PhotoOnslaught VII: The Quest for a New Title

Hey! I just noticed that the clicking of photos from this here blog opens them in a new window anyway - hope this works for everyone. If that takes you to a page in my Photobucket account you can click the images again there for the full size version. Some of them, just one or two, are 7 megapixels in size, so it may reduce your computer to a whimpering slave for a second or two
99% of them are only 1600 x 1200 pixels in size or, in English, about the same size as a decently big monitor screen. So don't panic. Please insert your own impression of Lance-Corporal Jones from Dad's Army here Interestingly I couldn't remember the name for a minute there, and a quick search brought up this slightly charming little rundown of the characters from that Dad's Army.
Always a favourite programme of my Grandfather, I'm rather fond of it myself, and found myself reading the whole list with more than just a touch of nostalgia, which I now invite you to do so, too - http://www.phill.co.uk/comedy/dadsarmy/char.html

Another piece of goodness extracted from that site was this - a previously unknown Simon Pegg series! Well it was unknown to me anyway (Simon Pegg was the genius behind `Spaced` which was, obviously, the greatest audiovisual production ever created. Never heard of it? Well up yours )
Anyway this previous series, called `Hippies`, must have been his first attempt to get paid real money for portraying a stoner on television, which is ideal for a man of his quality and vision seeing as he is, quite obviously, a stoner in real life. Or at least he definitely used to be It didn't work out so well, but you can read a bit about it here: http://www.phill.co.uk/comedy/hippies/index.html

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Anyway a bunch more pictures from me today, still at Hampi (well I was there for a month and did quite a lot of sightseeing - plus there was an incredible picture pretty much everywhere you looked). If you ever go to India, and only have time for one place besides the eagerly-escaped airports, I strongly recommend making it Hampi.

This is the view of the sunset from the top of the Hanuman temple mountain, and I just wished to buggery that I had a proper SLR camera (and knew how to use the thing) so I could do this scene justice. My half-arsed attempts are just here:

And this is, I think, one of the best ways to illustrate the best and worst of Indian culture. Pretty bold claim for a hazy, poorly framed photo huh?
Well the signs on the rocks; this is at the temple on Hanuman mountain; forbid anyone from climbing on them, even though it does no harm to anyone at all - the temple is at the top of a flight of almost 600 steps and not that many tourists could come here and wear down all the rocks - and the sign on the far left which I really wanted to include but forgot about fosusing the thing properly, say `photography prohibited` and `no photographs` in big blue letters. This, on its own, would make it one of the most bureaucratic, pathetic and petty-minded little things I could even imagine, let alone see.
The good part? Everyone ignores it, the monks have no problem with you climbing anywhere or photographing until your fingers blister. They have even built little stone paths between the more difficult rocky areas on the plateau to let everyone get everywhere aroudn the top of the mountain, which is immensely sweet of them.

What almost certainly happened is some officious bureaucrat came up here with his red and blue paint pots, saw how much of an awesome thnig this was for people to experience and remember, and decided to try and stop anyone having any fun. I think this only because I have seen some strange and hitherto unrealised aspect of the human mind here in India, among those few annoying officials and unhelpful police I have spoken to; situations where they will go to great lengths to PREVENT you doing what you want to, need to, or feel like doing, just because it gives them a petty little thrill. It is what we know as the `little Hitler` mentality, people who have no power in their lives use whatever they can find through their jobs to make life difficult for other people, because it makes them strangely satisfied to think other people can be unhappy too.
How fortunate for everyone that the Hanuman priests have no time for that nonsense, and disregard that petty little bastard's signs, and he was pretty handy with the paintbrush; there were big red crosses on all routes onto the rocks, messages of `no access` and `dont climb here` daubed on all available surfaces.
There were reminders that photography was not only prohibited, but one rabid scrawling around the rear of the main rockhead proclaimed that `Photographs are illegal!` which I thought was really a step too far.

Anyway you can hardly even see what I've been going on about here, just a couple of the red crosses and things - but the first time I went up there it got me thinking and it really got me annoyed, because I know just the kind of pathetic individual who would go and do that.
Thankfully, these people as are rare as rocking horse shit, as my Mother used to say and we all got everything from the experience of the Hanuman temple that we could have:

Anyway after all that pious ranting, here are a bunch of extra-cute monkeys, doing monkey things (although I still don't have the ones that Holly took of the monkey on my shoulder! Holly where are you?!):

This one was heavily pregnant and the others were all grooming and looking after her:

And other monkeys - with baby monkeys! God, they are as ugly as a sackful of needles when they're young like this, but still unbelievably cute:

Monkeys and crows playing and squabbling on the edge of the mountain, in front of the most amazing view of the surrounding country:

There's some more of that mountain-top viewing:

Down at the lake (which I failed to jump into - gotta get over this fear of deep water!) there were some great photo oppurtunities but, unfortunately, you're going to have to flip them the right way up yourselves because Photobucket have just introduced some new gizmos to edit pictures that the computers here can't handle, so from now on, a few pictures way come up sideways. Sorry. They're quite lovely shots though:

The `lake` was really a reservoir, and you can see the cutoff edge in these pictures where the height of the place really becomes obvious; standing at the reservoir's far edge you could see right down into the most amazing valley of paddy fields, palm forests and banana plantations:

Of course all of those are from the jumpioong rocks well away from the edge, I hope I got some fo the valley below but we rode past it on the bikes each time, so I'm not sure if I did....
..anyway, more stuff! :

"Seven fat cows, and seven thin cows, and the all walked out of the water..."

Great shots of the little bridge you have to cross to get into the reservoir area proper - I saw this goatherd guy coming down the road, and scrambled like a mad bastard up onto a rocky outcrop in time to get the pictures while he was on the bridge:

Last thing I saw by the reservoir that day, was this rock cracked amazingly down the middle:

Back in Hampi town, this is how the levels of the river were dropping after just a couple of weeks:

And from the holy Hampi side (the non-beer side), taken from just above the top of the stone ghats:

And, finally for now, because I woke at 7am and it's 10:40 now and I haven't eaten yet (the things I do for you lot, honestly) these are the fields we crossed whenever we wanted to take the shortcut to our lodgings. Honestly, it's a hard old life.... :

Adios, for now, guys.