No less than an adventure

I was still in my dream world and could see the familiar stone structures of hampi in between the mist in front of me. It was only when we crossed the river to reach the other side, I realized that I was already in hampi. It sounds too cheesy but this is what I felt on the very first visit of this historic place.

the first image of hampi

We climbed the steps and saw virupaksha temple and this marked the start of the first day at hampi. So excited was I that my eyes constantly moved all over the spaces and places there.  I wanted to capture everything I could be it the history of that temple, the architecture or any other events related to it. In this process I realized that for the first time in my life I focused on everything except the idol there. I didn’t bother to even pray for a second. Going through so many things, later I realized and just stood infront of the idol for a minute.

This incident might not be so great for many of you who are reading this but it was a big thing for me since I was so much into overcoming the fact that I am in hampi, carvings and history distracted me from the actual purpose of visiting a temple.

This for sure is not just my story but of all those who come here and are caught by the beauty of its carvings and stories. It’s important to focus on this fact because tourists come here and fall in love with the arrangement of the rocks, paintings that depict Ramayana and the monkeys that are all over this place. Somewhere in the beauty of projection we often tend to capture everything in the camera before merging in with that place.

As we came out of the temple I saw a man playing songs on iktara instrument and he played it so well and seeing that I had the feeling of learning this instrument. But I had to keep pace with the group so I moved on. From there we went to the monolithic bull and later climbed the flight of stairs to see the sunset point and other small abandoned temple structures. It was here that my first set of observation began and that was the structure made on the ceiling above the bull.This was fascinating because many of my doodles (done in school) did include such a design.

In between this I can say that the first place I made the connectivity with was the “mango tree” restaurant. Here we had our lunch but the ambience of the place surely gave tourists the essence of India. With its seating on a mattress with pillows to rest your back it does give the feel of sitting down and having food in an Indian style. This place shall become a part of my “nazeriya” which happens to be my final output for the exhibition in the college. From here we rented  bicycles and continued the exploration.

 Tired already of climbing up so much and then cycling to the monolithic ganpathi , I had a lot of exercise on very first day ;). From the monolithic ganpathi we moved down towards “laxmi narshima” and the shiva temple. The laxmi narshima was also a monolithic and its broken, destroyed yet fixed structure made me gaze at it for a while. A minute later or so an old lady told us that how this structure was attacked by the britshers and later partially restored by archeologists. Due to this destruction, today we can only see the hand of ‘laxmi’ near the narshima suggesting that, laxmi was seated on its lap. Moving towards right was the “badav shiva” temple, where the shiv linga is surrounded by water. And this obviously said the story that its because shiva controlled the flow of ganga and hence is surrounded by water. From here we headed back towards the the place where we rented the bicycles. Returning the cycles and having a feeling of completing day it was amazing because this day turned out to be “no less than an adventure” due to walking, cycling, visiting and observing so many things on the very first day.

We took the boat to cross the river and from there the auto to head back towards the resort. Tired everyone we met at evening snacks and had the session where we discussed on how our day was and how would we like to proceed in terms of our study. As the discussion ended , we had a round of story telling from two of our facilitators and two of my group mates and this is how the story telling skill development began.

As the moon rose and we all sat near the pool, it felt so good that despite the day being tiring, everybody still stayed together had fun in the pool and then ended the day.  I didn’t share much of the history I heard today is because the places, the stories and today’s experience would just be a surface level information but the start of building the familiarity with hampi. As the days proceed, I shall write more about my experience and the stories since then my focus would be more directive.

Some photos that I took on the first day.

virupaksha temple

monolithic bull