Hampi

After enough of watching the dolphins, listening to Betyar a Holdon from Amorf Ordogok in our cocoa hut restaurant and approving, that baron Munthausen was right, when depicted the moon as an arch sailing over the night sky, we headed to Hampi in Karnakata region. Leaving Goa behind with a 7 hours train ride we arrived to the once capital of one the Hindu empires, which is a large scale complex of temples scattered around the city and the nearby cocoa palm and banana plantations. We took a room in the Hampi Bazaar center, which is a mix of stands selling everything from slippers to airplane tickets, masala chai and fruits I have never seen. Funny how our contemporary Indian friends cosied themselves into the 15th century ruins, extended the granite pillars of the ancient bazaar to be their colorful patchwork like homes right next to the main temple. Today morning we started our tour in the Virupaksha Temple, where Lakshmi, the temple elephant was grateful enough to give me a blessing in return of 2 rupees, which she skilfully took from my hand (if the donation was banana, she ate them and sorted the cocoa nuts for the tougher days), elegantly handed it over to her attendant and ever so softly petted my head with her trunk. After a long and extremely hot walk to the Vittala Temple World Heritage site, we bargained two bicycles for an afternoon rent and rode to see the Elephant Stables and a dozen of other temple ruins which are in an unforgivably poor condition. After answering the where are you from? question to almost everybody on our way, smiling to the I am also hungry, but what is your country? and posing with 10 Indian guys who asked from Tomek (not from me!!!) permission to take a photo with me, we decided to make an earning from it; we started to charge 10 rupees for each photo. Somehow they all laughed at our proposal and we gained our peace...

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