On The Road Again

With Hampi closing to tourists as of tomorrow, I find myself on the move. This morning I woke up still feeling really woozy, and thus nervous about my upcoming 4 hour "chicken bus" ride to Hubli, a transit hub in northern Karnataka from which I'll get an overnight train to my next stop, Pune.

The bus went OK, aside from the fact that there was no luggage storage and I had to hug my backpack the entire time. But we made pretty good time and nothing dysentery related happened (although, again, if this is dysentery I either have the biggest tolerance for pain ever or a Guinness Book level immune system; I'm just being silly when I say 'dysentery'). In fact, I actually felt BETTER after 4 hours bouncing around trying to keep hold of my backpack. Weird.

Hubli is the closest to "real" India I've come so far. I put it in quotes because personally I think all of India is "real", and find it demeaning (towards Indians) when travelers say that such-and-such place isn't "really" India. I mean, nobody in America says "Oh, New York isn't REALLY America..." Some of the places I've been have been easier to deal with, downright touristy, or culturally different from the elephants-and-monkeys INDIA (tm) we all know from movies and storybooks.

Anyway, Hubli is about the closest to the Real Thing you can get, in terms of what archetypal backpackers term "real India". Nobody speaks English (in fact the local language is something I can't make heads or tails of at all, which made finding the bathroom at the bus station interesting; my sympathy for immigrants in the USA has grown by leaps and bounds this morning). No white people. No restaurants with huge menus full of omelets, pasta, and the like. Signs are written in Kannada only, with no latin-alphabet transliteration. The people at the Hampi bus station kept thinking I was getting on the wrong bus, because no white people ever come this way. I'm actually getting stared at by everyone because, here, I'm as freakish as a woman in a sari with a huge nose ring and armfulls of bangles would be in a greasy spoon diner in the middle of Kansas.

A lot of backpackers complain about being stared at when they head off the beaten track; I think it's cool because that way I can stare back!