It may have been a week or so, but it seems a lot longer. Strange things have happened, dark deeds are afoot, or at least they were at some point recently, and circumstances have changed somewhat, generally for the better you may be pleased to know.
But sod that, I still have a half a million pictures to plough through, so, here goes. If they have appeared before or a chunk of stuff is missing blame this odd, odd system here on blog.co.uk, either that or my total inability to click buttons correctly at least one of which has made the last 2 or even 3 posts not appear, and possibly even disappear.
In short, I want a laptop and my own website from now on. I may contract the inestimable Gregory; of Palolem and IT wizardry fame; to build me a cool new blog site with shiny stuff, video hosting, and a bunch of cool features like he has on his page.
Check it out: www.wanderingnerd.com and take a look at the quotes and featured pictures boxouyts and stuff, he built it his very own Yankee self and I want one now too! *eject toys from pram* Waaaaah!!
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Actually, no I dodn't have a load of photos. Well I do, but they are ordered in a very odd way - basically it makes no sense as I had to upload bits of different memory cards in different orders at odd times, and until I figure out what is what and which is when, I'm pretty screwed for getting it all sorted. Plus, this hosting site adds them all in the order they are in your memory crad or camera, and I forgot to reverse that order when saved onto the computers and so it is all extremely fragmented.
I realise you don't care about this, but lately I've been having a bit of a hiatus from writing and haven't much wanted to get anything down - I have had more than enough distractions - so I want to figure out either a way of sharing the whole album with ya'll, or just a way to organise all pictures in photobucket into chronological order, as the site does actually preserve that information. Fucked if I know how to use it, mind you.
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So, errrm.... yeah. I was going to go with a couple of people up to the North, near Nepal, for a highly stupid mission. We were about to run up to Dharamasala and come straight back spending 5 days solid on trains and buses with no break, and if you can't work out why on Earth people would do that then I ain't gonna spell it out for you.
Let us just say that it would have been very handy but the risks far outweighed the benefits, and in the end we all realised that, with a little help from our friends 
So here we are, still in Hampi, about to leave tomorrow if all goes to plan.
We, meaning Maria and I. She came out fom England and we're spending a bunch of time together before she buggers off back to blighty on the 16th; coincidentally my birthday so if you wanna show the love then my paypal address is evilhippy@onetel.net 
hehehe
In other news, I've seen a lot more of the temples, been climbed on by many monkeys and insects and have ridden a motorbike for the first time (actually a shitty little 50cc scooteresque device that struggled, poor thing, with my bulk).
I tell you this for nothing: these things are unbelievably stupid.
The headlights, feeble at the best of times, only work when you're actively rev the engine, and they uct out whenever you brake for some unfathomable reason I can only attribute to a very sneaky form of population control.
At night when you are riding back in pitch darkness and have to go downhill through villages - the roads in all small settlements are merely packed-Earth without any proper surface, and have unsigned speedbumps, foot-wide potholes and stray children and animals flocking unconcernedly across your path - you have to brake to prevent fatalities and your lights automatically go out; and the best and steepest hills are often right in the middle of tiny yet busy villages. Wa-fucking-hay.
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Also I can chalk up an experience of bus rides in Idia for the first time: they are quite Special.
The first was to Gokarna and the ride was intreesting - our seats were properly labelled as `gangway`. This did not mean we could charge through th crowds
In this fine and colourful country it isn't enough to simply sell all the seats on your vehicle, nor the beds and bunks as well but also the aisles between them are up for grabs. Gangway means just that: you're sleeping in the aisle, buddy. Only 12 hours to Gokarna!
Lickily there was one seat spare so, before anyone else could swipe it from my I baksheeshed the bloke in charge for it and got myself a place for the next half a day.
Jon and Aliya weren't so lucky (the aisles were about 15 inches wide and the boss-man filled them up directly the doors opened so there was no hope for anyone wanting to back up or get off or even turn around, or find their seat if they weren't quite near enough) and they found themselves at the head of the queue next to the cab with no seats and, because there is no seperate room for luggage, the aisel itself was filled with the rucksacks of the 80 or so travellers on board.
Quite how they can sell `gangway` tickets for a gangway that for all intents and purposes doesn't exist is beyond my feeble imagination, but hey. T.I.I.
Those two ended up baksheeshing the driver and his Mate to sleet in the cab with those guys, although at one point Jon, lying next to the driver in the Mate's bunk while the Mate counted his baksheesh and quietly suffered in the corner, was thrown into the steering wheel in the middle of the night after a sharp corner. The driver had to fight off a sleeping Englishman while trying to keep a 20-ton bus on the road and all of us alive, an impressive feat but one which, with a little more sensible thought, maybe shouldn't have been required.
The bus back was a lot better although I can't remember a single thing about it. For all I know it could have been a train.
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Maria met us in Gokarna; she is a friend of Jon's from back in England (Oxford no less) and is of Indian descent being born to parents from Punjab.
Being an English lass though of course she doesn't dress as people here would expect her to, so basically she looks, to most people, like a westernised native and by showing unswathed arms and legs, and hanging about with a bunch of pasty white blokes, she becomes automatically a `Bad Indian` and were she to, for example, kiss a man in public then there is a very real chance of getting herself shouted at and attacked.
Cultural sensitivity prevents the public showing of affection between men and women; in a country where at least 20% of boys and men hold hands and drape arms around each other this is at first very strange, and eventually just amusing.
Don't know if I mentioned that before but people of the same gender always walk about with hands on shoulders, holding hands, and generally being more affectionate than you would imagine possible, let alone likely. It's just another cultural thing and the way women are generally viewed, and I have a bit to say about this but I'll keep it short here, isn't too great.
Basically if a woman is seen to speak to a an outside of marriage it has to be for commerce or some practical reason, and all western women, by dint of their wearing light summery clothes and having boyfriends and speaking equally and freely with men, are all whores.
Okay that's not true of everyone, only those steeped heavily in the religion and the traditional way of life, but this is, to be fair, about 85% of people.
This is the reason why Indian men come and stare at female travellers all the time, and if they go to one of the lakes or reservoirs for a swim then they are guaranteed an unashamed audience of staring men as soon as they come out of the water, seeing as they're dressed even more lightly than usual.
The chances of being attacked are very, very small but frankly, it is disturbing as hell just being with the girls when this happens.
Hey-ho.
Another thing that happened in this vein was on a bike ride back from the reservoir with Jon and Aliya.
There were three of us on the bike - yes it's not legal, but to be fair none of us had helmets or bike licenses either 
- amd Aliya wasn't wearing trousers but a dress, so, showing a bit of leg, she was an open invitation to the local boys.
We passed a bike with two Indian blokes on it and they passed us again soon after, honking all the way. They pulled up level and the driver - not the pillion passenger but the driver, while riding the boke - got out his phone and totally unashamedly started taking pictures of Aliya on the bike - it was hardly the most revealing thing but it was amazingly rude, but there was no shame there at all.
If a woman gives away her virtue, by either having premarital sex or just having boyfriends or simply by dressing for hot weather (26 degrees Celsius today and it feels cold...) they are, basically, the same as prostitutes i.e. bad Indians or just whore-women. This cultural acceptance and reverance is hard to deal with sometimes, in the face of such insane unthinking bigotry.
But that's quite enough of that: what else? Errr, what else indeed... I'm not quite sure.
Things are good, pictures are a real pain, and I'm off tomorrow to Bangalore and straight onto Mysore, with the intention of getting to Nagarhole, Wayanad and Bandipur national parks, and hopefully another one as well.
I am stagnating here and want to see what I wanted to see in india and get the hell onto the next country, start actually travelling (and keeping on top of the photo situation) and see some new and interesting things.
The monkeys, which crawled all over me last night at the Hanuman temple, were especially cool though and made the extra days spent in Hampi totally worthwhile (even though one did have a go at biting me when I tried to remove her from my shoulder). I have to get the pictures from a supremely chilled-out Australian called Holly, utter diamond as she is she managed to get it all on tape as it were, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff.
The least favourite animal interaction of all however was the mosquito incident: I thought it ould be rude not to go to as surreal a place as Hampi and not do at least a little bit of Acid so while ending a jolly little trip a few days ago I crawled into a hammock to watch the pretty pictures while getting a few hours kip.
Not feeling anything like pain I drew the sides of the hammock up to cover the entrance slit, and slept from 10pm to 2am to wake just in time for Holly to give me a painful and difficult lift home thanks to me weighing distinctly more than the little 50cc bike, and at least four times as much as Holly herself.
During those kaleidoscope hours I was bitten on one hand - get this - more than sixty times. That's 60+ mozzie bites on one hand alone; it must have been the one blocking off the last of the night air from my slumberous form, the other hand only scores about 20 bites and I may have started out with one or two anyway.
Overall I'm very pleased to have contributed to the natural world even if it did mean said world taking half a pint of my blood, but honeslt, it would have been nice to have been asked.
