I had a good time in Hampi, which is a small village on the site of the ancient ruined city of Vijayanagar (City of Victory), a huge complex of Hindu temples and palaces in varying stages of decay.

Vijayanagar used to be the capital of southern India for several hundred years, and by all accounts sounds like an amazing place — a rich, cosmopolitan and effectively impregnable fortress city with a population of several million people that was a vital trading and transport hub, with precious gemstones being sold on the street like hot dogs. It eventually fell to a coalition of five separate Muslim armies when the King was betrayed by his wife, a Moslim spy, and his son, who snuck up and cut his head off in the heat of battle.

I explored the area with Erich, an American guy who was being harrassed by three monkeys in the main temple when I met him, and Trudy, and English woman that we kept running into. On the first day (26 April) we took a walking tour of part of the site with an official guide, and on the second day I hired a scooter to get to some of the more remote parts. Unfortunately the scooter broke down about as far away from Hampi Bazaar as possible, so I had to catch a tuk-tuk back to town in order to pack and leave to catch the train for Hospet.

At the train station I met Christine, a backpacker from New Zealand, and we travelled on the train together with three friendly Indian guys to Hubli, where we had dinner before boarding the sleeper train to Goa.

The sleeper train was great — I was in a 3AC compartment, which is a compartment with six bunks — 3 on each side. After the train set off, a guy came around with clean sheets and a pillow, and I got a reasonably good night’s sleep before disembarking at Goa early this morning.

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.

I’m still in Mysore, killing time by messing around online while all the images from my camera’s memory card are burnt to a CD-ROM. Of course the CD burner is actually here, it’s at another shop, so it’s going to take a little while — a typical India scenario, it seems.

Today it looks like I’m hanging out with my new buddy Kumar, an auto-rickshaw (tuk-tuk) driver I met yesterday. I hired him to take me up to the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel yesterday for dinner (which was disappointing despite the opulent surroundings), and on the way back he persuaded me to hire him for the whole day today for 300 rupees (about $7.50) — despite the fact that he seems to have the slowest tuk-tuk in Mysore! I guess he must be a pretty good salesman.

Apparently we’re heading up to a temple in the hills that has a special festival going on today, and then we’re going to see incense being made. I was a little reluctant to commit to whole day initially, but I didn’t really have any other plans so I decided to just go with the flow.

Today I travelled on an air-conditioned coach from Bangalore to Mysore, a reasonably comfortable journey which took about 4 hours and cost 140 rupees — about US $3.50. I could have taken a non-A/C bus for 65 rupees (about $1.50), but I figured I could afford to treat myself!

On arrival in Mysore, I immediately booked an overnight bus to Hospet (for Hampi) for the following night, and then took an ancient Ambassador taxi to the hotel I’d selected from my Rough Guide (actually it’s a friend’s Rough Guide — thanks Gavi!), the KSTDC Mayura Hoysala, which is a former colonial-era mansion with a beer garden. I got a pretty good double room with A/C for a little under $20 for the night (the place I stayed in Bangalore, the Royal Lodge, was less than half this price, but had no A/C and wasn’t quite as clean as the Rough Guide had led me to believe).

After some lunch (veg bajii and a beer), I walked into the centre of Mysore and visited the Maharaja’s Palace (completed in 1912). It was very crowded, and I joined thousands of Indian tourists and a small number of foreigners for a bare-foot shuffle around the opulent halls.

Now I’m writing my blog and checking emails, eseentially killing time until 7pm when the Palace will be illuminated with over 5,000 lights — it’s supposed to be quite a spectacle.

It’s 11pm and I’m sitting in a small, cramped Internet place in Bangalore, India right now, writing this while 5 Indian guys are watching their national cricket team thrash England.

I finally left Kerala today, after a very relaxing week hanging out with Johnny, Emily and the other wedding guests. But I wasn’t just relaxing at Surya Samudra: I also had an ayurvedic massage, got sick with and recovered from a 24 hour bug that was doing the rounds, went on an overnight backwater river cruise as part of a big group, and did a day trip to the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu that included a temple, a palace and a visit to the southernmost tip of India, Kanniyakumari, which is where Ghandi’s ashes were scattered into the sea.

Tomorrow I’m planning to go to Mysore, where I think I’ll stay one night before heading to Hampi for a few nights, before taking a train to Goa.

Johnny Diamandis & Emily Karim got married yesterday, in the spectacularly beautiful setting of Surya Samudra Beach Gardens here in Kerala, India.

The wedding was pretty much perfect — after a humanist ceremony on a petal-strewn terrace overlooking the Indian Ocean, we had drinks and then a many-course dinner with a variety of traditional Indian dance acts, followed by speeches (I told a little story about Johnny from when we were kids), a display of Greek dancing by all the women led by Jonhhy’s mum Zena, some Egyptian dancing by one very brave woman, fireworks, some acrobatic fire eaters and then dancing in the sand. The entire event was held in the open air.

There was a moment of panic when Emily dropped her wedding ring in the sand, but everyone looked and it was quickly found by one of the other guests.

It was a great day.

I’m off to India for two weeks tomorrow — I can’t wait, I really need a holiday.

My primary motivation for the trip is that Johnny Diamandis, my oldest friend (we’ve known each other almost 33 years, since we were 5 years old), is getting married at Surya Samudra Beach Garden in Kerala on Sunday.

But India’s been gradually rising towards the top of my wishlist of places to visit for some years now anyway, so this is the perfect opportunity.

My pre-ordered copy of Collected (Special Edition), the new Massive Attack “best of” album, arrived today.

By the time it arrived, I knew exactly what to expect thanks to the Collected teaser website, which had been incrementally releasing more and more of the album’s content over the space of some months.

Since this is a “greatest hits” compilation and I already have all of the band’s other albums, the main CD has only one new track for me: “Live With Me,” a melancholy ballad with vocals by Terry Callier. The rest of the tracks are largely what I’d expect — all of the classics are there (Unfinished Sympathy, Protection, Teardrop etc.), although inevitably a few of my favourite tracks were passed over due to space limitations.

The main reason I bought this album, however, is for the bonus disc that comes with the Special Edition version; it’s a double-sided disc with CD audio on one side, and DVD video on the other. The CD layer contains 11 “new” tracks, although there are only a few tracks that are actually genuinely new — most of them are essentially remixes of older tracks. But they are all still very good nonetheless.

The DVD side contains 16 music videos by Massive Attack. Again, I have most of these already on the “Eleven Promos” DVD (the new disc even uses the same menu interface). However, the Collected bonus disc includes five videos that are not featured on Eleven Promos: Special Cases, Butterfly Caught, Live With Me (two different versions) and False Flags.

Collected is packaged beautifully, resembling a small hardback book with pockets for the discs and 24 pages of glossy artwork from the previous four albums.

This is definitely a great introduction to one of my all-time favourite bands. If you’ve been meaning to investigate Massive Attack but didn’t know where to start, this would be a great way to get a broad overview of their best work quickly and economically. And if you’re a fan that already owns all their albums already, there’s enough new material to make this worth purchasing anyway. I recommend it without hesitation:

Don’t leave clothes in the sun.

I just realized that a pile of clean folded clothes that I left on a windowsill some weeks ago are now all ruined, because the sun has bleached stripes down the edges.

Do you remember that scene towards the end of the movie Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules says that he wants to give up being a gangster in order to “walk the earth”?

Well according to this Guardian Unlimited article, some crazy Brit guy, a 36-year old ex-paratrooper, has been trying to do exactly that: Become the first person to walk all the way around the World. He’s already covered about 17,000 miles by walking for the last 7 years, and is not quite half way there yet — he has another 19,000 miles to go.

Unfortunately he might not make it, because he just got arrested in Russia for having the incorrect immigration paperwork after crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska — plus a gun and a GPS system, both of which are illegal in Russia.