Hampi

The big dipper pours upside down. When the dogs fighting by the river wake me at three in the morning, I open my eyes and marvel at seeing it overturned. Beyond the roofs' low lip, the landscape reaching skyward between the palms is just as alien.

I'm in Hampi and by day the area seems to suggest that God - whilst feeling whimsical during creation - began dropping boulders into the clear blue sky. Here, they landed in precarious piles and long ago emperors came to love them and covered them with buildings ment to make them more sacred. After the emperors died and their cities lay barren, these buildings remained precariously a loft just as the stones from which they came. Then, others - who had probably been there all along - painted the flat areas between the piles green with vegetation and carried on until still other people - people like me - turned up to admire the wonderful peculiarity of both the temples built by the dead emperors and the strange rock piles left by God.

We spend our days climbing them - over, across, and around - Clay, April, and I. Yesterday - February 28th - we undertook what other Hampi guests describe as "the epic quest" to Hanuman Temple. After breakfast, we crossed the rice paddy and began - headed up and over the gigantic smooth surface of the mega boulder that bisects the two rock piles closest to our guest house. Our ascent was being watched. Out they sprang, racing down the rock their black faces surrounded by collars of light fur. What type of monkey they are I do not know, but they have the longest tails I've ever seen on an animal. After the first ascent, we appeared to be traversing the moon but over the next rise a spray painted advertisement reminded us this was not so. Baba's Cafe apparently lay waiting in the next valley.

We would lunch there on the return journey. After crossing the stream, passing the shepherded goats and water buffalo, walking the road dividing the banana plantations, and climbing the stairs. Oh - the stairs. All 500 and some of them leading to the very, very top where a whitewashed temple and a white flowering tree stand serine. There were supposed to be monkeys, but the midday sun apparently sends them into crevasses of hiding. I don't blame them, nor did I much mind their absence. All of Hampi lay below us, its boulders and temples sand brown in the heat.

Tonight, there's a film showing at the Laughing Buddha Restaurant tonight. I was initiated into this nightly ritual last night. We laughed like idiots at the antics of the animated cast of "Open Season 2". Us - an American and a Canadian - finding comforting familiarity in the notion of a comic deer and a gangster Grizzly joking amongst an evergreen forest surrounded by snowcapped mountains in this place - India, a world away from home - where even the big dipper pours upside down.