Land of the Monkey King--Hampi

We could only take the train to the city of Hospet, which was about a half an hour rickshaw ride to Hampi. Hampi is the capital of an 15 century southern India Empire that still has many of the ancient city intact. The landscape was very reminiscent of parts of New Mexico, with a high desert type terrain, filled with rocky hills poking out of a desert tall grass filled terrain. The interesting part about it though is that almost every hill you look at, no matter how insignificant, has some sort of ancient ruin on it. I have never seen so many ruins in an area before, and it’s not a small area, it is probably a 30 or 40 square mile area filled with ruins.

The city of Hampi is situated in the middle of one of the larger ruin filled areas. The town is literally built in between and around the ruins of the ancient city. The other exciting part of Hampi is that is has tons of two different types of monkeys. They are everywhere, crawling around the building and streets, and then fleeing to the rocks or temples surrounding the city when it gets too hot for them to be out.

Upon arriving in the city we were swarmed by people trying to get us to stay at their guest house. At one point we literally had eight people around us, all putting their cards in our faces, talking at once about their guest house. We settled on a place that was a little more expensive then we might have usually gotten, just to get of the streets and the large amount of hotel touts.

Our hotel had a restaurant on the top floor that had great views of the city where we had breakfast and met a very nice and proper British girl and two guys from San Francisco.

Our first day there we went to the main ruins that the city surrounds and explored the many temples found on the hill side above the city. It was interesting to be able to just explore the temples yourself and not have any sort of restrictions to where you could go or see. We would wander into a temple and have to turn on the flash light to see the inner rooms of it, finding many times them to be filled with bats. We also had our first serious run ins with monkeys as we tried to infiltrate the lair of the monkey king. It was a temple way up on a hill that was inaccessible without some scrambling over rocks. Maggie decided to stay behind, but as I got closer to it, I saw more and more monkeys jumping from rock to rock in my direction and then vanishing from sight. As I got even closer I started hearing a roaring sound that sounded like a quite large monkey, so listening to my better judgment I turned around before reaching the ruin.

Because Hampi is a very religious site for Hindus, there is no liquor or anything allowed in the city. However, the city borders a river, and we heard that on the other side of the river these restrictions didn’t apply. The only problem was that the only way across the river, which was only about 100 feet wide, was a small ferry that that charged 10 rupees during the day and 50 rupees at night (20 cents and 1 dollar respectively, so not a big deal when you think of it that way, but ridiculously expensive here). The way that side of the river was described to us, we started calling it Vegas, because it seemed to have all the vices prohibited inside Hampi.

Our second day in Hampi we decided to cross the river and see what this Vegas was all about. It mostly consisted of Hotels that had restaurants in the middle of them, where all of the residents of the hotel hung out. It was much like an all inclusive resort for poor hippies and Israelis, with some people never even leaving the hotel, just lying around at the restaurant and drinking and hanging out all day. After spending an afternoon there, we realized we were staying on the wrong side of the river, because while during the day, Hampi had a lot to see, once the sun went down the town died, while Vegas kept going late into the night and had many more travelers to meet.

We headed back from Vegas earlier than we would have liked because the last ferry across the river was at 6pm. We had also heard that it was really nice to watch the sunset from a temple up on a big hill nearer to our guesthouse, so we thought we’d give it a try. It was starting to get near sunset when we reached the bottom of a really big hill and decided to check out some amazing ruins we hadn’t even known were there at the base of the hill before going up. It was a whole complex of temples, pretty well preserved, and must not have been the most popular ones because there was hardly anyone there. We looked around for a few minutes before we realized that there was something strange about this place. We sat on the steps of one of the temples and listened closely and finally realized what it was—silence. It was a sound we hadn’t heard since coming to India, and a very welcome one. We were so seduced by the quiet that we sat there for quite a while, then wandered around the complex a little, whispering so as to not disturb the silence. We had given up on getting up to the top of the hill by sunset, so walked to the other side of this temple complex towards even more ruins nearer to the river. We stopped to watch a sleeping dog who would stand up and bark every time another dog came by, sniff the other dog for a second, and lay back down (we joked that he was the toll dog) and were deciding which fork in a path to take when we looked around yet another temple and saw a gorgeous sunset over the large central temple in the background, all reflected in a widening of the river just below us. We stopped to take a few pictures, and decided to call it a day and head back to town so we wouldn’t be caught out far away after dark. On the way we saw some more monkeys playing around and shopkeepers shooing them away, which is a common sight around there.

While the Hampi side did have a lot less travelers than Vegas side, that night we met up with some guys from San Francisco and a group from England and had dinner together. One of the guys from San Francisco was involved in a start-up, so we talked shop for awhile. After dinner, the whole group of us followed one of the guys from England to a restaurant that was rumored to serve beer. Upon arriving we were just offered a Special Lassi, but no beer, so we called it a night and hung out with the SF guys on the roof of their guest house, where we watched lots of dog gang and cow herd drama unfold below.

Our third day in Hampi we decided to rent out first scooter in India. We had thought about it in previous cities but had looked at the mess the roads were, and had decided that it was against our better judgment to be let loose on the roads. Hampi we felt was an exception though because it was a very lightly traveled area and we thought we could handle the traffic, and also a lot of the sites in Hampi were more than a walkable distance from where we were staying. We rented the scooter and filled it up with 3 liters of gas and were off on the road with the wind in our hair, kind of, since we had both felt that helmets were a pretty important thing, which we were pretty much alone in thinking, since we were the only people we saw in all of India wearing helmets.

We really wanted to see the Hanuman or Monkey God Temple which was on the other side of the river and the map showed a bridge not too far out of town, so we headed off towards it. Upon arrival we came to find that it had collapsed and instantly remembered someone in Hampi talking about a bridge that had collapsed recently, killing some fifty people. The funny thing about India, is they are not very good at cleaning up after themselves and the bridge looked like it might have collapsed yesterday. Rebar and concrete was still strewn about with no obvious attempt to clean it up. After asking some locals working in the area if there was another bridge and finding out that it was some 50 km away and that the only close crossing was the ferry in Hampi, we headed back to where we had just come from. On the way out to the bridge we had passed some interesting ruins and a town so we decided to see the ruins but first make a stop at the Wine Shop in the town, since there was no liquor in Hampi. After buying two small bottles of Rum, we were off to the ruins. After seeing all the ruins on the first day, the rest started to look all alike, although the group of ruins we wanted to see before crossing the river gave me a good opportunity to do some serious off-road scooting, seeing that they were all found off of dirt roads.

After checking out the temples we loaded the scooter onto the ferry and took it across the river. It seems like everyone and everything that wants to cross the river takes the ferry, we even saw a dog take the ferry from one side to the other, and not someone’s dog, just a stray who wanted to get across. Once on the other side, we were off to the Monkey Temple. Upon arriving, we realized that it sat on top of a fairly tall hill that was no short walk to the top. Luckily there was a well maintained staircase going the whole way to the top.

After a long and tiring walk, we arrived at the top, hopeful of seeing monkeys running around everywhere. We were sorely disappointed, there were no monkeys anywhere, so we walked into the temple and were informed that the monkeys were sleeping but would be back out in a couple of hours for chai, which the monk said they enjoyed. We walked around for awhile since there was such a great view of the entire surrounds area from the top of the hill, which seemed to be one of the tallest in the area. We ended up setting up shop under a large boulder that offered some shade while we waited for the monkeys to come out from their caves.

After a few hours, we were told by a kid and his mother, who were also waiting, that they were beginning to come out. We walked back to the temple and sat outside to wait. Slowly but surely, more and more monkeys arrived until there were maybe 20 monkeys, ranging from all ages, surrounding us and taking the food we offered from our hands. These monkeys were definitely accustomed to people. They would come right up to you with no fear, some would even start digging through your pockets, knowing the food came from somewhere and instead of waiting for you to feed them, they might as well go right to the source. The kid and mother who were also up there had been before and the kid had actually turned his pants inside out so they couldn’t reach into his pockets.

The monkeys were really entertaining to be around. They all had many different personalities. Some were more timid, while others, you could just hold out a closed fist and they would run up and open your hand for you looking for food. Many fights were started when one monkey seeing another getting fed, would run up from behind to steal the food from his hand before he could deposit it into his mouth, which is where they stored their food before eating it. Some of the more aggressive beggars had cheeks bursting at their seams with food.

 One monkey who caught our attention was a young, mostly hairless one who we named Schmeagel because of his likeness to Golem in the Lord of the Rings series. He must have been sick because he looked so much different then the rest of monkeys his age. He also seemed completely uninterested in taking food from us and was content with digging through the garbage for something to eat. It also seemed like the other monkeys tried to keep us away from him, for every time we got close to try and feed him, they would get between us and him and make sure we didn’t offer him any food.

We had heard that the sunset from the temple was an awesome sight, but we needed to get the scooter back across the river before the last ferry at 6:00pm. So we headed down and back to Vegas to cross the river.

Before crossing the river we decided to stop at one of the restaurants and have a drink. While there, we meet a South African couple, who were interested in moving to New Mexico after their travels in India. This surprised us and we talked to them awhile about New Mexico and why they wanted to move there. It turned out that they loved the landscape, mystique and a folk singer who lived in T or C, named Dan Bern. After a conversation with them we realized that we were cutting it close to making the last ferry so we headed back across the river to return the scooter.

That night, we decided that we were done with trying to find something to do on the Hampi side of the river, so we took the ferry back across the river for the night, thinking we would just have to pay more to take a ferry back across the river later at night. So after a night of hanging out and talking to a Korean couple, Wan and Yun, and some Jewish girls, we headed back to the river to cross back to the side our hotel was on. Upon arriving at the ferry we realized that there was no more ferry and that if we wanted across, we were walking through the river. We heard that it was only thigh deep at its deepest point, if you were in the right spot. But seeing that there was no moon that night and we only had a head lamp, it made finding the right spot pretty hard. When we finally thought that we were in the right spot and were walking towards the edge of the river, we saw some animal, we still don’t know what, but it looked to be around three feet long, jump off a rock back into the river. For me that was it, there was no way I was getting in the river and after talking Maggie into the same fact, we headed back to the restaurant / guest house we were at before and rented their cheapest room for the night, which turned out to be the worst room we stayed in, in the entirety of India. After a sleepless night on my part, due to the fear of begs bugs and spiders, we headed out to the first ferry at 5:30am, tired and just wanting to pass out. Although our train was that morning, so we just had enough time to get back to our hotel, pack up and head off to the train station for our two day long journey to the north of India.