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 14 th -16 th 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 mon...