Entering Hampi is a bit like entering a family-run, organised crime bubble; everybody is a brother to everybody and has a business of some kind. Accommodations are, on average, the same price across the board and predominantly full of non-locals. Here competition has been replaced by negotiation from ‘overpriced’ to ‘a little less overpriced’ leaving tourists with the sense that they’ve achieved a small victory, when in fact they’ve still overpaid. While Hospete might be hostile towards foreign unmarried couples and repeatedly refuse to rent rooms to them, Hampi is a good example of where a monopoly fucks things up. It feels greedy, corrupt and full of mercantile scumbags who openly admit “you cannot trust anyone”, and then use this as justification to continue their dodgy actions.
Seeing something independently in Hampi became a challenge for an autonomous traveller due to several limitations placed on renting two wheel transport or getting a saucer across the river. Experience of rural life and interaction with locals is therefore prevented and generally avoided by tourists, leaving them places of commercial activities instead; german bakeries, kosher restaurants and foreign handicrafts. It is utterly unfortunate bearing as behind the banal curtain of tourism, Hampi has an alluring beauty of its landscapes, animals, rock formations and people, at last having an incredibly calm and quiet lifestyle.
Everyday pilgrims and packs of students arrive to Hampi from nearby cities to have an occasional early morning bath in the river along with bathing of a sacred elephant from the nearby temple. People fish with nets on saucers, take sheep to graze and dry millet on barely used roads.
“Don’t worry, be Hampy”, a slogan printed on the range of t-shirts, hanging down the curtain of the local shop, hoping to be bought one day by a pretentious vipassana tourist in elephant pants. Constant attempts of being scammed in Hampi sadly left us with a bitter taste and no sense of being Hampi at all, but desire to leave sooner and to call this town Scampy instead.
