Double Arete Video

Andy (the same Andy who I traveled to Gokarna with) took a video of my second attempt send of Double Arete.  I didn't think I would be able to upload it but then I realized if the internet here can handle Skype surely it can handle a YouTube upload (though it did take about 30 minutes).  The video starts a couple of holds into the boulder, I started where the chalk starts, but it gets the hardest part, the final move to the lip.  You can also see me confuse left and right :).  Despite everyone below telling me to go left I still manage to think right haha.

On the cultural side of things yesterday I rented a scooter and spent the day visiting all the ruins.  It's surreal here, even more so than ruins usually are.  In Pompeii or Rome or even the castles in the UK you can visualize everything that was at the site.  You see the walls of a fort or the Colosseum or in the case of Pompeii an entire town and you can imagine what the city looked like and how the people interacted with their surroundings.  In Rome you replace tourist shops with Roman markets in your head but in Hampi because of the scale of what's missing you can't do that.  Here of the sixty square miles enclosed by the ruins of the city's walls only the Royal Centre and the temples remain, as they were the parts of the city constructed with granite.  So to imagine what it must of been like you have to imagine about 55 square miles or more of city out of nothing, as only shrub and granite hills remain.

I rented the scooter I had on the side of the river I'm staying, so I had to take it across the river on a boat to get the ruins.  My plan was to take the road back, using the closest bridge (the road that used to bridge the river at Hampi is now underwater...). I expected a forty minute trip but as it turned out the next bridge was more than an hour down the river.  Before I ran out of petrol I managed to buy a litre in a small town where no-one spoke English by pointing to the tank of the scooter after stopping next to random people on the street.  I got directions by repeating the name of the closest town to where I'm staying; Anegundi.  Two hours later I was back in my guesthouse, relieved to have not got totally lost or run out of petrol.  But it was worth it to see some more of the real rural India.  In Hampi everyone speaks English and many of the Indians here work full time in the tourism industry; they spend summers working in the North then come down to Hampi when the tourist season starts here.  Fifteen minutes in any direction though and all the children yell, "Hello!" as you drive through a village and Hindi is the only language.  I also passed through some more industrialized rather than agricultural towns and there is definitely a difference between the two.  Hopefully India can find a better balance between the wealth industrialism brings and it's human costs.  The West isn't a great example in that way.

Hope you enjoy the video, and thanks for reading!