India A local bus ride from Goa to Hampi taking two days
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Johan Kruseman
Updated on 16 October 2024
Updated on 16 October 2024
In Goa, the top tourist destination, it was not difficult to find a direct non-stop air-conditioned tourist bus to one of the highlights of the Lonely Planet, Hampi. However, immediately after New Year‘s, these buses were expensive and full, so we were left with only local transportation, which was the opposite in both respects: six transfers, including an overnight stay halfway because the train we had to catch had less delay than the bus we wanted to catch; and the air conditioning consisted of open windows but couldn‘t compete with the heat generated by the packed crowd.
After a tuk-tuk ride to the local bus stop, a bus to the first city, and another bus to the capital of Goa, I went with an Australian I had met in North Korea in search of a bus to Huppali, halfway. All the offices were open except for the one to Huppali. At the spot where the bus was supposed to depart, quite a few people were already waiting, including some without tickets. You could buy the ticket perfectly fine on the bus, but you had to hope there was still space. However, people with tickets didn‘t have assigned seats, so everyone, with or without a ticket, was probably vying for the same spots. We were just at the back of the line, though.
We briefly left to buy lunch, but when we returned, there was a fully loaded bus, and only the other three tourists were left waiting. They said it was full. However, we decided to give it a try and managed to squeeze ourselves inside and even secured a (shared) seat after some shuffling.
After two hours of driving, we stopped for a short pit stop. I bought a banana and a coke to supplement my lunch. After emptying both the banana peel and the coke can, it turned out that this hut went a step further than the Netherlands, where we introduced waste tax on refrigerators, TVs, and the like a few years ago. When I wanted to throw the banana peel and the can into the trash bin, the shop owner shouted, “40 rupees!” And this was while there was trash all around us. Laughing out loud seemed like the best option in this case, and I received support from my fellow passengers.
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Traveled route: Ganges, Varanassi, Agra, Taj Mahal, Buland Darwaza, Jaipur, Fatehpur Shekhawati, Ajmer, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Bundi, Udaipur, Mumbai, Goa, Hampi
A local bus ride from Goa to Hampi taking two days
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Photographed by: Johan Kruseman
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Hampi was both the final destination of this trip and of my journey in India. It was a fantastic village where we would zoom around on mopeds during the day, which would lose in terms of speed to a lawnmower, and gather with all the backpackers from
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