Sunrise, Salutations and Slow Trains

I’m sitting here on the train to Goa from Hampi. The train came from Calcutta and is already three hours late. That’s India. Nothing ever turns out as you expect.

Like the day before yesterday when at the end of the day we visited a hilltop temple that overlooks the Hampi ruins. Hampi is an ancient capital (early 1300s) that is actually mentioned in the epic Ramayana. By the 1600s it held over 500,000 people, but then it was sacked by a confederacy of rival sultanates. The ruins of the city remain today and are spread over 36 square kilometers around other-worldly mounds of boulders that seriously look as if they’re the remains of another, far older, civilization.

To see the sunset we went up beyond the temple’s rear gate where the light was turning pale gold and illuminating the heaps of boulders. We stayed there awhile with a family having a picnic. The light wind filled my face and the ubiquitous Indian haze softened the distance. Standing there, I felt like I could inhale the softness, especially after the music started playing in the temple. We headed back down to the temple and sat down to enjoy the peace. Then an orange-clad priest invited me up into the temple to take a seat and take part of the music. I don’t know quite what I was playing—small metal cups that you clap together in a syncopated rhythm. I was very bad at it, but I was still offered puja and a blessing. An unexpected welcome to Hampi.

On the other hand, yesterday I wanted to take photos of the sunrise over the Hampi ruins. Maybe it was my need to book end the visit—sunrise and sunset—so I was up at 5 am and had a driver arranged to take me to the ruins. We drove to Hampi and he dropped me at the stairs/trail that led up a very tall hill to the optimistically named ‘Sunrise Point’. The stairs were made of huge, uneven, pale slabs of stone that I could barely see through the darkness of pre-dawn. By the time I made it to the top of the stairs I was panting. Then I was faced by a conundrum—carry on, on a wide dusty path, or follow a sign that pointed off the main trail to Sunrise Point. Being Canadian, I followed the sign and found myself on a spider web of trails that led up and over boulders and through the brush. I found another set of stairs leading upward and headed up. And up. Over bounders. Up rough stairs. And up some more until I found a young French girl perched alone on a boulder like a messenger in a Dungeons and Dragons game. Above her was an even bigger boulder with vague indentations chipped into them as stairs.

She said she’d stopped where she was because she was afraid to go further, but more afraid of trying to get down. Looking at those half-formed stairs I totally got what she was saying and decided to stay there to photograph, if not the sunrise, at least the landscape as the sun turned it gold.

When the light changed, it seems that her assessment was correct. I headed down the rough stairs until I reached the place where I’d left the brush. Then I struck out on the path back towards my original stairs.

Only to have the path run out.

I retraced my footsteps and took another fork. It ended, too, and so did others so that eventually I had to make a decision: Go back to the second set of stairs if I could find them again (given the first set had mysteriously disappeared,) or get to the base of the mountain and hopefully find a path. I chose the latter and after much battling with cactus and thorn trees, bloodied, sweating and actually wondering what I would do if I fell and broke something, I found the bottom and a well-worn path next to a field of banana trees. That path eventually led me back into ruins where I enquired of a Japanese tour group what direction I should be going. I did find my way back, but I bear the thorn and cactus scars of my adventure.

So the lesson I’ve learned (actually, I should have remembered from my previous visit to this country) is that (for good or bad) in India nothing ever happens the way you expect.

Oh yes, and the train—we lost another three hours on our journey to Goa, arriving six hours late. I guess I should have expected it.