The titles are geting worse, I know that now. I'll move onto Indiana Jones stuff or something soon , I promise.
Anyway, just before I go crazy and throw a bunch more photos of the temple sites around Hampi at you, I would like to say a few words:
Argh.
Ouch.
Help!
ShitShitShit!
Oh, fuuuuuck....
&
thank god it wasn't me.
See, things have been a little weird and dangerous here lately, for strange reasons. On monday, I was a little bit drunk and in my nice new shiny hotel (I checked into another 3-star-alike place; it's not really up to 3-star-standard but the cockroaches are always very polite, and the prices are very reasonable) and I tried a little trick that Chris taught me in his apartment block in Little Britain in London - yes there is actually a street called Little Britain, it's in the City near to St. Pauks - which is that when in a lift you can press on the inside walls while moving up or down and create a terrifying screeching noise that really puts the shits up everyone in the lobby, particularly funny if you're heading that way yourself and upon ariving you casually saunter from the lift compartment a if nothing like a nuclear holocaust had been heard by you at all, and stare into their mortified visages, carefree and insouciant as if you have no idea what sounds of the hellbeasts coming from their liftshaft could possibly have been, and that it must all be in their imaginations, the silly little souls.
A jaunty tapping of your room key on the reception desk and a cheery backwards wave as you leave once more for the pub makes this whole exercise even more rewarding; the challenge is keeping a straight face until you get around the nearest corner.
Really, the sounds this little trick produces are terrifying, especially in large marble-lined and echoing lobbies, where the lifts face the reception desk, such as there were in my hotel.
So, I did it - in fact I ran along the stairs up an extra floor to make the effect even more dramatic and so that the the hellish sounds last even longer, but, quite stupidly, totally forgot that this was an underfunded, loosely-maintained piece of Indian engineering and that even the slightest abnormality in its operation could have led to fatal occurences. I started on the 3rd floor, pressed the key for the lobby and, giggling like an idiot braced myself fully at 90 degrees to the door's opening and leant my full and impressive weight upon each wall, which apparently destroyed the lift's mechanisms almost instantly, made me drop at least a floor in less than a quarter of a second, and set off alarm bells all around, although I realised after a second that these were just in my head and that I had to press the panic button manually, which I did. At length.
After a minute or two a voice came back on the intercom to ascertain that their valued guest was still alive, and after 20 minutes of me slamming myself into the lift's doors trying to force them one way, and the staff on the first floor pulling on them the other way, I eventually stopped to get my breath back and the doors opened a few inches and it became clear I was trapped between the first and ground floors, and that there was a gap of about 18 inches above me that I had to clamber up through.
Knowing the lift had already fallen I instantly realised what would happen if it failed again as I was halfway through this narrow gap - that I would be sliced into two neat halves.
Rarely have I moved so fast in a vertical direction, the Royal Marines would have been impressed at the display of obstacle vaulting, and I hardly even noticed the huge bruises on my knees and elbows until some time later.
Needless to say, the lisft is out of order, and has been for five days now.
Hooray for English tourists - it's given me a bit of exercise though, going a couple of floors up the stairs about 5 times a day.
-
The other thing of mild terror were the murders; and the city being shut down for 2 days. I'm in Kannur right now, Northern Kerala, and the Communist Party if India (Marxist) or CPI(M) as the papers all call them, took a bit of a disliking to some of the memnbers of the BJP party (I have no idea what that one stands for, make uo your own rude acronym decoder yourself 
) and they dragged an autorickshaw driver from his vehicle on Wednesday morning, beat him, cut off one of his hands, and then stabbed him to death, right down the road from me near the train station.
They also dragged a lorry driver from his vehicle and stabbed him to death, too - the BJP boys didn't take it all lying down though, they beat and stabbed a Commie to death that same night somewhere downtown, all apparently in retaliation for what some bearded Russian Idealist said about all the rich people 150 years ago.
Fucking, fucking politics - the police moved in 600 officers, half of them firearms officers, and shut down the whole city for most of wednesday and the entirety of Yesterday, not a single shop was open about from hotel restaurants and one little phone shop.
Every mall was closed, every little precint abandoned. The streets were pretty much deserted for miles around the centre - I know this because on Thursday morning (I hadn't left the hotel much at all on wednesday) I woke up at 6am and took a 10 or 12 kilometer walk around the city's poorer and less commercialised suburban areas, largely around the Muslim district although I only noticed it was such after seeing the 16th or 17th Mosque looming into view
As it was, it was about the safest place I could be, this was all about politics, not religion, although even there there was a virtual curfew and only snack stalls and fruit sellers were open for business. I got back to the city centre about midday and tried to find a net cafe - or in fact anything at all - that was open, but the entire city centre was locked up, not a single shop was open after 2 more hours of wandering about, only a phone shop, the staff of which didn't seem to want to talk to me anyway.
Last night, Thursday night, somewhere in the streets of the city centre the Communist Party of India (Marxist) workers dragged another autoprickshaw driver from a street corner and, after blow up several explosives in his general direction, decapitated him right there in the road.
And who said war was the continuation of politics by other means - politics is simply the justification of murder by any means, or so it seems to some poeple around here.
I'm leaving in - one hour now, in fact, and don't have time for any of those photos I'm afraid. I just had to share that with you - I'll see you all (figuratively speaking) from Fort Kochin some time tomorrow.
Ciao for now.
