Hanging in Hampi

Last month, Shannon, Ashley, Allison and I ventured out on an overnight train for an all-girls weekend. We spent time at the the very holy (and consequently completely dry) town of Hampi. However, the town's dry status didn't stop us from smuggling in some red wine and jamming the cork into the bottle to drink it. The town feels magical -- it sits on a river among green hills scattered with huge boulders. Hampi is poor (not necessarily more so than the rest of India), but seems to be surviving thanks to a steady stream of tourism from both foreigners and Indian pilgrims. The guest houses and restaurants all proclaim 'Recommended by Lonely Planet!' in paint on the sides of the buildings. Our weekend consisted of visiting about a dozen temples including a couple world heritage sites, drinking lots of masala chai from the roof top of our 'bring your own toilet paper' guest house and wandering around the surreal landscape.
Another highlight was watching the local temple elephant get her daily bath.



I also spent a lot of time playing with Jemina, the 10-year-old girl who was employed by our guest house to help cook, clean, collect water, and run all the errands for the owners. Not surprisingly, they didn't flinch during my lecture to them about child labor. 'Her parents across the river send her to us. What can we do?' was their reply. I thought about checking out right then just to demonstrate my disapproval, but realized a better option was to just distract her from her work-- we danced to the Lion King on my ipod, counted to ten in Hindi and drew pictures in my journal.