L'Entr'acte

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post to give you a blog in two parts – the first announcing the winner(s) of our “Guess how much we paid for Valentine’s Day Dinner” contest and the second is related, but a slight detour from our usual travel posts.

Part One: And the winners are…

India is a remarkable place to travel not only because the culture is like none other we’ve ever experienced, but for two frugal travellers, it’s extremely easy to stay within, if not well under your budget!  So, many of you were close…the ballpark 200-250 rupee guesses (thanks, Joel and Noah) were a bit low (that’s about US$ 5.00), but indeed a good guess as we’ve had many meals that were close and/or under that.  The free guess (thanks, Paul) would have been nice, alas, ain’tnothing free in India.  Taking photos (such as the one below) can cost you up to US$2.00.  But the TWO ladies, very near and dear to our hearts, who guessed the same price at $9.00 are:

TIANNA HUSTON and KELLY MCCARTHY!  Indian goodies will be in the mail soon…

We, in fact, paid $9.50 for our splurge of a V-Day dinner.  We shared a delicious Special Veggie Thali (a platter of squash and veggie korma, rice, chapatti, and some other delicious mouth-burning side dishes – US$2.50), a PalakPaneir dish (spinach and potato) + chapatti (US$2.50), one mango and one papaya lassi (US$2.00), and a yummy dessert of nutella, banana, and coconut crepe (US$1.50), plus tax and tip, bringing us up to $9.50.  We probably won’t ever have a V-Day meal that cheap again. 

Congrats, ladies.  We think you two and your respective hubs and fams (yay, Kent, Jake, and Jimmy Mac!) should visit India sometime to try out your price-guessing skills first hand.  

Part Two: A Day in the Life…

Whether it is through the occasional query on family Skype calls or in the emails from friends that read “I know you’re busy…,” I’ve been sensing a curiosity as to how we spend our days on the road.  I would like to take a short break from our usual site-specific post to give you a glimpse into a day in the life of Steve and Sarah.  Of course, every day is new and different with each passing country, city, and cuisine, but there are several daily occurrences that have become as familiar and predictable as…say...a hot shower used to be. 

If you’re curious – read on, if not – Steve will be telling you all about our travels in the Indian state of Goa shortly.

(Please note: Times are relative depending on jet lag, bleating goat noise outside our bedroom, or the frequent need to just go with the flow.)

6:30-7:30ish  Wake up: Sarah is usually cradling her Mona Lisa pillow and Steve is cocooned inside his sleep sack (photos below).  Mona has come in handy, acting as a.) a stuffed animal-surrogate, b.) apillow for airport sleeps, or c.) a meditation pillow for the brief attempts at the end of our yoga sessions.  The sleeps sacks have also come in handy when we’re a.) too cheap/frugal to rent a room with sheets or b.) tooweirded out by the sheets provided.

7:30-7:45ish  Yoga (yes, Geraldine, yoga).  Happily, yoga has started most of our days.  Our sessions usually last about 30-45 minutes and hardly have us doing no-hand headstands in Hampi, but making (and having) the time for a little stretching in the morning has made our long-walking days and sore backs from harder-than-we’re-used-to mattresses all the more bearable.That, and our arms are looking buff. :)

8:30ish Post- (and sometimes during) yoga music.  Out trusty iTunes has come in handy by reminding us of home with some familiar tunes.  Paul Simon, Gillian Welch, Ray LaMontagne, and The Great Lake Swimmers have set some nice, homey tones for the days.  

During this time, we also embark on some shower and washing up journeys – most of which have consisted of conserving water via Navy showers (turning off the water when soaping up) or bathing in buckets left in the bathrooms.  About 30% of our showers have been sans hot water, but then again, over 80% of our weather has been tee-shirt weather.  It’s an easy trade off.  We’ve both gotten quite good at the bucket baths and brushing our teeth with bottled water.  And, it’s also worth mentioning, I have a new and immense appreciation the western toilet.  I’ll leave it at that.

9:00ish  Breakfast – sometimes included in our accommodations, sometimes not.  We tend to cling to western favourites (eggs, fruit salad, muesli, yogurt) and also, we’ve tended to stick to one place once we find a place we like.  The servers are often sad to see us go when we (mainly Sarah) share that “it’s our last morning here!”It’s nice to feel like regulars on the other side of the world.

9:45ish Packing the bag for the day – Sunscreen, check!  Camera, check!  Bug spray, check!  Kleenex, check!  Digestion-aiding enzymes, check! Books, check!  Water, check!  Money, check!  “Okay, come on, Sarah….let’s go….”  (Yeah, I tend to take a little while to pack up where as Steve could fall out of bed and go.)  Sometimes the bag-packing feels a bit like Mom sending me off to the first day of school with all new my pencils, erasers, folders, lunch boxes, gym clothes, locker combinations, etc., but on the rare occasion that Steve’s gotten a sunburned neck or Sarah’s had the sniffles, it’s nice to have all the supplies readily available.

10:00-1:00ish  A fun local activity!  This can be anything from visiting Buddhas in Bangkok, to touring ruins in Hampi, to roaming through neighbourhoods in Ubud, to browsing for pieces of local art in Sydney.  We find we’re usually good for a solid 3+ hours before the hottest part of the day sets in.

1:00ish Lunch – this can be anything from a local cheap eat to a picnic on the grass with the Tupperware we bought in Melbourne (one of our best purchases by far).  Our picnics tend to consist of hard-boiled eggs, fresh veggies, cheese, and (in India) some “just open and serve” lentil dishes.  

2:00-4:00ish Another fun local activity!  If we were hard-core tourists in the morning, we’ll make our afternoons more low key, or vice versa.  Of course, we always allow ourselves the downtime needed to not run ourselves into the ground during these five months.

 4:00ish  Cold or hot drink and a read – we’ve naturally fallen into the habit of having an afternoon drink (iced tea, lassi, chai, etc.) coupled with either reading, writing, journaling, knitting, catching up on emails, or just people-watching for a few hours before evening time.  Steve’s been a superstar with his writing (book, blog, etc), meanwhile, Sarah alternates between knitting a baby blanket for her childhood friend and hub’s (yay, Kelly and Jake!) baby due this summer, reading, or journaling.  This downtime has been such a lovely part of the trip.  The act of disappearing into a book and/or world-escaping activity has made the exploratory parts of the trip that much more doable.  

6:30-7:00ish  Dinner – like lunch, we’ll either sample the local cuisine or have a picnic at home.  Often this is a great chance to reflect on the day, or to just enjoy each other’s company with a glass of wine and silence. 

Evening time – During this time, we end up doing any number of activities: catch a local dance performance, slowly stroll home the long way, look through our photos, write on the blog, pop in for dessert somewhere, or, really, anything we’re up for.  

So there you have it: a day in the life of Steve and Sarah.  Our days have been so filled with many wonderful things that it’s important to be flexible at any given time during the day to allow for more wonderful things to happen.  But as creatures of habit, the above-mentioned schedule tends to be a fairly regular one.  That is, of course, unless we must take a 12-hour sleeper bus across Indian states, succumb to spending the day in bed due to an unhappy tummy, or are just feeling like lounging on the beach/in a park/at a café from 9:00am-4:00pm.  Part of getting to know the places we’ve visited has been about just being ourselves in different locales.  It’ll be fun to see how new places and additional people (yippee Mom and Pete!) throughout the rest of our trip will alter our daily goings-on.  

In the meantime, the journey continues…

Mining the Centuries in Hampi

There seem to be two kinds of tourist attractions in the world – the first, like the dinosaur park in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, that leave you more than a little underwhelmed, and the second, like Hampi, where you put up with the loads of tourists, the endless offers for rickshaws and trinkets, and the occasional scam because when you visit the actual sites, your jaw drops.


Hampi (pronounced Haum-pee) is a town built on top of, inside of, and around a massive medieval city that during the 1500s was the one of the major seats of power in India. It’s situated along a river, amidst mountains of building-sized boulders left over from the retreat of the glaciers during the last Ice Age. At one point over 500,000 people lived here, including traders from Asia, the Middle East and farther abroad. In 1565 a massive attack by the Deccans completely destroyed the seat of power, but many of the sites have remained.

Sarah and I began by wandering through the Hampi Bazaar towards the ruins you can glimpse behind the little girl in the picture. (The photos roughly follow the course of our adventures). We climbed up the steps and through the temple, leaving the tourists, shops and noise behind and as we reached the summit of the hills (which strangely resemble the landscape and foliage of Joshua Tree National Park, CA), we looked down upon the Sule Bazaar, one of the less visited and haunting sites around. We were the only visitors in the nearly kilometer long set of ruins, in which nearly all of the stone pillars and temples remain. Intricate carvings of the Hindu gods remain (Hanuman, Krishna, Shiva, etc.) and the stone stalls feel like the vendors that used them 500+ years ago have only just left for the afternoon.

The second ancient site we visited was the Vitthala Temple, which is the best preserved out of all of the sites. It is an extensive complex of temples and public areas, including a stone chariot that used to run and a majestic tree growing right out of the stone courtyard. It was early morning when we arrived so we had the place to ourselves, but as we sat and watched, the tourists began to roll in. Most of the tourists to this site are Indian, with a good dash of Westerners mixed in as well, making it a fascinating place to people watch. In my head, I was busy imagining life here in the 1500s, traveling for months with caravans packed with goods for the marketplaces to arrive at this spot, but watching the women and men in brightly-colored saris and wraps wander through the site, I began to think about the ways in which contemporary culture in India intertwines with the very present artefacts from the past.

I can only offer the most cursory observations as an outside observer for a short period of time, but some things seem to stick out. For instance, the physical way in which the ancient sites are both revered and put to use. There are ruins nearly everywhere you look, and as you can see in some of the pictures, many local houses are built using them as a frame. This is not just a juxtaposition, but also an intermixing of the ancient and new. There are, of course, no examples of sites this old in the States or Canada, but what does remain from the distant past seems to be venerated and put behind glass as opposed to be lived in and used in this way. Which is not to say that Hampi is not respected for its antiquity – the entire village that exists here now has banned alcohol and meat (arg) out of respect for the holiness of the sites. It is just a different relationship to the past than we are used to.

I’ve also noticed that the revered position of the Hindu gods demonstrated by the intricate carvings and temples in the sites is reflected in the culture today. There is a huge number of gods in the Hindu pantheon and you see small, modern temples and shrines throughout the village of Hampi. What you also see is an amazing respect for the temples built in the 1300-1400s. Flowers and offerings dot the sights and I would imagine this is a large part of the reason that many Indian families visit these sites in their travels.

The broad range of Hindu gods also creates a situation where the popularity of certain gods fluctuates dramatically through the centuries. The big ones seem to remain constant, but we’ve seen stone depictions of many gods that have since fallen out of broad public attention (for instance, Naga, a god with a human torso and a snake lower half). The monuments remain though, dotting the ancient sites, and I can only imagine that many more hundreds of years will pass and perhaps these neglected gods will come back into favour, their dusty statues from the 1400s will be dusted off, and flowers will be laid at their feet again.

We will sadly be leaving Hampi tomorrow, and due to some rejigging of our schedule, will be taking the overnight “sleeper” bus to Goa. We’ve heard from many fellow travelers (thanks Anna!) that it’s a beautiful place with a mix of beaches and history and we are excited to arrive.

P.S. It’s blog contest time! Hampi is filled with many local and national artists selling beautiful sculptures, textiles, and jewellery. Write a comment on the blog with your guess at how much our delicious Valentine’s Day dinner in Hampi cost. The commenter who guesses the closest will receive a little prize package from India in the mail. :)