A road trip to Hampi

On Sunday we took a road trip to Hampi with our favorite neighbors/Target expat family. It was our first trip outside Bangalore as a family (Wade and Caden have done some exploring to Mysore) so we were excited to take a vacation and experience a little more of India. Hampi was once the capital of one of the largest Hindu empires in Indian history, Vijayanagar – from the 12^th to 16^th centuries. It was a center of international commerce and industry, and now is home to a lot of cool ruins, temples and a much more hippy-India, “away-from-it-all” feeling.

We set out on Sunday morning, a happy clan on a road trip - us in our car, and five more adults and three kids in the other. It is only about 286 miles from Bangalore (comparable to the 262 from Burnsville to Lutsen, right?). But the traffic is worse than a 3pm rush to get to the cabin on the Friday before Memorial Day, the roads aren’t quite as good, and it’s not just cars hauling boats – but the usual overloaded trucks, motorcycles, cars, rickshaws and cows. Most of the trip was a near-death experience, and between bumps hurling the car into the air and honking it was hard to fall peacefully asleep, even out of self-defense. So it took a solid 6 ½ hours, and three stops (various bio-breaks) to get there. But tired and generally happy (to be alive) we got there. Peanut is ok and Lokesh did get us there, but we were missing our old Ricky with her amenities and safety features (a little size and airbags) quite a lot. Still, it was generally cool landscape along the way and again good to see outside the cityscape of Bangalore.

On arriving, we met up with our friends, and headed to lunch – a roof-top restaurant with great views of the nearby river, temple and town (and really cheap food prepared in a kitchen dirty enough to make most rodents cringe). Luckily, all of Hampi is apparently vegetarian, so with no meat on the menu food safety is a little less scary. Of course, of the six page vegetarian menu, they only had about two pages worth to offer! Anyhow, we ate and put the bags in the room, then headed out for a walk through town – a very much like expected bazaar of beggers/vendors selling their wares to tourists.

We started our exploration at the Virupaksha Temple, started in 1442 (the year Columbus sailed the ocean-blue!). It was a neat temple, complete with an elephant and an army of monkeys. We had picked up some bananas to feed the elephant (conveniently for sale just outside). As I was holding mine I felt a tug behind me take the banana, and looked around to see a monkey cheerily eating it. Crazy! A moment later I heard Caden scream bloody murder (as you know he can do), and looked around to see him clinging to his banana as if it were the royal jewels. He was completely traumatized by the experience and went through the next five minutes clinging to his banana for dear life and looking around frenetically at every monkey telling them in an authoritarian tone that it was his banana. After feeding the banana to the elephant, we enjoyed the walk through the rest of the temple and grounds. At the edge of the bazaar is a section of climbing / hills / ruins and we did a little exploring there. It was fun, the kids had a great time and the scenery was amazing!

We got a little cleaned up at the room – there wasn’t exactly a shower (and lucky for us we packed a towel), and no A/C so it’s hard to get to clean in the 100+ degree room. But we did the best we could and realized Wade had packed Caden precisely one change of clothes, which we’d went through on the drive up (semi-successful bio-break). Luckily, we went shopping in the bazaar, and while I couldn’t find a change of clothes for Caden (no Target), I did find one woman VERY willing to make Caden a new outfit while we waited, for 100 rupees (about $2.50). In addition to the outfit, Caden got a half hours’ entertainment enthralled with the process. We then went to dinner, more of the same scary vegetarian food on another rooftop restaurant (kid you not, a bucket of poop on the entrance to the stairway up – very welcoming and hygienic). Did I mention there is also no liquor in Hampi, not even beer?

Still, we ate and proceeded back to the room (notice I haven’t been using the term hotel). We stayed in a guest house where I was glad to have my very resourceful husband who had packed a roll of toilet paper (if not a change of clothes for Caden). This is because the room was a room, with a dingy bed, lots of bugs, a fan that didn’t work and a nasty bathroom with no toilet paper, a shower head in the center of the bathroom that sort of worked (no temperature selection – your option was water on or off), and a sink that had no drain – the water just ran into the floor same as the shower and drained into the corner. But it had a “western-style” potty and I was practicing being optimistic and happy (when in Hampi…). So we headed there in the pitch black (the stars were very cool, no light pollution) and went to turn on the lights and fan. Nope. No power for you tonight. It was about 105 degrees in the room, and dark. We were already pretty sweaty, and the bug-filled, dark room with little ventilation was a little tough. We all changed into jammies by lantern-light (did I mention my husband rocks at packing for these things?) and crawled into bed under the mosquito net. It was a rocky night, but sort of sweet that Caden really wanted to cuddle so I got to sleep with a little, sweaty space heater too…. The power came back on intermittently a couple hours later and we were tired enough to get some rest. I’ve now made a mental note to be a little leery going forward of rooms costing less than $10 a night…