in pleasant countryside, and there were some good views around us to look at. The hills in that area were like piles of gigantic rocks, as if someone had dumped them from the back of an impossibly big tipper truck.
By the time we got back to town and had something to eat, it was about three o'clock and and when we went into the hotel reception we were pleased to find there was one single room ready for us and there would be another one vacant later on that evening. The wedding was beginning in the evening and continuing the next morning and the hotel clerk invited us to go along to it. I wasn't too sure i could really handle a wedding, but it was difficult to refuse and anyway it would be an interesting experience. As it happened, we didn't end up going along to it that evening.
The next morning at about half past seven, the clerk called for me and took me into the wedding ceremony. By the time i got there, Jenny was already inside the hall and had a seat in the front row. I stood at the back, with a whole crowd of people and watched for a while. There were two televisions, one on either side of the stage where the ceremony was taking place. These were showing the wedding video as it was being filmed by two camera operators and simultaneously mixed by a third operator. I thought it was an impressive video setup for a small country town like this.
The bride and groom were sitting on the floor facing the audience and the person who was conducting the ceremony sat in front of them. They were wearing colourful clothes and garlands of flowers and doing all sorts of little ritual things. There were musicians playing non-stop throughout the whole ceremony.
After a while the hotel clerk came and got us and took us into an adjoining room which had long rows of tables and chairs. Banana leaves were put on the table in front of us and we were served breakfast. It consisted of a variety of different food, including idli, bonda, pongal (which is sweet rice), vadai, some sweet greenish stuff and a banana. Other people were eating there as well.
When we'd finished, he led us out of the eating room and out of the wedding hall. Everyone leaving was given an orange plastic bag each. In these bags there was a small coconut, a little packet of betel nut and a couple of paan leaves.
We went back to our rooms and got ourselves organised to go back up to the fort. On the way out of the hotel again, we met the groom's father and he insisted we went back into the wedding with him and had our photos taken with him and the bride and groom. It was a bit weird, me in bare feet, shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt, covered in tattoos and with a mohican hair cut. I probably would have been forcibly ejected from a wedding in Britain and beaten up for even trying to get in looking like that, but here i was, being dragged in to take part in the wedding photos and video!
On our way out the second time, we got given two more orange plastic bags with coconut, betel nut and paan leaves in them.
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That morning we'd decided we were going to climb up to Rajagiri fort, the one on the highest of the three hills, which was eight hundred feet up from ground level. It took us over an hour to climb up the path to the fort, which stands on a massive boulder probably about four hundred feet high, perched on top of a pile of gigantic granite rocks. The track up to the top was part steps and part path and was quite hard work in the late morning sun.
When we got up there there wasn't anything very exciting to see in the fort itself, but the view from that height was pretty amazing. You could see clearly the layout of the fortifications down below and the line of the twenty metre thick walls which connected the three hills. And you could see a long way across the countryside all around.
One of the weirdest things up there was a massive iron canon, which was about four metres long and two feet in diameter. I don't know who put it there or how they got it up that path, but the must have either been desperate or had a large ammount of expendable slave labour. Probably both.
One of the best buildings at the top was a granary. This was good because it was really cool inside and made a pleasant change from being on the side of the bare rocky hill in the baking midday sun. We stayed up the top for an hour or more and then headed back down for a couple of lemonades from the drink stall at the bottom.
The stall was under one of the two or three banyan trees inside the inner fortifications. The tree was heavily populated with monkeys and a couple of them sat and watched us as we drank our drinks and cooled off in the shade of its wide, spreading branches and large roundish leaves.
That evening in the bar at the Shivasand, a very drunk local started talking to me and telling me where we should go and what we should see around Senji. His English wasn't too bad, but, like most drunks, it was quite hard to follow what he was saying. He showed me a keyring tag with a photo on it of some guru he follows, who lives in a nearby town. He tried to get the tag off the keyring to give it to me, but he couldn't manage it. After he'd told me three or four times in a slurred voice that god had sent him to talk to me, i gave up and went back to the table i'd been sitting at with Jenny . After a while, he came over and insisted on giving me the guru's photo, which he'd finally managed to get off the keyring.
People in that state of drunkeness are quite hard work when their first language is the same as yours, but it's even harder when you have language problems anyway. However, i'm quite used to people like that - shit, half my friends are like it - and i tried hard to be patient. He was genuine and friendly, although he wasn't perhaps expressing himself in the way he would have liked. Fuck knows what i'm going to do with the guru's photo. I feel kind of a responsibility to look after it. Perhaps i'll find it a good home, somewhere it will be appreciated one day!
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My first impression of Vellore was that it was an interesting and friendly town. There were lots of little shops across the road from where we got off the bus, selling all sorts of different things. And it wasn't hard to find a cheap hotel, which was close to the bus station and the fort.
Vellore fort is just on the edge of the town centre. It's an interesting place, with a moat all the way around and very reminiscent of a typical castle in Britain. It was built around the same sort of period as Senji fort, but when the imperial british bastards ran the country, they converted it into a typically british garrison and administrative headquarters.
Inside there were all sorts of buildings, including a court house and police headquarters and there was an old hindu temple right in the middle. The whole place had a strange sort of colonial feeling to it.
In Vellore i bought a book called "Learn Tamil In 30 Days". It was just about the worst teach-yourself language book i've ever come across. I won't go into the gory details, but here's a couple of examples of the more useful parts of it:
Foreigner: Yonder. I see an elephant standing! How did it come here?*-*-*Guide: It is not a true elephant. It is a monolithic sculpture.
Foreigner: My eyes deceived me. The deftness of the hands of the sculptors is something marvellous.
Guide: Look at these stone chariots!
Foreigner: I have completely lost myself in the beauties of these sculptures.
Guide: See, numerous and the marvellously attractive figures cut on this rock.
Foreigner: My eyes are drinking deep in their beauty.
...
(this bit is about Madras's filthy, smelly and ugly beach:)
Foreigner: Oh! What a beautiful beach!
Guide: This is one of the world's beautiful beaches.
Foreigner: There is no doubt about it.
...
Foreigner: See there, the two kites are coming.
Guide: They come punctually.
Foreigner: See there, they eat the food offered by the priest.
Guide: They fly away again.
Foreigner: This is indeed a wonder. I have not witnessed so far a stranger incident.
...
2nd Man: We the Americans know the high culture of Tamil Nadu.
(sure!)
...
Friend: What is your opinion about the Tamilians?
Foreigner: The Civilization of the Tamilians will not die so long as the world exists.
(!)
...
1st Man: You speak Tamil well.
2nd Man: I learnt with the help of a book.
(obviously not this one!)
I wanted to go to Auroville, a community near Pondicherry, where they're doing interesting work with permaculture and with computers, but the closest point i'd been to there was Senji. Now i was going further and further away from it. But that's often the way it is when i'm trying to get somewhere. Shit, i had to go almost the whole way round the world to get from Malaysia to India, after all. A little detour between Madras and Pondicherry's nothing really. I'll get there eventually - if i'm meant to, anyway. However, it looks like i'm going to end up in Hampi for the new moon and solstice on the way to Pondy. Oh well... that's life!
From Vellore, we got a train to Tirupati, which is over the state border in Andhra Pradesh. It was about a three hour journey by ordinary, slow, passenger train.
Tirupati wasn't actually where Jenny was heading for the next place on her agenda. There's a palace and a hill fort at Chandragiri, which is a few miles south of Tirupati. By the look of the map, the railway line didn't go through that town though.
Jenny was reading when we stopped at Chandragiri railway station. I looked at the sign and thought "shit! that's where we're supposed to be going, isn't it?" I told her where we were and we quickly got our bags together and tried to get off the train before it started again. I made it easily, but Jenny's pack was much heavier than my two bags and she nearly didn't make it at all. I thought i was going to have to get back on, but at the last minute she jumped from the moving train and landed safely on the platform.
We asked if there were any hotels around and the station staff directed us to where we could catch a bus to Chandragiri town, which was about three kilometres away from the station. We walked up the dirt road next to the railway line and ended up in a small village of little thatched huts which were along both sides of the road. One of the locals told us there was a bus to Chandragiri in about two hours. Otherwise it was a two kilometre walk. Walking seemed like the best option, but we decided to sit for a while and rest before continuing.
As we sat down, what must have been a fair proportion of the village population crowded around us to have a look at the funny white people who were passing through their village for some reason. They asked us a few questions, through one man who spoke English, and stood around us in a semi-circle and just watched. We drank soda water at a nearby kiosk, which came in the old-fashioned marble bottles, which they still seemed to use a lot in India. If you don't know the type, they have a wide neck with a glass marble trapped in it so it can move around but not get into the body of the bottle or out of the mouth. When the bottle is full, the marble is forced against a rubber seal around the inside of the top of the neck by the gas pressure, this seals it very effectively. To open them you just have to poke the marble down into the bottle, using a bit of pressure, and it drops down into the neck allowing you to drink. These bottles are made of thick, tough glass, and can be refilled indefinitely. There are people in Britain who collect them as antiques.
The walk into Chandragiri was quite pleasant, despite the hot sun, but Jenny was struggling a bit under the weight of her pack. However, when we got there, we found there weren't any hotels and we'd have to go to Tirupati anyway. That was a bit of a drag after the walk, but it was only a half hour bus journey, so it wasn't too bad really. It had been interesting to have a quick look at Chandragiri and it was a shame there wasn't anywhere to stay as it looked like a nice place.
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I was intending to go to Chandragiri with Jenny the next morning and have a look at what was there, but i was really exhausted so i didn't bother in the end. I slept instead.
Tirupati was a really weird town. It's one of the major pilgrimage sites in India, on account of a temple at Tirumala, twenty kilometres away, up in the hills. There's also a large temple in the centre of town and a museum of temple art next to it. The town seemed to be full of bald people - it was a bit like an indian skinhead convention. For some reason connected with their pilgrimage, a large proportion of the visitors to Tirupati get their heads shaved while they're there. Because it's a major pilgrim centre for people from all round India, there are a lot of people who speak different languages and the place had a much more cosmopolitan feel than you'd expect in a smallish country town.
Our hotel was across the road from the bus station where the buses to Tirumala go from. They start before dawn and there was an amazing ammount of noise from very early morning till very late at night.
Next to the bus station was a large tank - a sort of reservoir and bathing place. The sides were long stone steps going from street level down to below the water level and in the middle there was a stone platform sticking up out of the water with a sort of little temple on it. Jenny told me that for certain festivals they float an image of a god out to these places and put them in the temple bit. I guess the tank was about a hundred feet square at water level.
The worst thing about Tirupati was that it was in Andhra Pradesh. And Andhra Pradesh is a dry state. You can't buy any alcohol there. Unusually, i hadn't had a drink for a couple of days before we left Vellore, so i was quite desperate for a beer. But of course, there was no beer to be had. It was stupid of me really, i knew A.P. was a dry state - or at least i'd heard it was and i'd heard it wasn't. I should at least have taken the precaution of buying a bottle of vodka in Vellore. As it was, i had no prospect of a beer until we got to Karnataka, which would be at least another three days. Shit! Nothing makes you more desperate for a drink than knowing you can't have one.
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We arrived at Tadipatri at about eight o'clock at night, in the middle of a power cut - they happen several times a day in southern India. The station was in complete darkness and, as we walked down the platform, it became obvious that it was in the middle of nowhere. There certainly wasn't a town very close by, anyway.
It was a bit of a worry and we wondered if this was going to be another Chandragiri, with the town a long way from the station and nowhere to stay the night when we got there. But before we got to the end of the platform, a man came up and asked us if we wanted a rickshaw. We said yes and followed him out of the station to where his rickshaw was parked. Jenny laughed when she saw it was a cycle rickshaw - the only one, parked among a few auto-rickshaws, although if it hadn't have been, the driver would have asked us if we wanted an 'auto'. We climbed aboard, which was difficult, partly because it didn't have a proper seat and partly because there's hardly any room for luggage in a cycle-rickshaw.
The journey to town was pretty crazy, with Jenny bursting into hysterical laughter now and then. The road was terrible and there were lots of lorries and other large vehicles. An unlit rickshaw didn't seem to have much chance under those conditions, but we eventually made it into town.
The first hotel we went to was full, but the second one had a room with two creaky old beds and a scummy bathroom for fifty rupees, which we took. It wasn't the best place we'd stayed, but we didn't really care much, at least it was a room. The power was still off, but i had a couple of candles with me, which was just as well, as the one short and very skinny one the hotel provided us with wouldn't have lasted anything like as long as the power cut did.
A short while later, there was a bang on the door and it was the boy who'd showed us to the room and a man i hadn't seen before. They asked if we wanted any food. When we said no, they asked if we wanted any alcohol. Ah, this place wasn't so bad after all! After a bit of negotiation, i ordered a quarter bottle of whisky which they charged me a hundred rupees for - that's over twice what you'd pay in Tamil Nadu. But, well, if there's one thing that prohibition of drugs does, it's to increase the price dramatically - and therefore the profit margin.
That was the first time i'd ever been anywhere where alcohol was illegal, and the first time i'd ever bought black market booze - apart from illegally distilled poteen in London, of course, and probably illegally distilled arak in Flores. It was quite exciting really. But, of course, it was just like buying any other drug on the black market. You give them money and then have to hang around waiting for them to come back, wondering if they would come back and, if they did, what they'd bring. After a while, there was a knock on the door again and the boy came in with a weird looking bulge under his jumper. It was so obvious and so silly, i couldn't help smiling. Anyway, it was a plastic whisky bottle and it was a quarter full of whisky. Not bad really - and i did desperately need it!
I think that was the best part of being in Andhra Pradesh all in all, the opportunity to buy prohibited alcohol! Apart from that, my short visit to that state left me with no desire to go back there.
The weirdest thing about A.P. was that, unlike everywhere else, at both hotels we stayed at the staff seemed to find it necessary to bash on your door at all hours of the day and night as if there was some kind of emergency happening. To be woken up like this at half past five in the morning, only to be asked if you wanted coffee, didn't leave me feeling particularly friendly towards the person doing it. Then, when they think you might have gone back to sleep, about an hour later, they do it again. Only this time it's food, or clean the room or take the bed sheet or fuck knows what. And this continues throughout the day. I think the lack of alcohol makes them hyperactive.
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When i got up a bit later and had a look out at the town i wasn't at all impressed. Country towns are generally not much fun anywhere in the world and this one looked worse than most. I didn't really want to be there. The place was making me edgy for some reason. It wasn't just the dust and the noise and the fact that everybody stared at you as if they just watched you land in a martian space ship. I didn't know what it was and i didn't care, i just wanted to get out.
Jenny came back before ten and she didn't want to hang around either. There was a train due at twenty to eleven and then nothing till eight o'clock that evening, so we quickly got our stuff together and headed for the station - in an auto-rickshaw this time.
The train eventually came at about half past one - two hours after it was due. The journey took about two and a half hours and it wasn't a particularly pleasant one - mainly because of the over-insistent friendliness of a slightly drunk man sitting opposite us. It was alright at first - i'm quite happy to talk to people on trains - but he was boring and went on and on. Then he started insisting that when we got off the train in Guntakal we went to his house to eat. We didn't want to because we just wanted to get to where we were going and not drag out the journey any more than we had to. But he went on and on, insisting, until his hospitality turned into a really annoying form of harrassment. Fortunately he eventually lay down and went to sleep. When he woke up, he invited us to his house again, but this time we said a very firm "no" and he finally let it drop.
The train from Guntakal to Hospet, which is the nearest town to Hampi, was due to leave some time after eight in the evening and arrive at midnight. That's not a very good time to arrive in a town you don't know and start trying to find a hotel, so we went to the bus station to catch a bus there instead.
Guntakal bus station came as a kind of last straw for me. I hadn't been having a particularly good day, and trying to find a bus to Hospet was a real pain in the arse. It actually wasn't that bad, looking back on it afterwards, but in my state of mind at the time it was a real full-on nightmare.
Apart from the strain of all the travelling we'd done since leaving Madras - which is hard enough on its own, i was beginning to suffer from the same problem we'd had in Indonesia, where we were public property and everybody was hassling us - in a friendly way. There had been a lot of people staring at me, talking to or at me, asking me questions - where are you from? what is your name? - crowding round me just to stare for half an hour or so, or whatever. It's not too bad occasionally and for a short while, but after a longish period of it, i begin to start going a bit crazy. Everybody at Guntakal station was staring at us the whole time we were there, as if we'd just landed from Mars. And on at least two occasions, a whole crowd of people gathered round us just to stare for a while. And of course, when a few people are standing staring at something, more and more join them just to see what's going on.
If i'd been able to speak Telugu it would have been different, i could have told them what i thought of them, or at least told them to fuck off. But when you don't know a word of their language and they don't speak yours, it's quite impossible to do anything about it. Any attempt at communication you make just adds to the circus and draws more people into the crowd.
Added to this was the difficulty of finding out which bus was going to Hospet - or even finding out if *any* buses went direct there from Guntakal. Hindi script i could just about handle, but Telugu was just so many squiggles to me. Even Tamil, which i was a little more familiar with, was a total mystery so far, although i was trying to start learning it.
However, a lot of people were being helpful - although they didn't all tell us the same things. And there was a kid selling popcorn who spoke good English and was keen to help us all he could. In the end, after at least an hour there, a bus came in that was going direct to Hospet and the kids helped us get a seat. One little one, who was selling something that looked like coconut ice, got into the bus somehow and captured a couple of seats for us. I gave him five rupees in return for this invaluable service.
The road between guntakal and Hospet was terrible. I couldn't see much of it, but if it wasn't a dirt track all the way, it certainly felt like it was. We went over the scariest bridge i've ever crossed - it was really long, about fifty foot up in the air and just wide enough for a bus. It also had a surface that was at least as bad as the road that came before and after it. The bus suspension was fucked and every few yards it hit a hole or something and jumped and lurched about in a really disturbing way. Fortunately it was going very slowly. Unfortunately i was sitting next to the window, but i tried not to look out - and down - too much as it scared the shit out of me. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, but probably wasn't, we got to the other side. I'll make sure i never have any cause to cross that bridge again!
It was a three or four hour trip to Hospet and i was very glad to get out of that bus at the end of it. We checked out a couple of hotels, but they were full up and we ended up at one called the Malligi Tourist Home. This was a big, posh-looking hotel, with a sort of tourist complex around it - two restaurants and an artefact shop of some sort. We asked about rooms, but all they had was an air-conditioned double, which was going to cost us nearly four hundred rupees - eight times as much as we'd paid the previous night in Tadipatri. However, mainly because we'd had a bad day and were fucked, and partly because it would be novel to spend a night in an expensive room - once - we took it. But only after making sure the air conditioning could be turned off and the windows opened.
It was horrific. There was carpet on the floor - which is an incredibly stupid form of lunacy in the tropics - there was an empty fridge and a television and the place was decorated in tacky british curry house style. The worst thing was it had a sit-down toilet. The thought of staying in such a hideous environment disgusted me a bit, but it was an interesting insight into how rich wankers live - although not one i'd want to repeat any more than i'd want to go over that bridge again!
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Hampi was a big walled city that was the heart of the Vijayanagar empire and was built about six hundred years ago. It was systematically destroyed by muslim armies from northern India a couple of hundred years later and at that point the Vijayanagar rulers moved their base to Chandragiri. As well as Chandragiri, Vellore and Senji were part of this empire and the forts are all built in a similar style.
There is a village inside the old ruined city, which is centred around the bazaar, or main street, leading to a large temple. Nowadays this village is quite a tourist centre and it's populated by a transient bunch of foreigners - mainly 'alternative' types (the more conservative tourists stay in the civilized safety of Hospet and come to Hampi for the day!)
Before the bus arrived at Hampi Bazaar, as the village is known, we passed through a gateway in the fortification walls and suddenly we were in this incredible ruined city. Then arriving at the village was kind of weird in a way, as the ruins came to life and the dead past flowed rapidly into a living present.
The main bazaar at Hampi was really weird in a way. At the temple end, it was all shops and restaurants and looked pretty much like any other touristy indian village. But about half way to the other end, it started to change and a few shops, restaurants and houses alternated with the skeletons of ruined buildings. By the time you got to the far end - about a quarter of a mile away from the temple - the buildings were all ruins, empty shells with stone pillars and no walls. Well, that's how it looked to me, anyway, but it's possible the buildings at that end never did have walls. It's hard to tell.
We looked around a bit and found somewhere fairly cheap to stay. We had a couple of small rooms which were furnished with thin mattresses and nothing else. The toilet was filthy and smelled disgusting - which was a bit of a drag, as my room was right next to it. But we thought it would do for the time being.
As soon as i got to Hampi i had a strong feeling i was going to meet someone i knew, and i began to wonder who it could possibly be - would it be someone from Australia or from Britain? Or maybe it wouldn't be anyone at all. Perhaps it was just imagination. Or wishful thinking...
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I didn't sleep very well the first night and woke up in the morning feeling like shit and aching all over. I think it was entirely due to some really irritating dust that the room - and in particular the bed - seemed to be full of. I don't know what it was, but i assume it was some sort of mould dust or something, as i seem to be quite sensitive to mould. Whatever it was, it was producing quite a severe allergy-type reaction in me and made me feel like i didn't want to stay in that place very long. The next night i tried to sleep on the roof, but it was too cold and i didn't have any warm bedding with me. Anyway, it didn't make any difference as i was still sneezing and finding it hard to breathe up there too - i'd obviously taken whatever was causing it up there with me in the mattress!
After that second night, i just had to get out of that room. The previous evening i'd asked in a guest house called the Shanthi Lodge if they had any rooms. This was apparently one of the best places to stay in Hampi and was clean, pleasant and spacious. But there was a permanent queue of people waiting for rooms there, and the chances of getting one the same day were pretty low. They'd told me to come back the next day at midday and when i did that they told me to come back that evening at seven and there would be a room for me. But i didn't feel like hanging around outside all afternoon and there was no way i could bear spending any longer at the other place, so i got a room at the Baju Lodge, across the road from the Shanthi.
This room was much larger and cleaner and a lot more pleasant and i moved straight in. However, whatever had been in the bed at the other place was here too - although it wasn't nearly as bad. But still, when i lay down on the bed it made me sneeze a bit. Shit! i thought, don't say it's everywhere in this town!
Anyway, in the evening i took the room at the Shanthi and Jenny decided to take over the room at the Baju as she was sick of the filth at the other place too. The next day she was going to take a room in a hotel in Kamalapur, the next village, where people she knew from the state archaeology camp were staying.
The Shanthi was a nice place, with a central courtyard with trees in it and rooms around the edge. There were also rooms on the first floor, off a balcony overlooking the courtyard. Even here, though, there was a trace of whatever it was in the beds that was making me ill. I still didn't know what it was and i don't suppose i ever will. And i didn't know if it was affecting other people the same way, although it seemed to be having a similar effect on Jenny.
Later on that day i went to a restaurant just up the road and was kind of surprised to meet Yoki in there. I'd last seen her on Koh PhaNgan in April, when she was travelling with Kelly. She told me she'd heard a couple of weeks ago that Kelly had been killed in a car crash recently.
It's a fucking weird world!
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I spent six days in Hampi in the end, and although i wasn't very active, partly due to feeling ill most of the time i was there, i wandered around the place a little bit, mostly with Jenny.
We climbed to the top of a hill at the opposite end of the main bazaar from the temple. There were two paths to the top, on different sides - one made with very wide steps that looked kind of important and ceremonial, and in fact it faced the direction of the palace area. The other path was narrower and had the appearance of being the back way up the hill. At the bottom of the narrow path there was another, ruined, temple and a ruined bazaar stretching down to the river. There were some buildings at the top of the hill, including, i think, yet another temple.
The people who built the place must have been religious nuts, as there were little temples, religious figures carved into rocks and religious stonework scattered around everywhere, in a kind of demented way. It was really amazing just wandering around among the rocks - the entire site was covered in mounds of gigantic boulders - and finding things carved into the side or the top of rocks everywhere you went. They were generally either images of gods and associated figures, or weird sort of stone domes that were surrounded by a usually square indentation which had a channel running out of one side and down the rock to drain liquids away. They pour some kind of liquid over them for ceremonial purposes for some reason. I can't remember what these things are called, although i'm sure Jenny told me.
But wandering through this strange landscape was almost like you were tripping - rock figures and things would suddenly emerge out of the stones. The fact that everything was carved into or made out of the same stones that lay all around gave it a kind of living, organic feeling. Sort of like it had just spontaneously emerged in some way and could just as easily flow back into the landscape and emerge as something else.
Overall, i liked Hampi, but it wasn't India. It was a european tourist colony and the food was awful. It was a real contrast with southern India, which surrounded it and where you could get good cheap food everywhere. In Hampi it was really hard to find decent indian food, although some of the foreign food - like pasta, falafel, humus, chips etc - was good. And it was quite expensive compared to everywhere else we'd been recently.
The other problem with Hampi was that just being there was making me sick. I never did find out what it was, but the day we climbed to the top of that hill by the back way up, we went down the other side and walked to Kamalapur. After this walk, i was feeling more healthy, but when i arrived back at Hampi Bazaar i started sneezing straight away and began to feel ill again. Whatever it was wasn't just in the beds obviously. But whatever the physical cause for the symptoms i was feeling, there was more to being sick there than that - as there always is. There are some places on this planet where it's just not healthy to be for any length of time. I've been to quite a few places like that in different parts of the world and you generally find a higher than usual ammount of sick people in them. Hampi was certainly one of them - almost everyone who went there seemed to get sick in some way or another. It's just the energy of that place, that area of land. People who ignore it and live in those places do so at their peril.
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