Where our day yesterday had focussed on the religious centre of Viyanagara (within walking distance of Hampi Bazaar), today was to focus on the old royal centre which is further afield.  We had been approached at the tourist information centre yesterday by an official guide who was trying to get a group of tourists together for a cycle tour of the royal centre – which sounded ideal to us, so after an early breakfast we headed over to Hampi Bazaar for 9.30.  Our cycling group was remarkably international – with a single representative from Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Russia and the UK, ranging in age from a few students to a fifty year old careers advisor on sabbatical.  The journey started off with a big hill climb but from there onwards was flat and the surface was, on the whole, pretty good.  The first few sights were reasonably close to Hampi Bazaar and our guide explained to us the history of some of the temples and shrines – how the broken statues could no longer be worshipped, but that some of the unbroken temples were popular with locals still.  The conservation authorities have had to battle with local residents over preservation of the ruins and there have been some forced evictions of shopkeepers who had set up in the ruins themselves.  Hampi Bazaar is a bustling little settlement and the ruins have already been flagged up as ‘endangered’ by UNESCO.

After this last collection of temples we cycled for about 2 kilometres towards the Royal Centre.  On our way we stopped off at the Queen’s Bath - a building that looked simple from the outside but inside was decorated in a characteristically elegant Islamic style.  This areas was far larger in scope than the religious centre, but was also not as well preserved.  The main reason for this was that while the foundations and lower structures of the buildings here were made from long lasting stone, the remainder of the structures were made from wood and have therefore long gone.  The most impressive part of the area was the old water storage tank – a deep square tank with interesting geometric patterns that is so well preserved that it looks like it is a reconstruction.

The group then made its way to the old female section of the palace, where the wives of kings and high ranking soldiers were ‘kept’ when the men were off fighting battles.  The women’s quarter was apparently guarded by an elite force of eunuchs.  The centre of this section was the ‘Lotus Palace’ designed to look like a lotus flower – the national flower of India.  To the south of the women’s section were the elephant stables.  The royal army would have contained hundreds and hundreds of elephants but these stables only had room for those belonging to the eleven most important riders.  To a westerner, a stable implies somewhere that isn’t particularly dramatic but then, you forget how big elephants are compared to horses – the amazing structure was one of the most impressive that we had seen.  From here our little group headed slowly back to Hampi Bazaar, through beautiful, shaded banana plantations.  We ate lunch as a group – the first time that we had really found other tourists to get talking to, which was very pleasant.  Myself and Sergei felt that we had seen enough of the ruins and therefore took it easy in a café for a few hours with our books.  We wanted to hang around until dusk to watch the sun setting over the bizarre Hampi landscape – a landscape that I decided dinosaurs would look right at home in.  As we sat watching the sun go down we were accosted by a brave monkey that, amusingly, grabbed Sergei’s food bag and stole his Galaxy chocolate bar – proof of how mischievous they are.

With that, we had finished our time in Hampi and I have to say it is one of the best places that I have come across on my travels.  The only ruins that can compare are those at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but somehow Hampi is more impressive due to its surreal, boulder-strewn surrounding landscape.  While two full days were enough to feel satisfied we hadn’t missed anything, we could happily have spent a little bit longer exploring ruins a bit further afield on bikes – or riding down the river on a coracle.  Unfortunately though, time dictated that we had to continue our journey south.