Hi dear Hive community,
Hampi due to it's small size offers so much! It's surrounding is full of rock ranges that you can climb and has many temples and ancient buildings all around. If you open your eyes and dare to explore the area a little bit away from mainstream pathways you can see hidden places and many carvings hiding in the big rocks.
The area is quiet big and majority of people visit places with hiring riksha and later walk around. There is also another option with renting a scooter or bicycle. But since we have full days available for roaming around, we walked as the distance is OK and as well we took it easy.
For this #Wednesdaywalk we took the Kampabhupa Pathway. It is an ancient path connecting important temples and places in ancient times of the Vijayanagara Empire. Archaeologist believe it was build somewhere between 1377 - 1404 CE.
The way lead us to Zenana enclosure (Zenana means woman), which consist of a palace called Lotus Mahal, big water tank and three watchtowers. It is all build in Indo-Islamic style and was never affected by any invaders. In the surrounding area we explored other great buildings, in one of them there was a small gallery of the rock carvings.
One of the interesting things we spotted was a big granit Elephant tank. The tank is made out of one single rock and is 12 meters long. It has volume of more than 2000 liters of water and it even has a small hole for letting the water out. This was looking so massive!
In between we took time to eat a nice lunch. You can never go wrong with ordering Indian thali, where you get many different items. The tastes goes from sweet to sour, and it is really a bomb of flavours.
Even thought we were already tired from all the walking, exploring and very hot sun, we were excited to visit the underground Shiva temple. It was just before we reached home. The temple was totally empty, looked abandoned and radiated strange energy as it was all dark. Later a guard came with the light and together we went into the heart of the temple which was totally flooded with water. In the center we found Shiva lingam and cow Nandi.
Thank you for reading. Wish you a nice day!