Temple Town

The rain was beginning to soak into our spirits, so with a new resolve we swallowed the advice of our French friends and decided to head inland and slightly north, to a dry place that actually had things to see, as opposed to communities that survived by attracting tourists to beaches. The destination was a little town called Hampi, and our method of travel a rickety bus of hard vinyl seats and scratched windows that would refuse to open, or refuse to close, depending on what was least preferable for the time. The bus made a sound I will never forget, like enormous mechanical vultures of rusted steel, bickering in a wire nest.

The Journey was to take just over ten hours, but within just half of one, Steven was passed out in the corner his lower lip shaking with the vibration of the bus and his headphones still bouncing music into his unconscious ears.

The air was hot and moist, as it had been since we arrived but shortly after takeoff the intensity increased with our altitude as we wound up mountains not dissimilar to the Black Spur, except due to the nature of Indian traffic this was a road on which people felt compelled to overtake you no matter how steep the curve, or how blind the corner. I saw at least two trucks and bus that had lost their footing and were perched in ditches, their sides resting against a wall of mud and rock. I tried not to think about the vehicles that had fallen off the low side.

Hours swallowed hours and Steve's state of consciousness flinched only occasionally, but the world behind my eyes surged as I attempted to soak up the intricacies of the sounds and smells and images of the changing landscape.

Once over the mountain range the dense nature of exploding jungles dissipated into drier scatterings of shrapnel as the land settled and stretched to a near horizontal horizon. Despite the vibrations I read 'The Alchemist', a simple but delightful book, made difficult to read as the words shook with my hands and the letters jumbled themselves up often removing themselves from the page altogether and scattering themselves on the floor of the bus or the back of the seat in front of me.

Eventually we arrived in Hospet, a few kilometres from Hampi, and as the bus entered the station there was a knock from outside on the back window. A young Indian boy was already offering us his services as a rickshaw driver. We were the last to get off the bus as were enveloped by at least a dozen young boys "Where you Going?" , "Hampi?", "100 rupees", "90 rupees", "Which country?", "Don't trust him, I give you good deal". Their arms and hand and eyes like tendrils crawled over me. Steve just picked one and off we went through the light evening drizzle an hour beyond dusk. The boy asked us where we had been, we replied that we had been in the rain and were seeking relief. He informed us of the hopeful notion that the current drizzle was the first rain in ten days for Hampi. We exhaled as our hope was fed through words of a rickshaw driver (a rare thing).

It is a strange thing arriving at a new place under curtains of darkness. You have such limited information to gauge your environment, your direction or your position. You see flashes of lights and shadows but like scattered pieces of puzzle you cannot put them together in your mind. The upside of such things is that the new day allows the excitement of slotting together certain elements and slowly the missing pieces reveal themselves and make the picture that much more satisfying for the original denial.

And the new day was indeed satisfying. We followed a steep, white steel staircase to the rooftop restaurant where right in front of us, about 150 metres away stood an 11 story Hindu temple of about 600 years old carved and constructed from sandstone. In front of it and around it were various other structures, temples and courtyards. The sky was grey but the air was dry. We ate with a renewed enthusiasm. Finally, we were to actually see something, finally we could walk with dry shirts and light, languid footsteps... then we did.

We sauntered through though a massive doorway of a 9 story structure shaped like a steep pyramid, but with intricate carvings of humans and gods. Beyond it a large courtyard of stone pavers stretched out to its borders where pillars and pylons stood in front of sandstone walls and masked, dark doorways to halls and chambers. The courtyard was alive things beautiful and ugly; brightly dressed children who played, stared and gushed towards us, monkeys that swung and jumped across the eves of temples, dirty fly bitten dogs, the occasional deformed and emaciated beggar and many men who offered to be our 'guide'. We tried to evade them all, an impossible task, but after declining everything for five minutes or so and letting our western manners slip just slightly, most of them got the point and we wandered around these ancient ruins. At the time I had naught to compare it with. It was quite amazing, the age, the workmanship, even the technology. 'Technology' you ask? There was one small chamber through a slightly larger chamber which has a small crack in the wall that acted like a pinhole camera, and at that time of the day the silhouette of the front was cast upside down onto one of the walls. Simple indeed, but one had to admire the thought and care of the people who built this 400 years before our country was even colonised.

Hours passed and photos were taken before a familiar feeling crossed my mind and then my skin. The pressure dropped, the wind picked up heaven started to melt above us. 10 days of dryness and we arrived as the rains arrived. I'm travelling with a man whose nickname is Sunshine, yet the actual experience of his namesake has eluded us every step. We spent the day drinking coffee and eating curry with our books and then retired to our rooms to continue the reading, when the power in the whole town went out. Steve slept and I darted through the rain to a cafe where a car battery or hidden generator powered a fluorescent light and there I sat, being eaten by the local insect wildlife and read about the economics of humanity.

The following day was the same but the rains started ever earlier and so we sat and read and wrote and smiled occasionally frustrated smiles at our fortune. Locals told us we were surrounded by 20 kilometers of storm on all sides, and although we desired to see the plethora of other temples ion the immediate region our desire for sunshine was too strong and we booked a bus further north. If there is one thing that India has in spades (beyond, people, poverty, cows, and curries) it is temples, and so we arranged some links in the transport chain that would take us to a place that would make everything we had seen in Hampi look like Legoland.