Hampi

I stayed in Hampi for around 3 weeks. Yes, it was that good of a place. For the first couple of days I stayed on the touristy side where the old ruins are. Hampi is split by a river and small island into two sides, the sight-seeing side and the hippie side, where the rock climbing and vibes are. As you can guess, I found nothing of interest in the old side. It’s not even that old. This city was from the 1400s but they treat it like it’s some kind of ancient civilization. That’s not old enough to be ruins. In Europe and the middle east you can visit ruins from two millennium ago, we visit still-in-use structures from the 1400s. Sorry Hampi, just not that impressed. I did enjoy the night I spent camping amongst the ruins though, that was spooky and mystical. Sadly I woke up to a flat tire that morning, my third of the trip! This makes sense as I had carted my bike across the rivers and over endless piles of trash several times. Fortunately, the nicest jewelry craftsman on the planet, who was set up to sell his wares just by my campsite, helped me out with that one, even after my first attempt caused 4 new punctures to appear. Yeah, I should really learn how to do bike stuff one of these days, I know. But hey, the Indians are so nice they never let me fix my own flats, what can I do? I’m just being culturally sensitive. When you go on touring cyclist websites they are so hardcore, it’s really intimidating and they make it seem like you shouldn’t even think about touring until you have the knowledge of a bicycle mechanic… but guess what I don’t know shit and it’s all been fine so far. Here’s what I have to tell the world: Just do it. You don’t need to know anything at all, you’ll figure it out on the way and in many cases the less prepared you are the more of a fun adventure you’re in for, just make sure you have the right mentality. Mentality is always more important than knowledge. So yeah, don’t read reddit. Have your own adventure. 

After having dinner with a British couple I met and my old friend Gatien who happened to be in town, I crossed over the bridge far to the east because I couldn’t be bothered to wade across the river again and followed the beautiful dirt road through boulder dotted hills and rice paddies to the town of Hanumanahali. On that road I met Tomer, an Israeli, and Lilli, a Hungarian. They were great energy. We exchanged numbers to go climbing later. Lilli would end up becoming a good friend, and I’d see Tomer around here and there as well. I found an incredibly cheap and lovely little hostel, with a bed in a large dormitory al fresco and full of other friendly travelers and non-ideally a rather strong Israeli presence, but that can’t be helped in Hampi. I met an old British guy named Bret from Manchester who had a fun personality and he took me bouldering. The granite was sharp and abrasive. Those first climbing days were really humbling. Bret and his brother were great company. Bret was an English teacher in Bahrain and his brother was an aspiring actor in… Thailand. They were both bachelors and still had the looks needed to find romance in your 50s, lucky bastards. Though Bret and his brother seemed to me to have perfectly wonderful lives, there was a tiny glimmer of sadness in their eyes particular to any man who has avoided marriage and stubbornly tries to live youthfully in middle age. Or maybe I was projecting? They’re definitely happy guys.

I remember one time when I was in high school, I met a guy in Rittenhouse Square who said he was from California and he was smoking weed out of a soda can. What he said about Philadelphia was that it was a heavy city, it had gravity. What he meant by this was that Philadelphia had real human history, and it created a vibe of density that one can perceive. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but having traveled more as I age, I understand him. Hampi had gravity too. This place had a special energy. People had been here, things had happened here. And now it was a beautiful place to just hang out and absorb this powerful ambience. I allowed myself to smoke weed again for the first time since Manali. Hash is a different high than I’m used to. With weed, I either get anxious or retarded, and hash graciously makes me retarded, the lesser of evils. I was pretty comfortable being retarded in Hampi, everyone else seemed to be so I didn’t mind, I still had superior cognition and reasoning despite the impairment so it all fell together rather well. The climbing, of course, was the main attraction. I tried to go out every day, meeting different groups of folks and improving my skills every day. Things that seemed impossible were easily conquered the next day. But the swimming ended up being my favorite, as well as the reason I stayed so long. I loved nothing more than cycling down to the lake in the afternoon and doing my laps, then hanging out on the beach with whatever friendly familiar faces I found there. Life in Hampi was like a never-ending music festival, just floating around from one good vibe to the next. And I fell back in love with swimming. Thank God I had the foresight to bring goggles. Nerdy? Yes. But without them I would have floundered in the water attempting my freestyle stroke. I’ve never been a good swimmer and I’m still not. But I do love that post-swimming feeling. Food tastes far more deserved than at any other time. Michael Phelps is a lucky man. There was a solid crew in Hampi. Lilli brought along a young Australian Israeli named Rimon who was good company, and then there were more regular Israelis than anyone really wants but that’s how it goes in India, when it rains it pours Israelis. The Israelis turned some of my favorite holidays, Christmas and New Years, into bonfires drowned out by the discomfiting vibes of trance music, putting me in a trance of sadness and that thousand mile stare into the fire that so often accompanies enduring a family holiday abroad and alone. But at the end of the day, I didn’t mind so much. The Israelis are sad and have PTSD, and I guess I understand why they need to clump together and smoke weed and listen to trance music. I just find it so tragic. It could’ve been me, I always think. How lucky I am to be an American Jew and not an Israeli. And the Israelis think we’re weak and overly polite and emotional. They see what, in my mind, are our most positive attributes as vulnerabilities. Because they’ve been reared in this toxic hostile environment, this constant state of self-defense and insecurity, they’ve had to take shelter in their identity and community and never been able to feel at ease in a world that through their eyes has rejected them and forced them to settle in that hellish little strip of land on the Mediterranean that serves as their unfortunate home. It’s pitiable, and I do feel sorry, though I have hundreds of times more pity for the Palestinians who are the true victims of this mentality. It seems like an impossible situation they’ve gotten themselves into, that both parties are powerless to prevent and instead of trying they simply entrench themselves deeper into the quagmire with every passing year. Still, I see the beauty and humanity in the Israelis I meet. I just wish that they could see it in themselves, and aspire to the higher morality that the world would approve of, and then they wouldn’t have to go traveling around India smoking copious amounts of weed and being rude to everyone after their military service.

When you stay in a place for a while, you experience the torment of shifting friend groups. Foreigners arrive and depart in waves, and when you overstay the contemporary wave that baptized you in a place and made you love it, you get that feeling of being a super senior in college, you’ve over stayed. Luckily, when Brett from Manchester left, the universe rewarded me with Robert from Manchester, which was actually an upgrade believe it or not. He was a fellow cyclist, though he’d left his steed behind in Goa, and also a fellow video editor. We got along famously and are still buds, I hope I’ll see him again. I met some lost souls in Hampi. There was Suzanna, the Czech girl who’s been traveling for many years now. Some solo female travelers in their 30s carry a sad exhaustion, like life has been unkind and they know too much. This could, of course, just be me projecting. In my case, as I get older, life seems to be easier. I feel comfort in my aimlessness, because I know myself more and I love myself more. I feel better and apart from my balding head generally more attractive. At the end of the day, I’m still a lost soul. But that’s okay with me. I wonder if people project sadness onto me when they meet me. I don’t feel sad, but perhaps my life appears sad from the perspective of someone with a rigid idea of what stage of life a person should be at in their 30s.

One of the best outcomes of Hampi was being able to slow down time. This gave me the space to make great progress in my musical. It’s hard to get into a routine and find comfort, but Hampi provided the tools to do just that. The guest house I stayed in was dirt cheap, 400 rupees a night, and so was the food. Every day was more or less the same, and that suited me fine. Wake up, have breakfast at one of the little spots making dosas, wander over to the cafe/bouldering shop and hop on the wifi and do some work while talking to any friends that happened to come by, set off for some climbing, come back to town a lunch thali, check on work, perhaps an afternoon climbing session, then cool off in the lake and watch the sun set, then go back to the hostel and work on my musical or socialize. Everything was just fine. I had everything I needed. I even found the space and motivation to meditate several times But eventually I had to get out of there. I was running out of bouldering problems, my dearest friends were leaving which was making me sad, and something was just tugging at me telling me it was time to roll on. There was certainly more I could have done there. I think I could’ve stayed some time longer. But India is big and I had a lot more to see. I felt I needed spirituality. I wanted to learn yoga. Mysore was a great place for that. But so many people were also telling me about Goa. I could potentially do both, but it would require me to go over the ghats another 3 times. I wasn’t terribly eager to do that, recalling how horrible climbing in heat was. I pretty much had set my mind. Tomorrow, I’m going to Mysore. I can learn Ashtanga yoga, and then I’ll cross into Kerala over the hills at Wayanad or further along and find my Ayurvedic healing and perhaps join an Ashram. This would be the plan.