The ruin of an empire in Hampi

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Hampi is a magnificent city full of ruins and temples. This city could be part of the UNESCO heritage if it wasn’t for its tendency to develop. That’s actually why a lot of hostel, hotel and restaurant have been closed, making tourism there harder and harder. Luckily Hampi is split by a small river, and all the hostels on the island where there’s no temples and ruins are still open. This river is, like many rivers in India, really dirty and it was a bit chocking to see one man sweeping the garbage of the shore to the river while in the same time many children and some adults were brushing their teeth and bathing in this very same river.

For our first day we decided to do a guided tour so that we could have all the historical and religious anecdotes on all we were going to see. The views were amazing and indeed we were very happy to have all the stories that went with them. Unfortunately, the second day was not as nice… We had to catch a night bus in the evening, departing from the touristic side, we thus decided to take our big bags with us the morning, thinking we would be able to leave them somewhere and so get out of one more back and fourth river crossing, which would have been the case if we would have left our bag at our hostel. Bad decision… Once on the other side, we went to the tourism office, restaurants, hostel, all were either closed or either someone was repeating to us “no … government” (even though we offered them some money !). Indeed, we didn’t even think that the government trying to reduce the development in the historical side, everything would be closed. We therefore decided to take a bus to go directly to the stop where our night bus was leaving from, and spent the day in the restaurant of a hotel nearby. Very exciting!!!