Hampi

So Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was once the center of a Hindu empire. Stories from Persian and European travelers describe Hampi as a very wealthy city - lots of temples, farms, markets, some elephant stables (!) - on a river. Wikipedia tells me that Hampi was the world’s second-largest city after Beijing by the 1500s and also pretty wealthy - could have been India’s richest city and was definitely one of its biggest trading centers. And then, like all empires, the party came to an end. A group of Muslim kings conquered Hampi, and pillaged and destroyed the city in 1565. An un-Hampi ending indeed...

We spent two days exploring the ruins and trekking around different parts of the city. The place was HUGE - 16 square miles - and built in hills of monstrously large granite boulders. It reminds me of Joshua Tree or parts of the southwest around Sedona or St. George, but much more lush. There are palm trees everywhere and banana plantations tucked in around the river, but it was surprisingly green all over the place.

First place we checked out was the Virupaksha Temple, about which not much is known in terms of origin.

It’s still an active temple and between that and the little tourist ghetto adjacent to it, there were lots of people milling about. Most of them were trying to sell us something - a guidebook, postcards, a bicycle tour. Then there were all the monkeys - langurs, I’m told - which have sleek gray coats and are made of solid muscle. Watching them move is like seeing a whole higher level of athleticism.

And then there was the elephant. We walked into the temple and I honestly didn’t register what it was for a second. It just surprised the hell out of me. It’s apparently the temple elephant and it blesses people who visit. For a price of course - you give your rupee note to its trunk, it passes that off to the elephant stage manager, and then it places its trunk on your head, giving you a blessing. Obviously we did this. If Scott hadn’t been in charge of the money, I might have handed over everything we had so I could hang out with the elephant longer.

Sadly, we moved on. Away from the temple, the crowds thinned and we could explore the ruins. We walked along the banks of the river, clamoring over boulders and finding all kinds of little temples and carvings tucked into the rocks (Dad, it was reminiscent of our time in Dinosaur, looking for petroglyphs). The last stop of the day was the Vitthala temple - dedicated to the Hindu god, Krishna. Similar to the first temple we visited, not much is known about when it was built or who built it. It’s extremely well known, though, as the stone chariot in the temple’s courtyard is featured on the 50 rupee note.

Beep beep beep beep beep beep

Day 3 of this trip involved a visit to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum, which was nice to walk around - it’s a gorgeous building.

Day 4 involved barfing and mostly staying in bed (rite of passage). No picture necessary.

But I’m skipping ahead to Day 5, where we flew to a town called Hubli and then hired a car to take us to Hampi, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was once the center of the Hindu Empire in South India.

Hampi is a mere 140 kilometers from Hubli, roughly 87 miles. It took us four hours, bouncing over a state highway that is only partially completed, taking detours through giant mud puddles and alternating between dirt road and fresh new pavement. If you want a good investment, may I suggest buying stock in the company that sells shocks for cars?

Driving here (or riding in a car) is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. It’s like Mario Kart meets Frogger meets Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. You zip through traffic, constantly beeping your horn and those beeps have all kinds of meanings: I’m on your left, I’m on your right, I’m behind you, I’m turning, I’m stopping, I’m annoyed with how slow you’re going, hello! Mumbai is constant beeping - it’s impossible to get away from. It’s a little less honky in smaller towns, but only because there aren’t as many people on the road. And while you are beeping your horn, you are slaloming through some pretty interesting traffic. Here’s what I saw on the drive from Hubli to Hampi:

• Rickshaws

• Bicycles

• Motorcycles - sometimes with three or four people

• Ox-drawn carts

• Tractors blaring Bollywood

• Tractors with twenty people riding in the back

• Giant brightly painted trucks

• Pedestrians

• Buses

• Stray dogs

• Herds of goat

• Pigs

• Chickens

But we’re here, safe and sound, and only a little worse for wear. And no one barfed. I have a video of the driving that I’ll add to this post once we have a better internet connection.

Addendum (Nov. 19): Apparently, drivers here think that using your lights drains your battery, so they don’t turn them on until it is almost completely dark. Best just to close your eyes and not look.

We're On A Boat! And Then An Island!

My dad is probably wondering what’s wrong with me because I haven’t gone on and on about the food yet. Don’t worry. I’m sure there will be an entire post devoted to it. So far, though, breakfast has been the highlight - I’m thoroughly enjoying these fried donut fritter thingies with the vegetable soup and then all the fresh fruit and tangy yogurt. Plus Indian chai - black tea with milk and spices, poured steaming hot into teeny-tiny cups. This morning, the addition of a dosa - kind of like a crepe, made from fermented batter and then rolled around spiced potatoes with a red chutney on the side.

Today’s adventure is super-touristy but fun all the same - and Scott, who’s been to Mumbai a lot, has never done it, so it’s new to him, too. On the suggestion of my friend and former KPCC colleague Tess Vigeland (follow her on Instagram - she takes amazing photos), we made the ferry trip to the Elephanta Caves, on an island about 7 miles offshore from Mumbai.

For 200 rupees (roughly 3 dollars), you can take one of the many ferry boats lined up in the harbor, just offshore from the Gateway to India, on the one-hour trip out to the island. For an extra 10 rupees, you can sit on the top deck. I would advise this - better views, fewer diesel fumes. Snacks are available on board, as the seagulls are keenly aware of. They followed us both to and from the island in a flock of hundreds, as people threw all manner of chips, nuts, puffed rice things overboard.

We pulled into the dock, which sits at the end of a long jetty. Too long for many people - the half-mile trek to the bottom of the steps leading to the caves was in full sun and some people just didn’t want to haul their children that far. Luckily, there’s a mini-train to take you. It looked like the kind of thing you’d find in the kids’ section of the county fair.

At the end of the jetty, tiny shops line the sides, all the way up to the top of the stairs, before you enter into the actual site. All kinds of bric-a-brac for sale - from carved soapstone elephants to plastic toys to “antique” door-knockers (how did they find so many antiques that look exactly alike?). And then there are monkeys everywhere. Climbing over the tarps that shelter the vendors, hopping up walls, chasing each other through the trees. We were warned that if you pull out food or water around them, they're going to come after it. And if you happen to sit down, to just rest your feet for a second, they will sneak up behind you. Turn around, and they freeze or look nonchalantly away. Kind of like a game of Red-light, Green-light. I don't trust them. Sneaky monkeys.

Once at the top of the stairs, you had to pay to get inside (40 rupees for locals; 600 rupees for foreigners). The caves are carved directly into the basalt rock of the island - they are essentially ancient cave temples, predominantly dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. I had trouble getting a photo that would capture the scale of the place but you can see all these pillars and statues - and that’s just one cave. There are several of them (although this was by far the most ornate). The age of these caves isn't known for certain but they're thought to be from the 6th century. They remained an active place of worship until the Portuguese showed up in the 16th century (1000 years!) and that's when the area came to be known as Elefanate, because of the elephant statues found there. Then things kind of fell into disrepair for about 300 years before the area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1970s. It blows my mind, though, to think of how much time and effort and precision went into hewing these temples by hand.

All in all it was worth the trip (thanks, Tess!) and nice to have a bit of a break from all the horn-honking. Also, as a side note, I had my moment of fame - and it’s not because of Wild Thing. Somewhere in the realm of 40-50 people asked me to take photos with them, hold their children for photos, pose for selfies, shake hands for photos, demonstrate how monstrously tall I am. Scott took photos of this whole thing (at least for the shots that he wasn’t also participating in). It was hilariously funny at first but then we couldn’t walk 10 steps without being asked to pose, and that started to wear a little thin. Still, pretty amusing.

Halfway Around The World

Whew! Haven’t been here in a while! But seems like the right moment to use this space again…

I knew India was going to be far away - I mean, look at the map. But it is on the other side of the planet and my body is still adapting to that fact. Day is night; night is day. I’m hungry and tired at odd hours. The key is staying awake and trying not to nap.

We arrived just after midnight on Nov. 14 and it took an hour to drive from the airport to our hotel, in south Mumbai. An hour. At one in the morning. No traffic. This city is enormous and had we arrived during the day, it would have taken twice as long. We went immediately to bed and then, in the spirit of overcoming jetlag, got up at 7:30 and started the day.

Breakfast is included and sure, you can get pancakes and waffles and eggs, but why would you do that when you could eat weird glops and soups and fried things? Indian breakfast is much more interesting - all kinds of rices and these little fried donut-esque things but savory and you dip them in a spiced soup called sambar. Then there’s tons of fresh fruit and delicious yogurts and mini-bananas that put the cavendish variety to shame in terms of flavor.

We headed out into the city after that. It’s hot here. 90 degrees and humid - a far cry from the wintery scene we left behind in Denver. And the air is horrendous. So smoggy that you can’t even see more than a few blocks from our hotel room window. It’s rated “unhealthy” - no surprise - and I’m told it’s the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. So, of course, no one wants to breathe that air if they don’t have to, so they drive in their cars, which then contributes to the smog and the traffic. But there’s no real way to avoid it - so on we go.

We walk towards the Gateway of India, a triumphal arch built to commemorate the visit of King George V in 1911. It sits right on the edge of the water and directly across the street from it is the Taj Mahal Hotel, a grand old hotel built in 1903, and known for hosting seriously high-level guests (like President Obama). The hotel was also one of the places attacked in November 2008 by Islamic terrorists.

We stroll through the markets - people selling gorgeous, perfect-looking vegetables. Goats and chickens all over the place. A horrendous chicken murder scene - the butcher’s table is directly on top of the chicken coop where several dozen chickens are crammed inside, awaiting their untimely end. A lady with a pile of grass that she sells to you so you can feed her cow (it’s good luck). Cars and motorcycles zipping around all of this, women with huge bundles piled on top of their heads, old rusty bikes from what looks like the WWII era. A man pushing a mobile cart and offering to use tooth powder on you (I passed). Amazingly beautiful colonial-era buildings that are now so rundown that they have small trees growing out of them - and right next to those, the tin and tarp shanties of the slums, where the sewage drains directly into the bay. Trash everywhere, but also people picking up trash - a never-ending cycle.

At this point, I am so overwhelmed. There’s a non-stop cacophony of horns and construction and traffic and more horns. People everywhere and someone constantly trying to get you to buy something, to come into their shop, to open your wallet. We duck into a spa to get foot massages and sit in a dark, cool room for an hour. It’s revitalizing. Back out we go, to lunch at Leopold Cafe, another Mumbai landmark and another site of the 2008 terrorist attacks. You can still see bullet holes in the walls - the owners chose not to plaster them over, as a reminder of what happened ten years ago.

Then on to our main mission of the day - looking for rugs. We found a small rug place down an alleyway off the beaten path. Family owned business that mostly does repair work but had a supply of rugs from all over - Iran, India, Turkey, Afghanistan. They brought out carpet after carpet and we haggled and hemmed and hawed and drank tea and haggled some more and finally settled on two - one a geometric pattern and the other with some sort of cat/goat design. Visitors to the Krantz/Carney household will no doubt approve.

A Million Little Pieces

Today's most interesting conference topic: Plastic. We love it. In 1950, global plastic demand was about 1.7 million tons a year. By 2014, that number was up to 311 million tons. It's super useful - bags, packaging, medical equipment, outdoor gear. You'd be hard pressed to look around you right now and not see any plastic.

And while we find it pretty handy to just throw away that empty plastic water bottle or dried up old pen, that stuff ends up everywhere, slowly breaking down into tinier and tinier pieces but not actually going away. This is proving to be an especially big problem in the ocean, where 13 million tons of plastic made its way in 2010.

Here's a short list of the problems it can cause. Some of these are nothing new - animals caught in soda can rings and or eating plastic bags, for instance - but there are a few that I found surprising:

• Entanglement - the aforementioned soda can rings are an example
• Ingestion - ditto the aforementioned plastic bags
• Vectors for dispersing organisms - because plastic lasts so long and drifts, organisms can attach to it and be carried to new areas.
• Toxins that affect animal health - the same crap that's bad for us in plastic (sometimes referred to as Persistent Organic Pollutants - POPs) can also be bad for animals. 
• Plastic debris on the seafloor - may change the local chemistry and release toxic chemicals

Microplastics - plastic bits less than 5mm in size - are the latest point of concern. These come from the breakdown of plastics or certain fibers (like rayon) into smaller and smaller pieces, and from products like exfoliants and toothpastes that contain microbeads (the US actually just banned these - the new law goes into effect in July 2017). 

Microplastics are often mistaken for food by all kinds of aquatic life, from tiny zooplankton to turtles. Sometimes the bits pass through them (I watched a video showing a copepod slurping up dozens of microplastics, and then pooping them out) but the animals can still absorb POPs or have inflammatory responses. Sometimes the particles get lodged in animals' guts, causing health issues, including starvation.

Interestingly, climate change and melting sea ice have an effect on plastic in Arctic waters. As the region warms and becomes more accessible, humans have a bigger footprint - more fishing, more tourists ships making ports of call to places like Longyearbyen, Svalbard - and the currents carry more plastics long-distance from Northern Europe. In fact, the amount of plastic found by Arctic researchers raises the possibility of a sixth garbage patch forming in the Barents Sea, just north of Norway and Russia.