Let's go to Hampi!

It's been a running joke on this trip that even though we are traveling all over the country seeing so many interesting things, Jen is still complaining because we can't go to Hampi (the 500-year-old ruins of an ancient empire). We could have gone from Hyderabad, or Bangalore, or Goa....since it is equidistant from all three, but there were family moans about the likelihood of a 12-hour drive...on bumpy roads...without pizza. So Jen is delighted when she learns from our new Goan friend Suhag that Air Deccan, the super-cheap domestic airline, has just started flying near Hampi from Goa. So now it is really a possibility that we could go, but we don't make any plans.

Until.....

We wake Monday morning to find that Jen has accidentally reserved not 5 nights in Panjim, but just one...last night. Since every hotel in town is booked with the film festival, Mark does some fancy footwork and comes up with plane tickets to Hampi and reservations at Hampi Boulder's, which as the name suggests is a hotel built into the rocks. With amazing speed, we pack and head to the airport. After getting through security, we find that oddly, the airport doubles as an appliance showroom:


Your seat number is 12B. Would you like a dishwasher with that?

The plane is only a 70-seater, but much bigger than we need. With only 14 people on the flight, the pilot walks back and asks 7 of us to move to the back of the plane so he can balance it. This is the kind of thing that can either make you nervous or make you giggle. Karma asks why the plane has a big fans on it.

But it's a fun 40-minute flight and we have a great view of a landscape of green farmland, a big river, long trains and iron ore mines as we approach Bellary, where the airport is.


Approaching the landing, with a patchwork of farmland, a small town, and a steel plant in the distance.


It turns out that not only is the flight from Goa just two weeks old, so's the airport. This little jewelbox is the whole airport...snack bar, lounge, ticket counter, security...it's much cuter than the picture shows, with kooky bird sculptures hanging from the ceiling inside. The staff were all just tickled to see us.

We began the drive to Hampi, passing a giant steel mill and a row of signs promising "A Tree for Every Ton Of Steel". Soon we were on an unbelievably bad road, watching the landscape turn from green to red as the iron ore dust completely covered the village, the road, and anything that had ever been lush. Just a kilometer or two from the eerie new gas station....




The iconic and incongruous rural gas station.

To the worst pollution we have seen in India...every leaf, every child's head, every item at the general store, covered in iron ore dust.

Don't adjust your screen. Everything in this picture is really red.

Eventually, we lurched our way out of this area, but it is hard to imagine what life must be like in these conditions. Considerably sobered, we next found ourselves in a landscape that was as fertile as the other was barren....really amazing vistas of rice paddies, banana, sugar cane, and water, water everywhere. We later learned that a dam was built in the 1950's, with canals bringing the water for irrigation throughout the region.

After the sunset, we came to Hampi Boulder's and joined a bonfire barbeque on-- you guessed it -- a boulder. And then we climbed another boulder and found our room, and went to bed.