Monday, August 20, 2007

Hampi Trip

So my trip to Hampi was amazing! So we took a night train this time (much smoother ride than the bus). The rickshaw dropped us off at the bus station and so we had to find the train station... thank goodness it was just down a little ways from the bus station. We went in and waited in line, we had already bought our tickets online but we wanted to make sure we didn't need anything else, which we didn't. Then we went to find our train... haha, that was fun. I didn't know exactly how train stations worked, so we knew we needed to be on platform 8 but we only knew where #1 was (good thing we got there early!) we decided to look around. We climbed some stairs and found that there were way more platforms than meets the eye! We finally found platform 8. We waited there till our train came, then finding our cabin became a problem... we didn't know where we were supposed to go and the train only stops for a few minutes. I resorted to asking a guard where to go, and he pointed us in the right direction. We made it to our cabin at the front of the train (not recommended if you ever take a train... they honk long loud blasts all night) we found are seats, and we're off! the seats turned into beds, so we secured our bags and tried to fall asleep. When I was asleep I would dream that we missed our stop, so I didn't sleep very much that night. We made it to Hopset at 7:45 and caught a rickshaw to Hampi. Right as we got in we checked into a guest house and put down our things, we were starving so we found a roof top restaurant to eat breakfast. While we ate our pancakes (which are crepes here) we planned out our day; we were going to do our own site seeing on friday and then plan to take a tour on saturday. The first temple (and the tallest temple in hampi at 55 meters, that you can see from the entire valley) we got a tour. It was fun to see all the monkeys (even though they weren't very nice), and we got a red dot on our foreheads and flowers in our hair, we also met Lakshmi the elephant. After that we roamed the country side and saw tons of ruins of temples and bazaars (ancient market places) and met lots of children (that love getting their picture taken). We went and ate at the Mango Tree which is a restaurant in the shade of a mango tree, which is between a banana plantation and a river. It was fun and we ate very good food. Then we went to the guest house and took rest. We got up the next day, did about the same but took a rickshaw tour in the afternoon to the ruins that we couldn't reach via walking. It was jolly good fun and we took approximately 500 pictures between anika and I. We made it back in time for church on sunday!

2 comments:

Isis said...

This is the best blog ever! What a great way to keep updated with the news there! Oh my gosh!! I still can´t believe tori is pregnant! sooo cute! Stacy is having a great time in India as I can see!! Amb is sooo beautiful at her wedding and with the dark hair aind all! Keep the blog updated, I will read it often!
Miss you all!!
Kisses
Ana Menezes

ManFam said...

Glad your having fun! I'm excited to see ALL the pics :) Love you, Mom