Rajith, Sandeep, Kien and myself visited Hampi in early November 2007. November 1, which happens to be a holiday in our state, fell on a Thursday so we conveniently bunked office on Friday to get an extended vacation. Pre-planning for the Hampi trip was not as exhaustive as our Silent Valley trip, so we were all cool till the last moment. Rajith’s brother Rohith wasn’t planning to come on this trip, but Roopa’s friend Kien was in. He, at the time of our visit, was on a all India tour, and staying at Pondicherry after covering Northern India.

Getting there

Our plan was to leave Bangalore on the 31st itself and drive as far as we could and then take up a room for the night. Tumkur was our target, but thanks to Bangalore’s traffic our departure was delayed by almost an hour and a half. Consequently it was quite late when we reached Tumkur, with the rains not helping us cover the distance. We stayed in a rather shabby hotel for the night, crashing only at around 12:30 and planning to wake up by half past 5. I barely slept that night but my adrenalin kept me going the next day and through the entire trip as I was to soon realize. We left Tumkur on the 1st at around 6 as planned, and kept driving till Chitradurga, with only a brief chai break inbetween. The four lane highway after Tumkur till C’durga was fun, even in Rajith’s old and ailing Maruti 800. If only all highways in India were that good! We stopped at the Reliance A1 bunk just before Chitradurga where we downed idlies and dosas for breakfast. Breakfast wasn’t really tasty, but our appetite was good and our spirits high. The weather was just right and Chitradurga’s gaint windmills kept us good company as we proceeded onwards after breakfast.

The road got worse after our grub break but we maintained a steady pace and reached Hampi by lunch. Rajith’s uncle had recommended a place to stay but we weren’t sure how good it would be because the room rent was supposedly only Rs 200. Our backup plan was to stay in Jindal in case we didn’t get better rooms in Hampi due to the Utsav crowd. Yes, we were at Hampi exactly two days before the Hampi Utsav which expected to draw crowds in lakhs.

The moment we arrived in Hampi, we were surrounded by hotel brokers and tourist guides. We shooed them all away because we had reserved rooms. The hotel manager, whom Rajith called, directed us to come near the river and take a boat to cross it because Sai Plaza, our hotel, was on the other side. We first took the wrong direction and ended up going nowhere because the boats were available only at a certain place. Being well past our lunch time, we stepped into one of the shacks which dotted the river bank, proudly displaying the words ‘Recommended by Lonely Planet’ next to their names. During our stay in Hampi we discovered that there are two faces to the place. One is what the Indian tourist makes out of it - ruins, temples and a seemingly boring vacation with loud kids and nagging ladies. The other face of Hampi is defined by the foriegn tourists - the Iseralis and the rest of the world. For these white skinned people, Hampi is a world unto itself. They stay on the other side of the river, safely tucked away from the regular visitors. Smoking their joints and drinking their beer, they make Hampi their home for extended periods of time. Of course the foreign crowd also includes the keen world traveler who stares hard into his travel guide trying to understand something about this world heritage center. Or the ones who make a stopover before heading out to party in Goa. But the Indian tourists and the foreign ones are worlds apart - and we were four blokes occupying the nether world between the two.