Inferno on wheels

I was up till 3 in the morning or so and couldn’t bear the idea of waking up at 5am to take the 8 hour train journey to Hampi. Instead, I slept in till 8am and took the local bus to Hampi. It was supposed to take about 9 hours, but took closer to 11. It was torture!!! The bus was a cross between an old school bus and the buses that carry convicts from prison to prison. The Hindu swastika posted above the no spitting sign made me feel like I was on my way to a German concentration camp. I fought for a window seat, which of course I would have been better off without. I thought the breeze would keep me cool, but the wind felt more like a hot blow dryer, not to mention the lady in front of me vomiting hourly. I had a newspaper that I held up to block it. It was disgusting. The road was bumpy and we would have been better suited in a 4 wheel jeep. There was one other tourist, a Japanese guy who barely spoke English. The bus stopped in Hospet, about 15 kms from Hampi. We shared an autorickshaw (which ran out of petrol) to Hampi. When we got off the bus in Hospet a local pointed to him and started saying “Jappy, Jappy” and laughing. I shrugged it off, but once we got to Hampi all the locals kept on pointing and calling him a Jappy. I remembered that in Rishikesh, there was an ashram where all the Japanese went and someone later told me about a popular travel show in Japan that everyone watches and then floods the featured destination. There were tons of Japanese tourists in Hampi, so I asked the guy if Hampi had been featured on tv, and sure enough it was.