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Hampi Ajanta Ellora Travelogue - Day 1

Namaste. Long time :D Just blogging the travelogue cz I got many requests abt it after I shared it on my whatsapp status. Disclaimer: If u r to browse my previous articles, plz know that many things have changed since the time I wrote them. So my past opinions abt many things may not be applicable now. So with that aside, let's go... It had been a long, long time since we actually went on a holiday. Not counting Goa temple visits and the places around (I ll probably make a separate post on Goa). With the COVID "holidays", we spent the last couple of years also without any long distance travel. And finally this year, we finally made one. Earlier we could visit places during off season and enjoy most of the places without any crowd. But with school, we have to schedule our travels during the breaks. So Christmas break it was. We hit a bit of a luck here too. The school announced Christmas holidays in the week prior to Christmas, i.e, from 17 - 25 Dec (as opposed to 25 Dec to 1 Jan). Fortunately we hadn't done any bookings or deep planning and so everything fell in place wonderfully. The only downside was that I had to give 2-weeks off for my class - one to accommodate my vacations and another to accommodate everyone else's. Everyone else meaning my clients/students. I hope you do know that I am a hatha yoga teacher now :D. (You may visit www.adi.yoga for more info). Moving on... Rough itenarary: Hampi - Ajanta - Ellora. Later Pandharpur and Goa also were added. Day 1: Mangalore to Hampi We started by 7am. Reached Hampi by 4:30pm. Breakfast, lunch break included. We also stopped at a place on the way to look at the huge windmills that were close to the highways.
Hampi: Lots of homestays (don't expect the ones like we have in the hillstations). These are just local townspeople running the business in their homes. Homes are close together We stayed at a place called Sushanth Homestay. They lived downstairs and they had constructed the first floor with 2 rooms, just a few weeks back and we were guests #4 or so. Clean space, nicely maintained. Homecooked food - fresh, tasty. It was lovely. They even provided a shed in the next lane for parking our car overnight. Since it was only 5:30 by the time we freshened up and had tea, we decided to go out. Our hosts suggested to go to the sunset point 3kms away. Don't know what happened, but we ended up not taking our car. The auto charged Rs.100 !! And by the time we reached the sunset point, which happened to be the hillock @ Sasivekaalu Ganesha (will come back to this again in Day 2), also called as Mathanga hills, the sun had already set. It was quite crowded. We clicked some photos, walked around the several gudis which are now empty, visited the only temple that was there.
The Virupaksha Temple view
By this time, the place was already empty. We descended from the side of Virupaksha temple which is just beside this hillock. Went in for the darshan. It was not so crowded.
A 3-headed Nandi sculpture at the entrance
Thought to walk back the 3kms but it was so dark. No street lights. And hence had to take the auto again and this time it was Rs. 150 :D. Reached our room and our host had contacted his cousin, because we had previously enquired about a guide. This cousin, name Pavan, he claimed is charging lesser than the other guides and said will also be with us for the entire day. In December, being peak season, everything is costly. So this guy said 3.5k. We bargained a bit and agreed for 3k. Perhaps during off season, the charges will be half this, I'm not sure. Anyway, it was decided that we ll meet at 7am-7:30am the next day. Enjoyed the wonderful local cuisine in our dinner prepared by our hostess, Smt. Rekha- rotti, palya, rice, sambar, chutney powder, pickles. There was a wedding in the next lane and hence, the otherwise quite surroundings were tonight playing all the DJ versions of ra ra rakkamma n few other kannada songs from the same genre. Our hosts felt apologetic about it but they didn't need to and assuring them it was fine, we went to bed. The thought did cross our mind if we could sleep to the noise but like our host had told us earlier, by 10pm everything stopped. And within minutes we were off. End of Day 1. Tata for now. See u with the rest of the traveloge soon.
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