Day 1: Bengaluru

Early Saturday morning, Thomas and I were sitting in an auto ricksha, bound for Ahmedabad airport. There, a

GoAir Airbus was waiting to take us to the city of Bengaluru, formerly known as, and still frequently called, Bangalore. It is no more than a two hour flight from Ahmedabad, but the differences between the two cities are huge. We only spent the afternoon and the evening there, so it would be a shame to say we got to know all the ins and outs of the city, but I can tell you this: Not a fan.

Yes, it by all measures more Western than probably any place in Gujarat. You can eat beef if you want to (and yes, we did - thank you Hard Rock Café). Most people do not find your skin colour exciting. And there is beer for anybody who likes it. So far so good, but still it is missing something. Charm is, I believe, the word that I am looking for.

Bengaluru is hectic, traffic is awful and the ricksha drivers refuse to go by the meter. Negotiating the price quickly gets tiresome, when the gentleman in front of you insists 250 rupees is the fair price to go to an address a few blocks away. (I do not think there are two places in India a ricksha drive in between of which would amount to 250 rupees...) There is really not that much to see. After an absolutely delicious Western lunch (Subway, but still) we went to see the not super exciting Tipu Sultan's Palace, from where we walked a considerable distance to the Bull Temple. That the distance covered on foot turned out to be this massive was mostly the result of Lonely Planet's Bangalore map clearly telling us to take a right, when in fact left was the answer. The LP maps were in fact to evolve into a continuous ordeal during our journey. To briefly summarise the Bull Temple, it was pretty cool, though oddly enough came with a corporate sponsorship.

A dinner even more Western in nature than the lunch left my stomach not really in uproar but still somewhat grumpy, as the sudden inflow of Hard Rock Café amounts of dead cow was something it was no longer used to. After what seemed like a long day, I was looking forward to the night sleeper to Hampi, which was supposedly only a few minutes away.

Private bus companies, unfortunately, do not leave from the main bus station in Bengaluru, from which only government buses are allowed. Instead, they leave from... well, other places. It is chaos. We had an approximate address (near a roundabout and a Ganesh temple) to help us locate the place, but this turned out to be far from the smooth ride you desperately want at that hour. Nice gentlemen kept pointing in completely opposite directions. Luckily (we thought...) we suddenly stumbled upon the bus company's office, where they pointed out a location about a hundred metres away, where the bus was supposed to pick us up. There, the people said they had never heard of any such bus and we were directed back to the bus company's office, where they then sent us back to the position from which we had so recently come. We decided to hold our position and hope for the best.

All of a sudden, my telephone rang. The man on the other end obviously spoke no English, a fact he tried to compensate for by instead talking louder than normally. After two failed attempts at communicating I was able to locate somebody who looked nice and well educated enough to be able to interpret whatever was coming out of my phone. As it turns out, the man with no English skills had simply wanted to tell me that our bus was five minutes late, which at this point really did not seem like a very big deal. All was more or less well and suddenly the bus even showed up. We hurried to get onboard only to find out that it was the wrong bus. Apparently, the people at the bus company office (how I do not fancy these people) had got the buses mixed up. Realising the mistake, we were taken to another stop, where the genuine, true and air conditioned Hampi sleeper coach was peacefully awaiting us. If only we knew then what to expect from the ride...

Stay put for days 2 and 3 on Hampi.

The pictures, some of which stolen from Thomas' memory card, show, from left to right: The exterior of the Venkatamaran Temple, which we unfortunately could not enter; the cow-inhabited interior of a temple we found while we were heading in the wrong direction to see the Bull Temple and which some children (pictured) showed us; and an interior of theTipu Sultan's Palace.