A rainy day

          We heard the mobile phone ring and realized it was our aunt  on the call. Hundreds of questions arose in our mind as to why she had called at this hour!! Hesitatingly, I picked the call and was bombarded with questions, one followed by another without any time given for answering!! I felt like I heard a  thousand voices at once asking where we were, have we heard that days news, or read the days newspaper and so on. Suddenly, the focus moved on to questions like were we crazy. After the so thought ever lasting  questionnaire ended, we heard that most of the places in North Karnataka were flooded due to heavy rains and since our aunt knew we were traveling towards Hampi, she fore warned us about the same. We were about 70 km away from Bangalore towards Hampi, via Chitradurga. This was during the last year's floods in the northern parts of Karnataka, which had created havoc, causing severe damage to mankind. As it was a long weekend ( the Gandhi Jayanthi  weekend), we planned to visit Hampi and booked Kishkinda resort for accommodation (3 km from Hampi) .

        We told our aunt that we would get back to her in a while. Meanwhile, we called one of our friends who was traveling from Bangalore to Sindhanur, to find out the situation. He answered that it was pretty bad and had been stuck over 4 hours for now and  the bus has not moved an inch. This gave us the feeling of having butterflies in the stomach. After a round of consultation, we decided to call off the trip and move on to another destination. We took  the U-turn towards Bangalore and were deciding to drive  towards Pondicherry and Gingee fort .
           We suddenly realized that we had to call the resort  manager for canceling our accommodation. The man who spoke to us told us there was no major problem except that it was raining cats and dogs. Since the accessibility through the shorter route was cut off due to the heavy rains, an alternate route to Kishkinda had increased  the distance from 3 km to 42 km. We made another U- turn and not looking back, drove towards Hampi. In a few hours, we reached our aunt's (not the one who had spoken to us that morning) place at Chitradurga. We rested for sometime, had breakfast and surfed through news channels to make sure we wouldn't be risking going to Kishkinda. All the channels covered news about Mantralaya, one of the many scared places being completely flooded. Well, we had to move on towards our  destination. So, we proceeded .

Initial Set Back 

           The distance from Chitradurga to Hospet (town near to Hampi) is about 130 km, and takes about  3 hours (max). We took more than 8 hours to reach Hospet. We felt like we were traveling by bullock cart. It rained through out our journey and there was water every where. We had to probably over take more than a thousand lorries that day, in order to reach our destination. Apart from listening to great music,  we passed our time checking out the number plates of the lorries and other vehicles. To our surprise, we had already counted more than 20 states. This exercise was quite interesting.

Water Water Everywhere!

Over Flowing Lake

 Raging Nature

Sorry! Not the Trucker's Fault

T B Dam

Land Slide

T B Dam's Back waters during the heavy rains

T B dam with no back waters during April 2010

  The above two photos represent the same spot taken during different times, giving an indication of the effect of floods.
      After overcoming many obstacles posed by the overflowing waters and the heavy Lorry traffic that day, we finally made it to the resort and heaved a sigh of relief. We eagerly waited to see the "Ruins amidst the Rains".