A Trip to Hampi - part 4

For our 3rd full day we met Viru in Hampi again and spent much of the day in the "royal center"- Vijayanagar. Here there are ruins all around- many of them were buried for centuries and many more are likely to be found as other parts are investigated. We first walked past a huge stone platform which Viru said once had a large wooden structure on top from which the kings would oversee the events going on below. We came back to this later.
We walked to see a "stepwell". These are common in northern India but were uncommon in this area in the 1600th and earlier centuries. Viru pointed out two things about it. One is that the stone is a different color than the usual granite and the second is that every stone in it has a number engraved in the surface. He said the belief is that this was actually built somewhere else (further north) and then taken apart and re- assembled here. Viru showed us some stone troughs that have been partially reassembled as well. The handling of water here was fairly sophisticated as they brought water from far away to fill the stepwell and lots of other features in this area. We later bought a book that was published some years ago on the water systems.
We next walked to a huge "swimming pool". We don't know how else to describe it. Viru said that one of the earlier overseers of the digging in Hampi had many areas covered with stucco to minimize the digging of people who just wandered on to the place. This pool bottom was covered like that so there may be much more interesting stuff to be uncovered.
We went to see some pre-historic paintings on a huge boulder and then had lunch before going off on another coracle across the river to visit the village of Anegondi. This was the capitol before Hampi was built up, but Viru said that it was never really occupied by royalty. The Hampi area is huge and there are many areas we did not visit. This village was a little disappointing. When we arrived on the river bank we saw the remains on a modern bridge that had collapsed about a year earlier- killing 8 workers. The bridge was started many years back and was always controversial because many said that it should not be built so close to Hampi. Apparently, many people also thought it was not well designed and when they began more work to finish it they added more supports, but apparently, not enough and the bridge collapsed in Jan. 2009. We read about it in Bangalore, but did not know much about it then.
When we arrived on the other side of the river we noticed a couple things. One was that a lot of people were accumulating to cross the river to Hampi and we also watched some men making new coracles. These are made of sticks and rope with fiberglass sheeting over it and then the bottoms are covered in tar to keep water from coming in too easily. This was Jan.13. The 14th was a holiday and Viru said that thousands of people would be crossing to Hampi the next day, so we presume the boats were being made for that.
After our walk around Anegondi we went back to cross the river again and many people had accumulated and only 2-3 boats were running. Viru moved us ahead to get in a boat with 2 motorcycles, at least one bicycle and 8 people. We did not count the bicycles and people, but those numbers are about right. Viru complaine dthat they were being greedy by trying to take more people. As we crossed the river we came to a sudden stop when the boat hit an underwater rock! It would not move until a young kid climbed overboard and worked to push it off the rock. Finally we go to shore but with about 4 inches of water in the bottom of the boat. We were not too worried, but our cameras and clothes would have been ruined if we'd had to get out and swim! The motorcycles would have been wrecked and we worried more about those guys. This is pretty typical stuff for India. A boat made reasonably well for one use, then over loaded or put to another use and the risks go up. However, most of the time all works out without a major problem- like people drowning of getting crushed by a bridge- but those things do happen more often than we are used to hearing about at home. People have more personal responsibility here and less reliance on government and lawyers. This is good in many ways- many things are much less expensive because of the lack of lawsuits or extra safety gear, but the balance seems not quite right yet. Perhaps, in another generation, there will be more safety taken into account. Viru said he would not take people across in the coracles in the future when there are so many people and so few boats. He will probably arrange for one of the smaller ones like we had used a couple days earlier.
We ended our visit to Hampi by driving up a hill to a temple where we could overlook the area near sunset. The views were spectacular and we enjoyed walking around on the rocks and taking pictures. There were lots of monkeys too. While there we saw an extended family from Rajasthan walk around. Viru and Joseph spoke to them in Hindi and they said they were on a 60 day tour of India and had finished 45 days to this point. We dropped Viru off in Hampi and visited a few of the shops there before going back to our hotel. We drove back to Bangalore starting the next morning.
Overall, we had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed Hampi and the other sites. We had hopes of visiting Bijapur too, but decided that it was too far to go and come back in one day and there are not many good hotels in this area of India. It was also quite hot in the sun during the day- this being the middle of "winter"- so, we could easily understand why the place is largely empty for 8 months of the year.