On the Road Again

So, long time no post.  I meant to do another post about by last week in India but I after I landed in London it just never happened.  So I'll run though what I ended up doing quickly now.

I went from Hampi to Mysore, which for a long time was the capital of it's own independent state.  The palace the rulers lived in and ruled from is an awesome building combining tradition Indian architecture (both Muslim and Hindu) while mixing in the British colonial style.  The city is also famous for it's markets and the oils and incenses they sell there.  Here's pictures of the palace, a stall in the markets where I bought some things, and a boy working behind a stall making an incense stick:

The coloured powder is even brighter in person and the Indians use it in weddings and also for the Holi festival.

From there I took a train to Bangalore and then a 24 hour train to Mumbai, totaling 36 hours of travel.  Mumbai was a totally different experience to Mysore.  Mysore is a lot smaller than Mumbai and there isn't nearly as much of a problem with overcrowding.  In Mumbai you can't help but bump into people on the street it's so packed.  The traffic is so bad it took an hour to go from the train station to the hostel I was staying in even though it was only 14 kilometers.  The first day I took the local train to Mumbai's downtown I couldn't move my arms from next to my body because the crowd was so dense.  But then once I was in the nice part of the city I could've been somewhere in Europe.  There were old colonial buildings everywhere, the roads were relatively quiet, and there were tons of nice restaurants and bars.  Even more than the rest of India, Mumbai is a place of extremes.  Here are some photos:

India was by far the most intense country I visited, but also the most rewarding.  Climbing in Hampi and traveling the South was an awesome experience.

Now I'm on the road again.  This time with my car in the US.  I'm in Austin right now staying with some friends at the University of Texas, before on Monday I drive to Hueco Tanks, a state park and climbing area outside of El Paso.  I'll be there for a month doing a lot of rock climbing and probably some hiking too.  I'll post again when I'm there.

Thanks for reading!

Last Day in Hampi

So tonight is my last night in Hampi as tomorrow I take a bus to Mysore, before heading to Mumbai to fly out of India.  Last night we made another trip to Jungli Plateau to sleep out and climb there in the morning and evening, so I've had an awesome last couple of days here.  The day before that we climbed at Egg Boulder area, and I sent the classic Egg Boulder, a 6c or V5.  The pictures below catch the crux moves of the boulder, a series of slaps up a really wide bulge (you can also see why it's called Egg Boulder).  It's a cool area because unlike most of Hampi which is filled with sharp small holds the boulders around the Egg have feature climbing, with big slopers and lots of corners.

The first of these shots below is Andy working a 7a sit next to Egg Boulder, and the other two are from when we did some night climbing by fire and headlamp light at Jungli Plateau.  The second climber is Maxi, a German sport climber, and the third is of Yu, a Japanese climber who makes everything look difficult but nonetheless climbs it; he's pretty fun to watch.

So tomorrow morning I'm going to have one last session on my project Surf Traverse, then an a relaxing day before catching a sleeper bus to Mysore.  Two days there then a 36 hour train journey to Mumbai, where I'll see the city for two days and then fly home to London and Wales.

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!

Projects

As the temperatures continue to (slowly) drop here, some of the harder climbs are becoming more and possible.  Until it's cool the heat and humidity mean climbing at one's limit is very difficult; your hands sweat too much and the friction with the rock isn't nearly as good.  That's why we wake up before six and try climbs like the one below before the sun has risen and while the moon is still in the sky.  The climber in the shot is a Canadian from Vancouver called Nathan, and the climb is called Goan Corner.  It's named after the guesthouse all the climbers stay at, and for Hampi it's famous.  It's one of the climbs people come here to try.

Later the same day I worked my project, a V9 or harder on an overhang.  The first move is a huge left hand throw from two small holds to one of biggest and most incut grips in Hampi.  After rocking up on the super high feet you push backwards and grab the jug just as your feet come off the wall.  Your body swings back as your feet cut and you hang from one arm as you regain control and continue climbing.  It took me two solid sessions to get that move alone but now I've climbed from the start to a rail at the beginning of the difficult technical face you finish with.  Hopefully I'll finish the whole climb before I go not just because of it's difficulty but also because of it's uniqueness; very rarely in Hampi do you have overhangs and dynamic movement like this.

I've got another project called Surf Traverse which follows a line of okay crimps (ledges) diagonally up another overhanging face.  I've been working it with a Slovakian called Jaru and after our third session on it yesterday I think we finally have worked out the most efficient way to climb it.  If I climb it it will be my hardest boulder ever so I'm psyched to try it again after some rest.  The crux is at the end so you need to be fresh to do it. Hopefully next post I'll have some photos of me finishing it!