I had a fun day with Kumar in Mysore on Monday. After faffing around online and getting my pictures offloaded onto a CD, we went up to a couple of temples on the top of a hill that were bustling with Indians coming to be blessed, since it was a school holiday. There were monkeys everywhere.

Afterwards I had some lunch, then we went to see various local businesses — an oil merchant, a beedi (small Indian cigarettes) manufacturing shack, a carpet store and of course a couple of gift shops. I bought a few things, but not too much. Then Kumar took me to a park, and I went for a short ride on a boating lake with an Indian family.

By this time it was time to pick up my rucksack from my hotel and head into town to get dinner before getting the bus at 8pm.

The bus ride itself was pretty rough — neither the seat nor the bus’ suspension was very soft, and the road was a bumpy dirt track for much of the journey. Even when the road was tarmac, there were cruel speedbumps all over the place, seemingly designed specifically to prevent me from sleeping for any length of time! I finally arrived into Hospet at about 5:30am, before dawn, and stumbled off the bus to look for a connection to Hampi.

After fending off rickshaw drivers for a while beause I thought the bus was coming, I realized that I’d misread the time and that the next bus wasn’t for another 1.5 hours, so in the end after a bit of haggling I jumped into a tuk-tuk and we set off for Hampi. We arrived just as the sun was coming up, and I checked into the Vikky guest house and went to bed for an hour.