Thursday, 24 February 2011
BADAMI
Writing from Hampi on 24 February with just one week left. I have lots more to say about Bijapur so keep an eye for news on that posting which will probable precede discussion on Hampi, the last week or so it has been almost impossible to find a decent Internet setup, to judge from the huge proportion of independent travellers here this place should be much better.
We have just checked into the Padma Guest House in Hampi for 1500 rp including western breakfast plus an extra 300rp/night if we decide to use the a/c. We have a big pleasant room with a superb view to our west of one of the most celebrated sites in India. The sun has now set and we are thinking of finding somewhere to eat. We tried the train for a change from Badami feeling it would be better than overcrowded slow bumpy buses.
The first half of the journey was in a train in which all the seats were unreserved going South to Gadag and we managed to find seats and places for our luggage although a few others were standing. I had a long chat at the stations with Billy from Vermont USA who sold up his organic farming business and his home and came to spend 12 months in India, seven years later he is still here but is thinking of going back to the USA for good. I had not thought about unreserved rail travel before, not only are some trains like this first one wholly unreserved but almost all trains will have some unreserved coaches where the either the number of tickets sold will be that needed to satisfy demand rather than bear any connection with the number of seats, or as Billy explained it is more probably a reflection of the proportion of Indians who travel without paying for tickets. We saw the results here when for the second half we joined the few unreserved coaches on a crack Express, the Howarth, I think it goes to Calcutta (need to check), and joined a crush which would do any Indian bus proud, I stood with around 15 other men at the entry point of the coach with both ends open to the sky, the sort of hazard one can't even imagine in Europe - though it felt safe enough!
Billy also recommended cleartrip.com as the way to find and book trains and flights in India. I used this to check for the trains to return to Bangalore and found that there was only one train a day and that was a night express train leaving at 20.30 arriving at 6am next morning but both 2berth a/c and 3 berth a/c sleeper already had a waiting list, the 2 berth price with 35% discount for our age was 938rp for two, the 3 tier was 702rp. There was an alternate way of booking called Taktal which reserved some seats for late comers and there were seats available, though in our case we lost our age discount as well as having to pay a 400rp fee for Taktal adding 917rp to the original price. First I had to register and then in the normal way I had to confirm via my own email address, but I could not access my email account on this machine so I did it via the travel agency in the same location and paid them a 10% premium to 2050rp. In retrospect I think that having used cleartrip.com my computer had been blocked from accessing email and maybe more, having been told earlier by my next door neighbour at Padma Guest House he had had a row with a proprieter somewhere in Hampi for using the Internet to bypass their travel business and they then refused to print the eticket for them.
Since arriving in Hampi I have been watching West Indies make a complete mess of their first serious match, against South Africa, but even they couldn't compete with the disaster which was England all but drawing (tieing) their first tiddly game with the Netherlands. Rather like the performance of England in the World Soccer Cup!!! At least the USA is bigger than us!
Bijapur as we have seen is somewhere which is well visited particularly by Indian tourists, but with the exception of three sites is not yet ready to welcome them. Badami and its surrounding area according to our guide is of considerable interest but without any good accommodation and they advised visiting by day trip in hired car with driver from Bijapur.
TO BADAMI
We have just checked into the Padma Guest House in Hampi for 1500 rp including western breakfast plus an extra 300rp/night if we decide to use the a/c. We have a big pleasant room with a superb view to our west of one of the most celebrated sites in India. The sun has now set and we are thinking of finding somewhere to eat. We tried the train for a change from Badami feeling it would be better than overcrowded slow bumpy buses.
The first half of the journey was in a train in which all the seats were unreserved going South to Gadag and we managed to find seats and places for our luggage although a few others were standing. I had a long chat at the stations with Billy from Vermont USA who sold up his organic farming business and his home and came to spend 12 months in India, seven years later he is still here but is thinking of going back to the USA for good. I had not thought about unreserved rail travel before, not only are some trains like this first one wholly unreserved but almost all trains will have some unreserved coaches where the either the number of tickets sold will be that needed to satisfy demand rather than bear any connection with the number of seats, or as Billy explained it is more probably a reflection of the proportion of Indians who travel without paying for tickets. We saw the results here when for the second half we joined the few unreserved coaches on a crack Express, the Howarth, I think it goes to Calcutta (need to check), and joined a crush which would do any Indian bus proud, I stood with around 15 other men at the entry point of the coach with both ends open to the sky, the sort of hazard one can't even imagine in Europe - though it felt safe enough!
Billy also recommended cleartrip.com as the way to find and book trains and flights in India. I used this to check for the trains to return to Bangalore and found that there was only one train a day and that was a night express train leaving at 20.30 arriving at 6am next morning but both 2berth a/c and 3 berth a/c sleeper already had a waiting list, the 2 berth price with 35% discount for our age was 938rp for two, the 3 tier was 702rp. There was an alternate way of booking called Taktal which reserved some seats for late comers and there were seats available, though in our case we lost our age discount as well as having to pay a 400rp fee for Taktal adding 917rp to the original price. First I had to register and then in the normal way I had to confirm via my own email address, but I could not access my email account on this machine so I did it via the travel agency in the same location and paid them a 10% premium to 2050rp. In retrospect I think that having used cleartrip.com my computer had been blocked from accessing email and maybe more, having been told earlier by my next door neighbour at Padma Guest House he had had a row with a proprieter somewhere in Hampi for using the Internet to bypass their travel business and they then refused to print the eticket for them.
Since arriving in Hampi I have been watching West Indies make a complete mess of their first serious match, against South Africa, but even they couldn't compete with the disaster which was England all but drawing (tieing) their first tiddly game with the Netherlands. Rather like the performance of England in the World Soccer Cup!!! At least the USA is bigger than us!
Bijapur as we have seen is somewhere which is well visited particularly by Indian tourists, but with the exception of three sites is not yet ready to welcome them. Badami and its surrounding area according to our guide is of considerable interest but without any good accommodation and they advised visiting by day trip in hired car with driver from Bijapur.
TO BADAMI
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| Tickets please |
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| Note luggage as well as driver |
Our Mayura Chaluka is run by the state tourist board but has 10 very good rooms in an annexe rented for 915rp or nearly1200 rp if using the a/c with which they are all fitted. If run by attentive hard working management and supervision it would be excellent accommodation, but these state run organisations are in our experience all lax for want of a woman' influence. There were no obvious candidates to be excellent places to eat but we fared reasonably the wrongly spelt Sangam (Sanman) near the bus station and particularly by an excellent Thalli for 35rp at Shree Laxmi Villas on the main street (Station Road) which also has rooms - though choice on the rest of the lunch/dinner menu is nonexistent.
North Fort Temples
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| Barely room |
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| Celebration time |
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| View of South Fort from North Fort |
AIHOLE, the first Chalukyan capital.
As planned we set out for Aihole and a young man with a reasonable command of English, albeit with the common hard to understand Indian accent, offered to be our guide the second self appointed in two days. We had been guided around the North Fort and museum by someone we initially thought was a museum employee but in retrospect feel he had been tipped off by the pre-booked rickshaw driver to await us in one of the rooms of the museum. But both were excellent and gave a lot of interesting information.
Aihole it seemed was the above all an important school of architecture in temple building (as opposed to the earlier style as in Badami where temples were carved out rock faces). It dates from 600 AD and the dozen or so buildings in the park were largely built as models so as to explore and teach various styles and techniques of temple buildings, only two of which on this site were ever used as 'working' temples for the local community, plus one designed as a courthouse. He showed us how the style had begun to include influences from the square layered north India style superimposed on the Nagar (coiled snake) style of the towers commonly found in the south. Some were dedicated to Jaine gods (a development from Buddhism though Buddha was one of the last forms of reincarnation of Vishnu). We were reminded that there was only on temple dedicated to Brahma and this was one we had seen in Pushgar, and in fact often ate on the opposite side of the road, as opposed to the later way in which temples were usually dedicated to Vishnu or Shiva.
He pointed out the columned circular end to one of the temples echoing a style which Lutyens later used for the parliament building in Dehli, one of the latest and greatest signs of the Heritage Britain left in India.
We went to a selection of interesting temples outside the bounds of Aihole Archaelogical Survey and to another the name of which escapes me before returning to Badami which was a rather poorly kept, dust everywhere, temple in regular use, indeed there was what we took to be a wedding party there and there were a number of probably unrelated boys swimming in the tank.
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| Note likeness to Lutyens Delhi |
PATTADAKAL the second capital of Chalukyan kings
Next he drove to Pattadakal the World Heritage Site which was the next development site of Indian temple building in India dating from 700AD. We met a group of students who were taking a drink just outside the site at the same stall as us. The man was showing off his macho style of drinking coconut direct from the hole cut in the fruit without the conventional use of a straw, not to be outdone the girls were giving it a go but all reverted to straws. They were all working at the complex being Architecture students from Lucknow University (east of Delhi) and were engaged in a project to document and research into the dating of building developments here. We should have asked if one of them had the time to show us around what was obviously a major advance on Aihole, they probably would have had to refuse, Something always seems to go wrong with world heritage sites, it was 250rp as opposed to 100rp but with the addition of only the most confusing of signs, so that we never did discover which building was which. There were four large temples and rather more small ones. I shall need to research the guidebook text with my photographs later. The other difference of World Heritage Sites is probably the crowds of visitors, here European groups as well as Indian, or maybe it was just the heat, or because no guides were available for individuals, or maybe earlier development like at Aihole is just more inspiring.
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| Note crowds unlike the quiet of Aihole |
Our driver was very pleasant with enough English to keep us reasonably well informed, on the way back he ran over a chicken which would cross the road in a small village at the wrong time but he stopped immediately and paid the value to the owner graciously. She displayed her poor little chicken for all to see with its intestines hanging out.
Our guide from the North Fort had recommended we visit Pattadakal first, ideally each should be visited in the cool of morning, we had set out at 7am, but to slow down and divide into two successive days would have been far better.
South Fort
The south has four levels of carved caves which are very impressive indeed. Badami is a a must see location on its own, Footprint guides need to recognise this and really do their homework to find and publicise acceptable accommodation.
As regards guides I should have employed the 30ish Indian with excellent English who offered to show us around the South Fort temple caves, Joan was against based mainly on the fact that she liked to go at her own slower pace, instead of being rushed - but he took an Indian family instead and he took exactly the same time as us - refusing his offer I am sure was a mistake. Many guides are in fact a drag, full of useless facts whilst others can give you a real insight, we had two in the superior category and desperately needed a third at Pattadakal and a forth to give a greater insight to the excellent carvings in the South caves.
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| North Fort viewed from the South |
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| A Slovenian tourist smiles whilst the monkeys devour her water which they have stolen |
Joan remembers from her Geography lessons at school that the Deccan (inland Karnataka) was like a desert, well it isn't totally like that now in fact it is very fertile in the parts where it has been irrigated, there is no shortage of water with the monsoon due in three months. In fact there are huge lakes, almost the size of shallow seas, the first of which we spotted as we neared Bijapur on our over night bus. There have been others as we made our way south to Hampi, at least some of them are reservoirs created by strategically placed low level dams. The variety of crops is remarkable, not just the maize and sugar cane we had seen a lot of previously but now including Sunflowers though small by our standards, rice, barley, banana, orchards including pomegranate, vinyards of grapes. In fact this part looks like a major farming area, and in the countryside you now see new clusters of simple box like white concrete houses built in the middle of nowhere by the State government to provide free housing for field workers others still live in clusters of DIY tents.
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