128 Days

After our time in Aurangabad/Ajanta/Ellora we decided we wanted to head south.  We heard a lot of good things about Karnataka and decided to make a whole series of stops there.  We picked a whole bunch of cities based on descriptions in our guidebooks.  Then we decided to go for it.  Simple right?

Well, sometimes mother India has plans for you regardless of yours.  After beginning to understand the complexity of the Indian railway system we found there was no existing route through all the cities we had scoped out (Bijapur, Badami, Belur, Bangalore, Mysore, Belur, & Gokarna), there was no way to find out ahead of time a bus schedule between cities if said bus even existed, and with a tight budget hiring a car was out of the question.  But we have only limited time here in India, so we had to get moving.  We picked Bidar first, not because it sounded the most fabulous (that would be Hampi and Gokarna), but because it was the easiest to get to. 

This is how it goes here.  You want something, but you can’t get it for whatever reason (lack of infrastructure, prohibitive cost, inconvenience), but just at that moment India offers you something else, and you take it, reluctantly, because its not exactly what you wanted.  But often you’ll find that what you get is better even than what you imagined you wanted.  And so mother India provides in her crazy, and seemingly random way.