Hampi daze

Hampi is a beautiful, magical place but, as every woman who has ever waxed her legs knows, to attain beauty you must suffer. The 12-hour bus trip to get to this fairytale place was my suffering.

I took a sleeper bus service along with Michele, an Australian I'd met in Goa. The bus had been kitted out with bunk beds on either side of an aisle so narrow that when you tried to turn with a backpack on you got wedged in place like a turtle jammed in a crack in a rock.

Space is a luxury in Indian travel that even money doesn't seem able to buy sometimes. The bunks were in two tiers, with doubles on one side and singles on the other. This meant that a bunk designed to sleep two is only marginally wider than a single bed back home. This is fine, of course, provided you don't mind sleeping with a stranger's (or even a friend's) elbow, knee, arm, leg, bad breath, BO, farting or snoring invading your personal space.

And it's fine, as long as you are no taller than 5ft 7in exactly. I know this because that is my height and lying down flat on my back, my head touched one end of the bed and my feet were flat against the other. This was all very well but we also had to fit our backpacks in there (or put them in the bus's luggage compartment outside and out of sight during a long overnight journey with several stops where they could easily be parted from us). And our daypacks. And our shoes. The trouble was that the beds weren't wide enough to lie the packs flat, so they had to stand up on their ends. My pack is heavy. Concrete-block, lead-weight heavy, such that one fall could crush my lower extremities in an instant and lead to a life as a double amputee. Extreme care was required.

We hauled everything up to the top bunk and shoved and pushed and shuffled and hefted both it and ourselves until the packs were upright and we were flat (there wasn't even enough headroom to sit up straight). While 'comfortable' was far from being the adjective suitable to describe the situation, 'almost bearable' comes closer to the truth. The top half of my body was straight, but my legs veered off at an angle to one side of my backpack. This was to be my position. For the next 12 hours. Whether I liked it or not. I didn't.

Then the bus moved off. Sitting on a bus you experience low-level joggling and swaying. Now try this while lying flat, high up on a narrow bed on terrible roads. The movement is amplified a great deal more. Every bump, pothole, turn, bend and corner, our bodies rolled to right or left, then lurched back as the bus straightened up. The only means of keeping me from plunging to certain and embarrassing death in an untidy heap on the floor was a narrow, vertical metal bar halfway down the aisle side of the bed. Every time my body lurched in that direction I was forced to tense all my muscles to prevent the momentum of the lurch becoming a launch that would send me crashing out onto the floor.

Keeping this up for an extended period of time is only possible if you lie flat on your back. We spent the next 12 hours side by side, like corpses stretched out in our double coffin awaiting transportation to a heavenly afterlife.

When I 'woke' from a predominantly sleepless night, I was bone-shaken and sleep-deprived. Someone had replaced my hair with a bird's nest and my eyeballs with sand, but when I opened the curtains I was rewarded with the sight of a landscape so achingly beautiful it could have been a paradise in the afterlife.

The sun was rising over an endless panorama of undulating hills and valleys made of great piles of gigantic, smooth, rounded terracotta boulders. Many were, at a guess, 10-20 metres across. Piled precariously on top of one another, these heaps of stone, like over-sized Maltesers and truffles, were interspersed with plantations of bananas and fields of rice - all in a shade of the most perfect, most pure green imaginable. The early morning sun falling between the palms made luminous emerald flags of the banana leaves and set lime-green fire to the blades in the paddy fields.

Then Hampi itself came into sight. It is a small town set amid the ruins of an ancient town and temple complex which spreads across 27sq km. There are more than 1,000 temples in Hampi and it was these and their unique landscape we'd some to see. Outside the town everywhere we looked romantically crumbling ruins dotted the landscape, some huge and grand with beautiful carved stone detail, others tiny and balanced literally on top of huge rock outcrops or tucked between two massive stones. They peeped out like dolls' houses from the landscape. You scanned a hillside and all you could see was massive, smooth rocks, but look closer and tiny structures became apparent all over the face of the hillside. Some were no more than four pillars and a flat roof but all were made from the stone that surrounded them, almost indistinguishable from it. They looked as if they had grown from the rock.

A rickshaw picked us up from the bus stand and chugged us slowly down the hill into Hampi, giving us the perfect opportunity to look around. Giant boulders towered metres above us on all sides balanced, as if with an invisible hand, on top of each other. In the centre of the main bazaar, rising ancient and mysterious as a misty Mayan pyramid, stood the main temple tower, some 50 metres high. It soared above the low-level houses and looked like a tiered wedding cake with layer after layer of ornately carved detail. Silky grey monkeys leapt and scuttled with abandon over its layers and below it, right within what was once the ancient city's bazaar, a modern bazaar spread its wares.

Among the homes and stalls already setting up to sell food, drink, tourist souvenirs and handicrafts, sleepy people rose to a new day. Women with bulbous glowing neon water carriers, dampened the dust in front of their stall or house with bright arcs of water from a tin cup. Sleepily eating her breakfast, a little girl stood barefoot in the dirt wearing a grubby laced-edged party frock, now her everyday dress, that must have once belonged to her older sister. It hung lop-sided from her too-small frame, revealing a bare brown shoulder. A huge rip in the lace around the hem - probably where she'd trod on it because it was too long - left it drooping to the ground, where a wide-eyed kitten looked ready to pounce, as it swished before his eyes in a light breeze. Further down the bazaar, a group of goat kids clambered up a sloping, twisted tree trunk and up among the branches, bleating plaintively to one another.

It looked just as it must have done hundreds of years ago when the town first thrived. Nothing had changed but everything had. As ever the temples and the boulders and the trees looked down on the scene and above it all the sky-blue sky was the colour of life and freshness and beauty and perfection. Excitement burned my fatigue in a magnesium-bright flash and I couldn't wait to explore.