Ah, Malaprabha!

7.30 AM on Day 2 found us all up and about looking for a bus to Pattadakkal. Pattadakkal is one street big – at the end of this street, on the left side is the temple complex. A few houses are carelessly strewn around. Agriculture is big – the tractors are as well decorated as cows are during their harvest festivals. The Malaprabha adds a much needed dose of character to the town. The only food you get is sweaty Dairy Milk chocolate, (it’s melted, frozen, re-melted and re-re-melted and re-frozen in the heat) Krackjack biscuits, tender coconut water and chai-coffee. Ali’s little blue shop at the corner of the bus-stop serves upma in the afternoons. We helped ourselves to some excellent tea and reasonably good coffee at Ali’s. Fresh from the stove, served in big glasses. Very, very good tea. Not so bad coffee!

Pattadakkal, a guide in Aihole told us, was like the ‘university’ for sculpture and architecture. As we step into the immaculately maintained lawns of the temple complex – entry Rs.2 – I catch my breath. I’ve seen some of the great temples of Tamilnadu, and the unabashed black stone beauty of the Belur and Halebid temples. I’d seen some of the wonderful Vijayanagara temples. This place is a different ball game altogether. Never have I seen a whole cluster of beautiful temples, so pleasing to the eye, so inviting, all heaped together within such a small radius. All crowded together, each with its distinctive style. Experimentation? A school of sculpture? The remains of a centuries old temple-building competition

Lingams and Nandis are all over the place – you have to watch out so you don’t accidentally step on one. Two beautiful, curvilinear structures stand out in the crowd. They are dimly reminiscent of the towers of Angkor Wat, the Vishnu temple in Cambodia built in the 11th Century by Suryavarman the Second.

The Pattadakkal temples, I read later was testing ground for most of the temple architecture in Karnataka in the hundreds of years to come. More amorous couples, magnificent sculptures of Vishnu, Surya, stories of the Puranas later, we come across a cute grinning God at the entrance way to one of the temples. He is guarding the entrance to this temple – and he is oh-so-cute! We click a picture of me grinning back at him. Here's a picture for your viewing pleasure! Doesn't he make you wanna grin back?

Most of the temples have Vishnu’s vehicle Garuda carved in the doorway, but inside the temples were lingas – proof that as Saivism slowly replaced Vaishnavism, Vishnu idols gave way to enormous lingams. We walk down to the banks of the Malaprabha to another temple adjacent to the complex. There are black-faced monkeys here with a lone security guard from SIS to keep them company. As the family grooms each other on the temple top, we make small talk with the guard. He is part of the same “International” private security company headquartered at Hospet. Oh yes, he used to work as a guard at our hotel in Badami before this. It’s not season yet, he says. Badami is not as popular as Hampi is on the international tourist/traveler map. It is however, firmly placed in the ‘summer vacation’ circuit. March-April-May are hot months for tourism here, he informs us. We rest on the cool stones for a while and make our way back to Ali’s blue shop to find our way to Aihole. The bus stop that was so crowded in the morning is almost deserted. The tam-tam driver wants to know if we want a ‘besal’ (special) service to Aihole – the price: 150 bucks. We choose to wait along side a healthy-looking black dog for more passengers to join us. An exhausting 40 minutes later, we are on our way in another tam-tam to Aihole, 13 kms from Patadakkal. Before you rush away, here's one more detail from a Pattadakkal pillar for you to admire!