After a month of beach, partying and social life in Goa, over the Christmas and New Year's holidays ...and beyond, I have finally moved on. From Goa, most travellers seem to either head north to Mumbai or Delhi, if they are flying home, or directly east to Hampi. Everyone I have met in India insists that Hampi is "a place you will want to stay for a while...", "wonderful", "magical", etc. -- which sets up expectations which I eventually thought must be thwarted. Not so...

Hampi really IS a magical place which became famous when 40 square kilometers of Hindu temples and palaces from half a millenium ago were discovered and excavated.

I left Goa with Anna, a wonderfully positive and intelligent young Austrian woman, who had only two weeks left before her 4-month India trip ended, and who also wanted to see Hampi. The 13-hour motorcycle ride seems now to belong to another world. As if Hampi exists as a separate reality. The landscape is one of the most perfectly beautiful I have ever seen: piles of enormous round golden boulders View image form hills (reminiscent of Joshua Tree National Park, in California) separated by perfectly flat valley floors, the brightest possible green rice paddys View image and banana plantations, watered by an irrigation system created five hundred years ago, and fed by a beautiful and holy river. The landscape feels perfect because there is very little else in between - no scrub, no imperfections. It reminds me of a very expensive desert golf course! Untold numbers of ancient temples litter the rocky countryside, making it seem even more surreal and perfect, in a way that only stone structures can do.

Climbing up any of these boulder hills to watch the sunrise or sunset, one is presented with truly breathtaking views, so beautiful, it is hard to settle for words or concepts. And again, there is this overriding impression that this landscape exists completely separately from the rest of the world. One cannot imagine the roads leading in or out. View image.

The present village of Hampi, and most of the ancient city structures lies on the southern banks of the Tungabadra River. Most of the guesthouses are on the opposite side of the river, and there is no bridge within over an hour's drive. Instead, locals and tourists must use the same, impossibly tiny, perfectly round, and very primitive coracle boats, which have been ferrying people across for hundreds of years. Most alarmingly - I had to have faith that this was also how I was going to get my heavily loaded (over 500kg) Royal Enfield motorcycle to the other side. (See photos below.)
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The temples are incredible. And there are hundreds of them.
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But one can only see so many, before they, like so many ancient structures around the world, blur into a set of often beautiful shapes and relics that seem to hold little personal significance for me. The interplay between the temples and landscape however, is sublime, as is the landscape on its own. View image, View image, View image, View image, View image, View image

In this noisy and exhuberant India, I am very happy to have found such a peaceful and serene place to spend some time reading, writing, and relaxing with walks, swims in the nearby lakeView image, View image, and motorcycle rides in the sumptuous landscape. I just finished reading a wonderful book: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, which made me cry nearly every time I picked it up! I finished the book this morning, and my eyes were still red and wet as I passed it on to a fellow traveller.

Anna has left now, and I am alone among friends here. My guesthouse is called Goan Corner View image, which is a peaceful haven among some other places which are too ready to indulge rowdy groups of Israelis and their loud trance music. Run by a lovely fat Indian woman and her family, and set apart from the rest of the village, in a palm grove surrounded by rice fields and rocky hills. The next photo is a view of my room from above on the hill at sunset: View image, the place also has a tightrope stretched between two palm trees, and I have been learning how to balance and walk on it. It is a wonderful experience to learn a completely new physical ability View image.