The glorious city of Vijayanagar

Has anyone ever visited Hampi? Well, I am not taking you through a guided tour of the place, as this has been written over and over again by many writers and publishers. The easiest way is to access Wikipedia and you may get all answers you need to know whats where in the ruins of this erstwhile capital of the Vijayanagar empire.
What I will be sharing with you is the feeling I felt of being there and the imagination of myself travelling back in time during the rule of Aliya Rama Raya, the de facto ruler of the empire. He was the son in law (Hence the name Aliya in Kannada for Son in law) of one of the greatest emperors of Vijayanagar and one of the greatest kings from India,  Emperor Sri Krishnadevaraya. As children we remembered Sri Krishnadevaraya easily because of his court poet Tenali Rama, who was as brilliant as Birbal in Akbar's court.
Hampi was supposed to have been underground for over 4 centuries. When I last visited Hampi with my cousin, it took me two and half days to cover the sites that were popular, with good road connectivity and which existed on every tourist map there was. I realised the best parts of the city still lie unexplored and had to be explored on foot. Trust me, three days was just not enough, I wish I stayed over for at least a week, to really get and see what I was looking for. We came across areas where work on stones, boulders, rocks and temples were unfinished or incomplete in many parts which ran along the river. I gazed upon one such boulder of rock and wondered why was the work on it incomplete. At this point my mind took me in imagination,back in time when the Ramaraya left the city with his troops to take on the united sultanates of deccan. The 500,000 citizens of the city who woke up as usual on the morning of the battle and resumed their day to day profession, never realised that the confident army(which was much bigger than the combined strength of the sultanates) that left the city in the morning would never ever return. What came after they left, was a wave of murderers, looters and savages, that plundered the defenseless city and turned it to its present state. The sculptor who probably thought he would convert that huge piece of rock into a beautiful sculpture, would never realize his dream. That rock must have seen blood of the very man working on it. No man must have ever worked on that rock again and that's when I came back to the present and I said to myself, Holy Shit!

This place is still the best bet for any Indiana Jones wannabes. Treasures are still found to this very day in forms of gold coins and precious stones, however, there has been a very strict vigilance imposed after gold prospectors and treasure seekers tried vandalizing the monuments in search of gold. Most of the areas which were residential or commercial have all been turned to banana and coconut plantations by the government. This has completely put a halt on any unauthorized excavations.

This is one place I must visit again soon.