Hampi - ruins of a formerly great city


An overnight bus ride away from Mumbai (in a comfortable sleeper bus!) is the small town of Hampi, known in its heyday in the 14th-16th centuries as Vijayanagara, when (by 1500AD) it was supposedly the world’s second-largest city.  Despite its size and wealth, the Vijayanagara Empire was defeated by a coalition of Muslim sultanates, with the capital conquered, pillaged and destroyed by Muslim armies in 1565, after which Hampi remained in ruins.  It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, described by them as an "austere, grandiose site" of more than 1,600 surviving remains of the last great Hindu kingdom in South India that includes "forts, riverside features, royal and sacred complexes, temples, shrines, pillared halls, mandapas, memorial structures, water structures and others".

It also has the attraction of being located in a gorgeous setting of low hills around a meandering river, with enormous granite boulders all around the place.  And there are monkeys – both langurs and rhesus macaques – and quite a few rather attractive birds, from Woolly-necked Storks to Coppersmith Barbets, all around the place.  I loved the ruins, from the iconic stone chariot (left) in the Shree Vijaya Vitthala Temple complex to the small, off-the-beaten track, unnamed temples.  Some of the better-preserved temples had fantastic carved pillars, and carvings along the walls of elephants and camels as well as the thousands of Hindu gods.

I spent several days there, walking extensively around the ruins (which cover more than 40 square kilometres) but also visiting an old fortress, and some pre-historic cave paintings in the area.  Many Indians visit, as the monkey god Hanuman was supposedly born there - they do the trek up the 575 steps to his temple to pay homage - and many of these Indian visitors come from small towns or villages where they do not get foreigners; I quickly lost count of the number of people I posed with for their souvenir photos!  The town also used to be quite a hippy hangout, with the result that there are a number of roadside cafes selling Western food, which is great for those of us who do not like Indian food.  I very much wished I could have spent longer in this remarkable place.


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