James and Cat’s Jazz-tastic Journey!

So we finally left Palolem after what seemed like endless days of lazing and reading and eating and sleeping.  We had to; the languidness would have eventually killed us!

So we braved the overnight bus to Hampi.  When we arrived at the bus stand at 9:00pm, like our ticket told us to, to catch the bus at 9:30pm we met four people already waiting.  One guy travelling alone, who had been there since 8:00pm, he’d been told the bus was at 8:30, and three girls travelling together who’d been there since 8:30, they’d been told the bus was and 9:00! 

After a long wait the bus finally materialised at 10:30pm!!!!!  As per, it was bumpy and loud and very little sleep was had but my god was it worth it…

Hampi is beautiful!  The town itself, which consists of two streets is nothing special.. just like the rest of India it’s dirty and smelly.  But the landscape is spectacular.  I’ve had many converstaions with fellow travellers where we’ve tried desperately to describe it’s beauty, the essence of which I’ll try to capture here.

Imagine a rolling landscape, littered with boulders!  It’s as if some one spent an age perfectly positioning them… sort of like lego for giants.  But it looks so unreal; I was talking to a girl last night who completely summed it up for me… she said it looked like a really obviously fake film set for something like Jurassic Park, and thats just it, it looks fake! And scattered in amongst the rocks are these beautiful ruined temples, covered in scampering monkeys. I don’t know if my description has been much good so try looking here, here and here.

Anyway we decided to stay across the river, as the town of Hampi itself is so BORING! Being low season though there like three hotels and one restaurant open… but it does mean we’re getting a really cool circualar cottage with it’s own bathroom for one pound a night, and as there’s only one place to eat all the travellers congregate there and we’ve met some really nice people.

There’s a lot to see here but the trouble we’re having is being bothered to do anything in the heat.  It’s 37 degrees as I type but it gets up to 40 at midday.  Just up the road from our hotel there’s a huge fresh water lake so yesterday a group of us went up for a swim and it was gorgeous.. just laying around in the cool of the water.  I do have slightly pink shoulders now though!

Today we went and had a mosey round the main Temple in town, which was packed as they’re preparing for a big festival next week and the whole town is decked out in colours and paint. 

It’s our last night in Hampi tonight so we will probably spend tomorrow mentally preparing ourselves for the 16 hour bus journey to Mumbai!

I never thought I’d think this, but I’m looking forward to going to Thailand because it’s not so hot there!! Strange, isn’t it?

Oh yeah, both James and myself would like to apologise for the lack of photos we’ve put up.. this is what happens when you buy a cheap camera off a shopping channel, none of the computers recognise the USB connector thing. So we plan to buy a card reader in Bangkok.  Expect a flood of photos after that! 

Hope all is well back in blighty

Much Love

xxx

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 5:33 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.