Into the ruins of an ancient kingdom: Hampi

Hampi is a symbol of history, art, architectural excellence and the hard work of those talented workers who constructed this beautiful capital city of vijayanagara in 14th century. For me Hampi is a poem made with big black rocks. She is still standing tall even after destruction. I am just wondering how she would have been in her prime time and also how could people be so ruthless to destruct this amazing piece of art just for conquering a small portion of land. It’s very sad!!

A visit to Hampi was not in my wildest dream until I discuss it with nish on 6th may.

6/may/2008 – 8:00am:

Bangalore: When I woke up this morning I felt like something was missing in my life. But I never had any clue about what was missing until I opened a mail from my dear mate – Nish. It was surprising to hear that he too was missing something in his life. But we never knew what it was. So we have decided to meet after the office hours for finding out the “missing stuff”

10:30pm: Discussions started on a dining table of a hotel @ koramangala in the night.

Torture the reality until it confesses the truth – And the truth is we are “born to be wild”. And the wilderness was missing in our life from couple of months.

We have decided what we need while having dinner. We need to travel to a place where there is peace. We have decided the place, how to go, when to go etc. And we were ready for the new journey. Our journey starts right now, right here from this dining table. And the destination would be the capital of ancient kingdom “Vijayanagara” – Hampi.

Bangalore – Hospet - Hampi

11:30 pm: We were at Majestic bus stand wearing the same dress what we wore to office. No extra pair of dresses, no mobile chargers, no proper information about the destination. Adding to the wilderness (wilderness for us and may be foolishness for others) of the situations, our phone batteries were getting empty. I felt good for it. No connectivity to the external world. I whispered: “Break free brother!!!” Here we are, starting our new journey. We boarded bus to Hospet from Majestic bus stand @ 11:45pm. 7 hours journey. Distance: 350 kms. It was a Rajahamsa bus and was almost empty as it was a weekday. Bus started moving slowly, and my inner being was screaming. I hope so does Nish’s!! I looked at him and smiled.

7/may/2008 - 7:30am:

Hospet: We reached Hospet by 7:30am and we could find a decent hotel (Hotel Malligi) without much hustle. It was clean and neatly maintained. We had yummy breakfast. It was not in my wildest dream that I would be in this place on a working day!! Hampi is 13kms away from this town. We boarded a local bus to Hampi which took around 30 mins to reach the capital.

As soon as we step into Humpi, we could see a marriage procession passing thru and it was a pleasure to watch. wow!!

a marriage procession

into the entrance of ruined kingdom

a pond

Here comes the next challenge, Hampi is geographically distributed across 33kms. So moving around places to places will be almost impossible without a vehicle under the buring sun. The options infront of us were to join the trips provided by the KSTDC, or to hire a local guide. Both options were not okay for us beacuse the fun is limited in the guided tours. We have decided to move around of our own with my outlook traveller guide. We could rent our Inidan version of Harley. Accoring to nish, we should have the feel of the ride and we hired two bikes!!

a break after riding Indian - harley :)

And

"we rode, we rode and we rode

we rode like we have never ridden

punishing our body up and down every hill we could find"

Ride gave us an added excitement to the Hampi visit. Here we are, exploring new place by our own, without help from a local guide, or without using a guided tour. But I strongly recommend to opt for a guided tour when you visit this place for the first time.. Rent a bike only if you are crazy like us!!

But we explored the places the way in which we want, which a guide may not have taken us to. Here is some snaps,

These are the few precious snaps we could click before our camera battery goes down. These photos do not really speak about beauty of Hampi. We could really did not capture the amazing moments in Nish's SLR. But we have decided that we will come back to this place with our dear mates (with crazy devils).

To explore Hampi in its maximum,

to find the soul of the kingdom and

to read the poem written in black stones!!