Mr & Mrs Wanderlust : Hampi

Transport

From Mysore we took the Hampi Express sleeper Train direct to Hospet (nearest stn to Hampi). We left at 18.40 and arrived the following morning around 7am. We stayed in AC3 class and found it to be quite comfortable! The a\c worked and the bedding was clean and even pressed!

Once in Hospet be warned that rickshaw drivers will come on the train and try and take your bags and offer to take you to Hampi. Don't bother the bus is really easy and of course cheap!
From the train stn take any bus that appears to the main bus station in Hospet - should only be one stop away and cost only 8 Rupees. From here you get the Hampi bus which cost about 40 for both of us.

Accommodation
Once in the bus station in hampi we had to navigate to our accommodation which turns out was on the other side of the river in....where there are lots of the tourist accommodations. We really liked it over there but be warned it is touristy with lots of hippy-type places and you have to get the boat taxi to and from Hampi. It only costs 10rs each each way, but it stops at 6pm! If you want to get across after this time it's a very expensive hand paddled boat or a long rickshaw round to the bridge which could set you back in excess of 400rs.

We stayed at Mowgli guesthouse, in a cute little hut. The place had a nice feel to it and the huts were a novel place to stay! Again our room was basic, but clean and with hot water morning and evening. We did take down there mosquito net and put up our own. But besides that it was really clean and had a lot of character.

Day 1

We arrived at our hotel around 9 am and we had a little wait for the guests in the room to leave so they could clean and prepare our room, so we sat in the on site restaurant, had an English breakfast and a couple of cups of tea. We got into the room around 11. Dumped our bags, had a shower and were out and took a stroll up to the boat crossing into Hampi town.

We were walking around the streets seeing what was around and grabbing a few little bits of food (We tried deep fried green chilli in batter, which the Hampi locals seem to eat morning noon and night, it was quite spicy) around 2pm we were approached by a rickshaw driver offering to take us around the sights, but we had already read this takes most of a long day, so we decided to book him for the next day.

He suggested a nice place for tourists to walk was past the Hampi police station, set in a ancient ruined building, through a large temple entrance (where we saw our first foot long millipede) and after a few minutes of walking through the boulders, which are pretty spectacular in their own way anyway, there was a giant ancient temple straight from Indiana Jones, with nobody in sight we went looking around it was brilliant, as we snapped away at the fantastic carvings and the large pillars carved over 1000 years ago, we were interrupted by a few kids, who were followed by more kids and then a huge family of around 20 or so, wanting us to take their photo. It was a bizarre experience as each one of the 20 or so in the family queued to see the picture on the DSLR's tiny LCD screen. They were overjoyed, I guess they'd not seen many DSLR's. We spent around 2 hours looking at this temple and its surroundings before we walked back to the boat to our side of the island.

We ate the first night at a restaurant called Gopi Island, which was voted highly on trip advisor, but we didn't enjoy the meal too much, Gary had a pizza that was quite good, and Abi ordered a baked potato off the menu, and when it came it was fried potato slices. When we showed the waiter a picture of a baked potato he held his head in his hands. Whilst we realised pretty early on in the day what the north side of the island was famous for, we didn't think it would be as blatant as it was in this restaurant, there were lots of people smoking drugs and we chose not to stay too long. We walked passed the local Ganesha festival (lots of music, singing and children dancing and running around everywhere). Then walked down a dirt track to a restaurant called the laughing Buddha, here we had a beer and while there were still several people smoking, it was definitely less 'in your face' than the other place...we then headed home for our big day of sightseeing the following day.

Day 2

The next morning we were up at 7 to get the boat at 8am. When we arrived at the boat there were only a few waiting there, so the boat operators gave us a choice, we could pay double and leave, or wait for more people to come to the boat. We paid double as we could see the other side of the river was the temple elephant having its morning bath we were met by our rickshaw driver at the river and he took us around all the sites,but only after we had asked him to take us somewhere for breakfast and he took us to his street food seller who sold us some idli curry and deep fried chillies for 50inr for 2 people. It was a long day with a lot of walking, but it was spectacular. Some very old temples, old palaces, museums and many carvings of Hanuman (Monkey God). It would be worth noting that once you are in the ancient ruins there isn't many places to buy food, so take a good amount of snacks etc. This day took us from 8 am till around 5pm including a few stops for food etc. To hire a rickshaw and driver for the day cost us 800 INR. Some other options for viewing the monuments were hiring scooters or bicycles but we saw a lot of people with scooter injuries as the roads were mainly mud, and it was 35 degrees so cycling wasn't too high on the agenda. We bought a guidebook for Hampi just to give us a bit more information on what you are looking at. There is some information at each artefact, but not too much. There was a nice place on. The temple side of the river to see the sunset, which is great if you are staying that side, but if you need to be on the boat, you will not get to see it.

South of the river is a nice restaurant called Mango Tree, its definitely worth a visit, good food, nice atmosphere, helpful interested staff,and nutella! Which is in a lot of food places in Hampi, to cater for the traveller crowd.

Day 3

The next day we spent North of the river having a late breakfast, trying to chop a pineapple whilst monkeys were trying to steal it from me. Was very entertaining. Then we went and picked up some Dosas from a dosa cafe on the north side of the river, they are the cheapest dosa on the north side, but when they came out we realised they were very small, so ended up ordering two.

We then went for a stroll up the road to the north and found a few more hotels which we didn't know were there and a nice viewpoint. The afternoon was spent in cafes trying to get WiFi and eating anything with chocolate/peanut butter in it. The hunt for WiFi was important because the phone had no signal or data in Hampi and we needed to book our sleeper bus to Goa. This was an epic fail as nowhere in the north had working wifi, and we were forced to book through a travel agent who stated the private bus was full so we ended up getting the government run sleeper bus to Goa. More on that to follow, it was not pleasant.