Hampi Ruins

The last two days have been spent exploring the ruins of Hampi. I won't try to go into great detail about the place itself, for the "facts" you can look at the website about it (I think there is a link in teh May post "India preview.") In short, Hampi was the metropolis of the 14th - 16th centuries. And not just for India. It was a world renowned city. Unfortunately the king got whomped while warring away from home and the place was subsequently looted for six months and then abandoned except for a few wayward peasants I suppose.

The main part of the city is a 25 sq km piece that is littered with ruins. There are more temples than you can shake a stick at, old roads, remnants of bizaars around the temples, statues, random engravings on rocks, pillars, palaces, houses, public baths, private baths, elephant stables, guard quarters, and so on everywhere. Our tour guide - a family friend of Vaidya's who is a conservationist architect (or something like that) and who used to work at Hampi doing preservation stuff - was telling me there are something like 30,000 catalogued items of historical interest. And supposedly there is tons more laying on private land or under farm fields.

Which brings me to the most interesting part of this for me. I'm not super into "seeing the sites" - that whole tourist scene is unappealing to me and the "sites" themselves don't really rev me up the way more cultural/real/day-to-day stuff does. It is a challenge to reconcile "preservation of an historical site" with the needs of the peasants who are living (or trying to live) here and have been doing that since it was abandoned 500 years ago. Part of me understands the idea behind preserving it, but a bigger part of me thinks "who cares if the banana plantations are destroying ruins buried beneath?" The people are starving and destitute and most of the money that comes in from tourism doesn't get to the people so.... Who cares if they set up a little shop amongst the ruins of the old bazaar? A lot of historians care I guess. Actually, it seems very fitting to me that the old bazaar is housing vendors today. It looks hideous and is probably very dangerous (the structures are totally falling apart) and is definitely contributing to a more swift demise for the structures but... They were built to house vendors to sell stuff, right?

Anyway, I don't have much time so I'll refrain from further pontification on a subject I know very little of and have next to no experience around.

Quick quick highlights:

* I got blessed by a hef-a-lump (spelled, incorrectly, by some as "elephant.") Inside one of the temples (several are "living" temples still) I gave 5 rupees to a hefalump, he took it in his snout and then blessed me with the same snout.

* I witnessed a gang of monkeys thieve some bananas. Several distracted the women selling nanners while another snuck up, snatched a small bunch of about 3 and then booked it up a tree onto a house. The women reacted by yelling at the monkeys and the monkeys reacted by yelling back - part in fear, part in victory and part in taunting over their victory.

* The place is crawling with cows, bulls, monkeys (multiple varieties), buffallo, pigs (yeah, pigs!), goats (and goatlings :):)), cats, dogs, and tons of lizards. Vaidya and the driver are probably very tired of my interest, but I still love looking at them and find them quite amusing (even when blocking the road.)