making our way to Hampi, near the birthplace of Bajrang Bali, the King of Monkeys.
Fabulous place. Supposedly Hampi is a very hot place with the Sun furiously scorching away, fortunately a very big family of clouds were also vacationing there(Friendly Hellos) and we were welcomed with drizzles and a gentle wind caressing our tired bodies/bums(8 hr bus ride), but unfortunatley we were at Hampi not as tourists looking to be entertained
by the ruins of Vijayanagar Empire but as climbers wanting some piece of action at the vast array of boulders and rocks that lay strewn all around that area(Not so friendly Hellos, now the clouds were like Uncle Scrooge on a Christmas Eve ruining our party). hehe we were in ruins;).
but one can have only a limited amount of bad luck,..agreed that Mr Murphy does take a liking to us ..but he cant forever be on our heels, so we were pleasantly surprised to get a place to stay a Goa Corner, a really nice place among paddy fields and a Coconut grove, we had a complete Hut with Hammocks:)
all to oursleves(well later on we had to share it with a lot of uninvited mosquitoes but thats a different story)! Well when we first reached Goa Corner its was early morning and we looked like the only souls there(very Scary), apparently the season had just opened and we were the first guys(season openers;)), the only other soul awake was the caretakers dog, from a distance this black mongrel looked like he wud scare the shit outa us, and although Mitesh and Kaushi tried to look
as unintruding as possible and giving out those calming gestures one makes you know like 'Nice Doggie, Nice Doggie', I was hoping that he wud bark and wake up the caretaker, but all we got from that bloody dog was a good licking, Mitesh ran away while me and Kaushy withstood the torture, the damn dog refused to bark even after some really threatening poses we pulled out of our sleeves. Remembering
the old adage that Dogs that dont bark, bite...we let him lick us in peace!!
after abt an hour of loitering arnd we finally decided to go up the owners house and a loud yell(HELLO) from good old Kaushy brought success:), the hut was ours.
After a very fulfulling breakfast we lazed on the hammocks......Paradise:)
The family of clouds was making merry with occasional drizzles, the rocks were
all wet, we cursed Vikrant for not watching the weather news and warning us, the
the morning scares had earned him the position of horror movie director, playing
with us poor fellows. But I guess Hammocks have that effect on you, one cant
stay angry for long.........it was like Goa without the beaches.
We missed Jaat, everyone agreed he wud have loved this place!!
The Caretaker was this huge lady who seemed to me cud easily run for Lok Sabha by the look of the way she was handling things arnd. She jokes that we had brought rains along with us and we smiled at her, forgiving her ignorance, this was tiny,
I mean if mr Murphy likes us and bad luck runs in our viens imagine what we cud have brought;). we have a name for this phenomenon and we call Him, Nasood
Devta, meaning the God of Bad Luck!! apparently this is the God we try to appease everytime we have adventure, and I guess he takes care of us by
not being too harsh. Jai Nasood Devta!!
some very frantic praying (Jai Nasood Devta) and intense optimisticity(forgive me you Wren&Martin addicts & Vocabularians) led to a clearing in the sky, well the clouds were still there , lets just say they ran out of gas;).
Grabbing our chance we scampered through rocks and bushes, Vikrant quickly zeroed on a nice looking dry boulder and though it was not Baby's Day Out(a particularly easy route), it was not difficult and everyone actually managed to climb it, with some hiccups and Kaushy giving is a perfect demo of how not to climb and crawl on a rock:))
Kaushy is impressed, but still has his doubts and puts up this question to us, a question which has been put up to every accomplised climber/mountaineer sometime during his career,you know the sort of questions you ask ppl as to why do they do the things they do!
George Mallory(very famous Mountaineer who some say was the first man to climb Everest-1924) was asked on his repeated attempts to scale Everest " Why do you want climb the Everest?", He answered "Because its there" well so Kaushy muses ..why do ppl climb boulders/rocks....wats there in it.
hmmm.....its difficult to answer these questions, its a 'See for yourself' kinda thing.
well anyway a not so famous climber was asked the same question and he said:
"When God gave me Life , he asked me how do you want it? , I said 'I want it on the Rocks'"!
okay okay I made that up, but I am sure climbers who like Scotch will agree:)
This is turning out to be a long blog : Part 2 later-- titled Lords of the Rock.
