So after another over night bus we arrived in Hampi at around 7am.After speaking to a lot of travellers in India, everyone says you must see Hampi as it has the most amazing scenery so here we are... and it really is unbelievable!It's nothing like the rest of India, it's a bit like the Flintstones - there are huge orange boulders and stones piled up everywhere and its all natural, we have no idea how they got there, they look so strategically placed - the locals say it's because two gods were fighting and threw the rocks at each other!!! It's a bit like Rome too; there are ruins everywhere, and so many temples. We didn't do much the first day as we were tired after our 2 consecutive overnight buses as you don't get much sleep, so we just wondered around the ruins close to us, and had dinner at a place called Mango Tree which is a lovely walk by the river and through banana plantations, and you sit on the floor at low tables overlooking the river. We also went in to one of the temples close to us, and there was an elephant there called Lakshima - she has a bath in the river every morning so the following morning we got to the river by about 7am and she came down for her bath at about 7.30am.It was amazing!We assumed she'd just be allowed to bath herself but the keepers gave her a really good scrub all over and she just lied in the river in her side in bliss!!!We stood right next to the edge and I asked one of the keepers if we could help wash her, and they agreed!It was great!After she'd been scrubbed she got up and used her trunk to spray water all over herself, and the cheeky mare sprayed me!The keeper told her off!It was such a good experience.After that we grabbed some breaky and hired some bikes so we could see all the sites.It 's the best way to see everything, it was really peaceful and the scenery was beautiful - everywhere you look there are these boulders and ruins amongst lush greenery... and luckily the roads were all flat cuz the bikes had no gears so peddling up any sort of gradient was agony!!!As usual I was a liability - I was trying to put the camera back in its case whilst riding the bike and wasn't concentrating and I crashed into a bush!!!It was hilarious, Rich said he just heard a crash and looked round and just saw the back end of my bike sticking out of the bush! Haha! I scratched my head on a twig on the way in, but I was a brave girl and didn't whinge, honestly!It was so funny!

After about 4 hours our bums were sore and it got really difficult cuz there were rocks to climb through so we (or should I say Rich!) had to carry the bikes a bit!We stopped off to get some food and then cycled the last 15 minutes back to base!We grabbed a quick (cold) shower and went to catch our 8pm overnight bus back to Bangalore, before we got on I tried to call Vinay just to make sure we were still OK to stay, but he didn't answer so I text him.He didn't reply so we boarded the bus anyway, and luckily checked the phone when the bus stopped at the next station and saw Vinay's text saying that he wasn't in Bangalore - he'd had to go to Ooty as his grandmother had been taken ill, he had emailed me but we hadn't checked our emails!We got off the bus and explained the situation to the driver, who gave us a part refund for our tickets - if Vinay wasn't going to be in Bangalore we had no reason to go back!So at about 9.30pm we made a quick decision to go the Gokana instead, which we'll tell you all about in our next blog!Lotsa love.Xxx