We took a night bus from Trivandrum to Bangalore, with plans to stay for only one night. Mieke has a friend living there, Peter, so we got lucky and had a place to stay. He lives in UB City, a high end shopping and condominium complex. We had no idea, and it is absolutely beautiful! Just like a hotel. We had our first hot shower in over 2 weeks, and it was wonderful.
We weren’t sure what to do with the day, and had to figure out our plans for getting to Hampi, our next stop. Peter had also mentioned that there was a cricket game on that afternoon, Ireland vs. England. We did some shopping and then had to sort out our bus tickets to Hampi, which turned out to be much easier than expected. We got a great tuk tuk driver who brought us to a travel agent and we managed to get a bus leaving that same evening.
Next stop was trying to get cricket tickets. Our driver said that the only way to get tickets would be some black market scalped tickets, but that he would see what he could do for us. We drove to the stadium, and he got out and talked to some people looking for tickets. He went to a few different entrances and managed to find us some for only 250 rupees each ($5.50 CAD). Success!
Then he brought us to buy some beer to drink before heading to the game, because alcohol is prohibited in the stadium. He let us sit in his tuk tuk and drink them. He was the nicest driver we’ve had in all of India.
He dropped us at our gate, and we wandered a bit away to get our faces painted. He came back out because he thought we were headed in the wrong direction away from our gate. Then he made sure that the guys doing the face paint charged us a fair price. They had some issues with getting the Irish flag right, and wanted to paint the Indian flag...even though India wasn’t playing. Since the colours for the two countries are the same, most of the Irish memorabilia they were selling was actually all India stuff.
Somehow we ended up in a section filled with Irish people, who had come to Bangalore specifically for the cricket matches. These guys beside us gave us these funny hats they had brought from Ireland, a leprechaun and jester hat. We got to talking with them, and they asked how much we paid. When we said 250, they were like “Rupees?” and we said “yeah, rupees.” Turns out they paid 150 Euros for their tickets, and the stadium wasn’t even half full.
What was quite a bit different from sports events in Canada was that they didn’t sell any alcohol. No beer at all, only some Pepsi. I couldn’t imagine everyone going to hockey games and not having any beer! The food was also quite different. No burgers or pizza, but samosas and fruit bowls.
We stayed for a few hours, and during that time England was just destroying Ireland. We left to go and have dinner and get ready for our night bus. On the bus we got a call from Peter, and Ireland had just managed to pull off an epic win. Mieke kept getting texts from people back home in Ireland telling her about the win. We should’ve stayed at the game for a bit longer to watch it happen!
Mieke and I at the match:
Mieke and I at the match:
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