Main Street in Badami
We went to the hotel that we had carefully chosen online. There they assigned us a room without any problems.
India 2017
Day 23: February 10
Bijapur-Badami
India 2017
Itinerary
Today is also pretty much without photos and without incidents. I’m writing so as not to lose the thread and to fill in the empty spaces, as BG sang.
I’m already feeling better and we’re moving to Badami. We have a train at 8 a.m. We walked to the railway station. In the morning it’s so pleasant, not hot. At the station, in a café full of locals, we ate shira (sweet semolina); I’ve grown to love it so much that I’m ready to eat it for breakfast almost every day. I’m constantly hungry :) I hope shira from a place like this will do me good.
The train was good, not many people. We sat by the window. The time flew by quickly, and we only had two and a half hours to travel.
Badami railway station is 5 km from the center of the village. We got to the village by tuk-tuk, packed with Indians, and we were with them. On the bumps, we were tossed mercilessly since we were riding in the back.
The day was in full swing when we reached the center of the village of Badami. It’s a very dusty and noisy little town.
Our room
After resting a bit, we decided to go for a walk and look for a water heater. But first, to eat. There is a little restaurant at the hotel, and it was packed with people, all Indians. The menu was extensive, but what to eat from all that remained a mystery. We asked for vegetable soup; the waiter promised it would not be spicy, and we ordered a flatbread, while Volchiy ordered some kind of strange potato dish. As a result, the supposedly non-spicy soup was so spicy that even Volchiy could barely eat it, and I was left without food, so I had to order dosa as well — a pancake made from rice flour, to put it briefly. It took forever to make Volchiy’s potatoes, and when they were finally ready, it turned out to be something awful and practically impossible to eat. So in the end, I got full on dosa, and Volchiy on my soup and flatbread.
We set off in search of the market. Finding a market in India, especially in small towns, is not a problem at all — it’s basically everywhere here. We went from shop to shop, showing our old water heater, and everyone offered huge bucket-sized heaters, but there were no small ones. Then one trader finally had a small water heater. We hurried home to test it.
At the market, mountains of red pepper
The kettle didn’t even last 10 seconds — bang, and it was completely burnt out. We went to return it. The shopkeeper fiddled with it, turned it over and over, taped the wires back on with electrical tape, tested it — it seemed to work — and handed it back to us, saying, “Use it.” Well, okay. Volchyi didn’t see that he had stuck the wires back in place with tape; he thought the man had soldered them. And when I asked on the way home whether it was really okay to fasten wires with electrical tape like that, Volchyi said that once we got home he’d open up the kettle and we’d see what was inside. When we got home and Volchyi opened the kettle with a nail file, it turned out the man had attached the wires very poorly and they came off again right away.
Also, before we left, Volchyi put our little bag with soap and toothpaste on the windowsill. And when we came back, half the bag had been viciously torn off. There’s a small metal grille on the windows here. We realized it was the monkeys’ doing — apparently one of them thought there was food in the bag and tried to get it through the grille. There are a lot of monkeys in the city; they climb around on houses, which is kind of scary.
I lay down to rest and fell asleep, and Volchyi sat down to read something.
In the evening we went back to the man again to find out what we were supposed to do now with this kettle. He promised that tomorrow morning there would be a new kettle just like it. We didn’t understand where he was going to get one from in the morning, but we left the broken kettle with him and went home.
We had dinner there too, because all the other cafés looked even worse.
I ate rice, which was very tasty, by the way, with ghee and cashews, and Volchyi ate chapati with some sauces they brought him for free — apparently they felt sorry for the poor guy, how was he supposed to choke down dry chapati.
The waiter just couldn’t calm down about the fact that I was only eating rice; he came over several times and asked whether he should bring me something with the rice, spices or curry. I said everything was great, exactly how it should be!