“It’s just totally naff and non-sensical.” We were talking to San, an Indian, about religion, often a touchy subject but we felt sufficiently comfortable – and drunk – to broach it.

English clock-tower. Indian city.

San had had be-friended us on the streets of Mysore. This is not so strange, Indians be-friend us all the time. What was different about San was that he didn’t seem to want anything in return. He had a strange, Frank Spencer English accent and an endearing buck-toothed grin and used words like ‘naff’ and ‘non-sensical’. He helped us find a hotel room (took no commission) and then paid for a rickshaw to take us to bar. It took us some time to get over the natural traveler’s suspicion but it turned out that San was a massive Anglophile, just a ‘nice bloke’ (his words) with an almost tragic longing to see England. Unfortunately we were the closest he was ever likely to get.

We got roped into buying some incense sticks.

Mysore is a terrific little city. Alongside the standard fare of advertising hoardings, wandering cows, rickshaw-wallahs and grim buses are to be found overblown Raj-era palaces, pastel coloured colonial mansions and ancient Dravidian temples. We were also – having eaten nothing but curry for some weeks – ashamedly excited to see a McDonald’s there! After wolfing down a McChicken sarnie (beef is off the menu obviously) we strolled round Mysore, then left for Hampi after a couple of days.

Yep, that’s our room and, yep, that’s a temple.

Hampi, wow. This place really has to be seen to be believed. Basically a vast concentration of half-millenia-old temples and ruins, dotted haphazardly around a landcsape made up of sandy boulders, some enormous, stacked in improbable formations, juxtaposed against green banana plantations, rice paddies and coconut trees. You stay in amongst the temples, in Hampi Bazaar, and can rent push-bikes to get round and see as many as you can before getting bored (commonly known as being ‘templed out’).

Great photography from Amy. Regrettably I dropped her camera in a rock pool shortly after this.

Across the river from Hampi Bazaar, and accessible only by boat, a surreal proliferation of bungalows and restaurants, shops and bike rentals has sprung up to service the needs of the ever-growing hippy population. Vying, along with the hippies, for the title of ethnic majority, are Israelis. Some inter-breeding has inevitably caused a number of Israeli hippies. They all hang around getting stoned, juggling sticks, banging bongos, juggling sticks, getting stoned; we even caught the Israelis doing some weird Yiddish hokey-cokey type dance. A great place to people-watch and we stayed on this side of the river for a few nights.

This is the ‘other side’.

After seven nights in Hampi we are off to Goa, back to the beach.

I call this one ‘Some boulders and a woman’.