Hampi Part 2

Waking early we packed our bags and said goodbye to the circus, hoping that we hadn't picked up any passengers in the night. The guesthouse owner reluctantly handed over the money for the second night we had pre paid and we headed off to our new 'homestay' which we had visited and agreed on earlier that morning.

Laxshmi the temple elephant

We wandered down to the River Ghats in search of the Temple elephant Laxshmi who gets her morning bath each day before putting in her hard days graft blessing people at the main temple. Theres something quite memorising about watching this huge beast lolling around in the water whilst two men scrub away, clearly enjoying every minute, whilst in the background the locals are going about their daily routine of washing clothes, themselves and their teeth. After watching the first side being done we headed off deciding the second half would be much the same although being slightly disappointed that we did not see how this massive animal made it down the 50 or so steps to the riverside (although judging by the size of the dung on the partly squashed stairs I figure she just walks down, not via some secret elephant size passageway, the other theory).

Wierd rocks with Vipraksha Temple in backgrpund

Hampi's main tourist attractions consist wholly of temples, not so ruined temples and completely ruined temples. We spent most of the day wandering through them, in a sweat inducing (for m anyway) midday sun, for some reason, no matter how good our intentions, we always ended wandering around at the hottest parts of the day and Hampi being surrounded by massive boulder of unimaginable formations the heat just seemed to bounce around the sites with a fierce intensity.

After our hard day of temple trekking we retired to our room on hope of escape from the heat, unfortunately this was not to be. Again having looked for a room in a reasonably tired and agitated state we had not noticed that the room had no window in it and as a result was hotter than any of the places we had visited that day. In the corner of the room was an 'air cooler' which when turned on provided little relief and produced a noise which would have reverberated round Hampi's ruins (also, unbeknown to us, it was also very heavy on power usage and as our guesthouse ran on battery power when the frequent power cuts hit we were to wake in the morning to some unhappy hosts). We again settled down for what we knew was going to be a hot comfortable night!