Hampi And Searching For The Unexplored

Hampi is located in the old capital of the Vijayanagara empire that was toppled by the Deccan Muslim Confederacy in 1565.  Without getting into the history of South India (which I don't know and don't particularly want to research at the moment) let's just say that whatever was left of the capital was literally left in ruins. And oh, what sweet beautiful ruins they are.

What got me the most though was the scenery.  The easiest place to compare Hampi to would be Angkor Wat in Cambodia which is loaded with the preserved stone temples of another fallen civilization.  In all fairness Angkor Wat is significantly more impressive architecturally speaking.  What makes Hampi it's rival is the rock-strewn hills that are dotted with temples.  Angkor Wat is located in some pretty thick jungle so you basically bike or take a rickshaw from one temple to another and can appreciate each on its own terms. In Hampi you can go hiking (or bouldering as many mountain climbers there do), come around the corner of one giant rock formation and suddenly see a whole new valley dotted with ancient temples. Keep walking over another hill and there on a mountainside are the crumbling remains of some building.  It's all very awe inspiring when you first arrive.

That said, Hampi isn't some unexplored corner of the world.  Like most places of significant cultural heritage its seen a growth in tourism to keep pace, especially as incomes in India rise and things like domestic tourism become more feasible.  Tons of tour buses filled with Indians pour into the place everyday during the high season between Christmas and New Years.  I had mistakenly thought the tour bus crowd was an Americans in Europe or East Asians anywhere phenomenon, I stand corrected.  And although a lack of classy accommodation means fewer Western package tourists, the backpacker crowd has its own strong presence.

I decided to stay at the slightly quieter area across the river.  The main temples were on the other side but the backpacker haven I stayed in is where you could get a beer and not be hassled by a rickshaw driver every 10 feet.  To get there you need to take a small boat that costs 15 rupees a person (about 35 cents).  Since these boats cross packed every time and since they run from morning to evening it must be good business.  Rumor has it they built a bridge down stream twice and both times it collapsed shortly after.  I'm pretty sure there's a boat mafia at work.  If you look closely there's a motorcycle on that boat too, only way across the river.

Now on the other side it's known as Virupapur Gaddi.  It's basically a small farming area peppered with guest houses cum restaurants.  As a side note, the word cum in India is used in it's Latin form meaning "and".  This is acceptable English accept that no one in England or America would ever use it and would probably get a good chuckle.  Imagine this sign from Mysore in some American city...

Back on topic...Virupapur Gaddi is loaded with these guest house/restaurants with basically identical 'multi-cuisine' menus.  Multi-cuisine there generally means Indian, Italian, Chinese (basically fried rice and fried noodles with some weird Indo-Chinese creations like Gobi-Manchurian or Chicken 65), limited Continental options and a whole section devoted to everything Israeli.  I like hummus as much as the next guy so for the first few days these culinary options were quite nice.  Regrettably, every menu said they served Mexican food but when asked they always said it was out.  Teases.

I said they were nice because about 4 days in my stomach troubles reappeared. The doctor I saw in Hampi made a big show of charging me 500 rupees for tests he didn't look at only to diagnose me with traveler's diarrhea.  The fact that I didn't have diarrhea and instead had severe gas, vomiting and a sour stomach didn't seem to phase him. I was happy to take the antibiotics though since I suspected I had Giardia (an intestinal parasite) and the stuff he gave me is used to treat that as well.  It got cleared up after a few days but has recently returned in a limited fashion, basically my stomach hurts whenever I eat more than a small meal.  On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I'm losing a good amount of weight and I've definitely got some to lose.

So getting sick definitely soured my opinion of Hampi after that, especially when I didn't have the energy to go hiking and was stuck reading or using my netbook in the backpacker haven that is Virupapur Gaddi. Now, I used to really like that sort of place and still do in a limited degree.  But it definitely isn't India and sadly it has the feel of tons of similar places scattered throughout Southeast Asia (see my earlier post about Varkala when we first arrived in India).  Christmas Eve and New Years Eve were both spent at the Tee-pee restaurant that had a really nice hippy vibe with people sitting on cushions having impromptu jam sessions, competitive dice and jinga games and other things that hippies do.  Those sorts of places are fun to be at, and the Tee-pee definitely had a cool vibe that set it apart from the other places in town.  It's just when every place in town looks the same that it gets old after awhile and can make the experience less enjoyable.

A conversation with a friendly German guy named Nicholas on New Years Eve brought it home to me.  He was asking how to get out of the tourist route and see somewhere that hasn't already been trod by a million feet.  My best advice was to get your own transportation like a scooter or motorcycle, don't expect much and just go with the experience. My own fantastic trip into Nan province in Thailand one New Years break kept coming to mind.  I was driving 6 to 8 hours on my scooter every day for 3 days to get there, drive around the province and drive back but it was an incredibly good time spent ordering food in broken Thai, buying salt from some hill tribe that mines it in the mountains and according to Lonely Planet has a cultural taboo against using metal in their houses, and stopping by the side of the road to get khao lam for lunch (sticky rice steamed in bamboo).  By the end I was a little sunburnt, had a sore butt and was definitely ready for some R&R but the memories of those deserted mountain roads and gorgeous high passes at sunset still bring a smile to my face.

It seems though that everyone backpacking faces the same dilemma.  They all want something new or different, sometimes to the point where people get competitive or snooty about it.  But at the same time the places people want to see with the most famous landmarks are already overrun by tourists. So in the worst case scenario (and I occasionally find myself slipping into this train of thought) you end up hating the other tourists around you for being tourists and being where you are right now.  Now some may make a distinction between tourists and travelers here and I believe that people definitely do travel in different ways, an independent backpacker is experiencing something different than a package tourist to Goa or Cancun.  But as my buddy Martyn would put it, "They're still fucking tourists."  And I have to agree, I'm a tourist to going through India right now and for the most part I've kept on the tourist trail which is absolutely huge and well-traveled in this country.  As a side note, those three brothers on Nat Geo Adventure who think they're the shit for going to Bangladesh or some remote area of Nepal need to be taken out and shot.  The Madventures guys are all right in my book though.

So anyways, I'm not exactly on a quest to find the unexplored but instead just want to experience the new which is all relative to your personal experience anyways. The wonderful thing about India is that the tourist trail is well-trod but in most places it's still India swirling around little pockets of backpackers.  And India is such a strong, at times in your face, culture that you're guaranteed to see something new. Hampi might have been too touristy for me, and getting sick didn't help my mood, but it was still an amazing sight and one I wouldn't mind seeing again.  So my parting thought today is, if you're ever in South India don't miss Hampi because it really is beautiful.