On the week end I went to Hampi, a popular tourist destination in the vicinity of Manipal. We took a sleeper bus with "beds" there, and despite the bumpy road I did get some sleep during the 14h ride. I wasn't able to capture the interior of the bus on any picture, but looking out of the bus you might see something like this truck passing by. Notice the decorations and colors on the truck. That's normal.
Hampi is famous because of the many ruins dating back about 500 years. In a very small area, there is (or better "was") an amazing lot of more than 50 temples and I wonder if people in the old days did anything else than praying and building more temples. The ruins are situated in beautiful landscape of hills covered with boulders.
Nowadays there's no sign of any powerful and rich civilization any more and some ancient ruins are inhabited by modern people. The clash of elements that I categorize to completely different times is representative for whole India.
In the picture you can see how huts made from palm tree leafs are build around an old temple, right on the "main road". Walking the streets is like walking through an open-air museum, or even like walking through people's living rooms. All the life here seems to happen not in the small huts, but right on the street. It's the place where you see people eating, sleeping, working, playing, raising kids, taking care of animals, washing cloth, making fire, selling goods, ... just everything.
While in Germany the default state of a person is inside the house, and you go out only to complete a certain task, here the default state seems being on the street. I wonder what people actually do inside.
As usual there are animals:
And curious kids:
The most fun part was hiring mopeds. Click on the picture to see a video of me and my flat mate Markus going for a ride. We were asked neither for a driver's license, nor for any identification. We also didn't get any helmets or protection. In general hardly anybody in India wears helmets when biking.
Here's a very boring picture of me, posing somewhere. No travelogue is complete without it:
And there's a nicer picture of a temple during sunset:
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