Published on: 11/07/2026

Last edited on: 11/07/2026

I recently (26th-28th June 2026) went on a three day climbing trip to Hampi and this is my day to day log of a small set of things that happened. Find day 1 here. Onto day 2:

Promises. At their core they are born out of an evolutionary feature. One which helped us grow stronger. Which helped us stay in tight knit packs and rise higher in the natural hierarchy. Its a feature called trust. At its core, promises are based on trust. If you introduce a constraint which makes a person compelled to do something in the name of promise, that’s not a promise, that’s an order. Promises are mutual agreements based on trust. Trust is difficult to form and even harder to maintain. Broken trust can sever relationships permanently and leave one down the spiral of sorrow. Well, we had made a promise to wake up at 6 o clock in morning, and…that didn’t happen. We all slept through till 07:00-07:30. (I am not hurt by it at all, just wanted to sound profound 😛).

Morning

I did wake up late, but it seems some of my other friends were already up cause five new friends had joined us for second and third day!! As they got settled in, freshend up, satisfied their hunger, it was already past 7:30. As we were late, I had a quick coffee and set out with everyone for climbing. We took the same path as yesterday, hiked up the hill, and crossed few peaks to land at a new area this time, named Rishimukh Plateau. This is a big plateau just besides Rishimukh peak and is home to iconic routes and boulders like PyscoBloc, TV Boulder, Shield, etc etc. Pshycobloc is the same route I talked about in my last blog, my special flash!

Skin

I had decided to take this morning session a bit more chill, core reason being skin conditioning. What is skin conditioning? I am not talking about some alovera based cleansing/rejunvenation potion here. In climbing, skin is amongst the best indicator of how hard can you push further. Often climbers look at their hands and decide how further long their session is going to last. This is because their skin, mostly fingertips can tell them how long and hard they have been climbing. Thinner skin means they have trying really hard and maybe they should call it a day. In a fresh session, skin usually feels much thicker and ready to rock and roll! 🎸.

Skin, specifically skin on your fingertips, is the indicator here. Besides fingertips, thickness of your skin in the hand area is also super important. As climbers rely on their grip strength a lot, their skin on hands take a pretty big toll. It is mandatory for a climber to have calluses. When someone is new to climbing it takes time for the skin to adjust and it could be hurtful at times too. But if one survives through that, you get THICK THOCK skin, mockingly its called “genda chamdi” in Hindi. For non other hindi readers, it basically means skin as thick as the Rhino’s 🦏. Once you have the thick skin all around your hand, skin is mostly not in the way. Same is not true for fingertips cause they are are almost always in contact of the rough edges and hence they get sanded out pretty fast. There are even deeper concepts like levelling up the skin with sandpaper, you would see professional rock climbers do this very often cause the more unlevelled you skin is, higher the chance of flappers. And trust me boi, YOU DO NOT WANT FLAPPERS! They can be super painful and seldom take quite some time to heal.

For outdoors, this is even more important cause we are climbing super sharp rocks! Remember, I had mentioned in first part of the series that boulders in Hampi are made up of quartz, feldspar and mica minerals? Well, climbers just call them crystals, and theses crystals love your rose petal skin. They will cut through, rip it to shreds, and leave paper thin layer behind. Thin enough that you would bleed every session for months after that! Personal experience, after my last Hampi trip it took me 3-4 months before my skin was good enough to not bleed after indoor sessions :(. Even for climbers who have conditioned their skin indoors by doing a lot of volume, they need to spend at least a few days doing easy outdoor routes to allow their skin to grow thick for them to project much harder boulders. This is a good video which talks about all of this in more detail.

Plateau

Well as the customs, we yapped (uhm uhm..I mean warmed up) and after some nice deep stretches, we started with few 5 and 6a warmup routes. As I was only there for three days, I had decided to use this morning to grow some thicker skin. Now that I think about it, maybe it was just straight up stupid given my trip outline? But also I was tired from last night’s session, so kinda makes sense? Well, back to the plateau, amongst new friends was a Spanish climber who has been living in India for 12 years. He is our friend and climbs in Equilibirum Indiranagar all the time. He is super strong. You would see him flash level 6 indoors like it was a stroll in the park. This guy flashed PsycoBloc, and next one of my other friend sent it after a couple of tries. Now now, I was completely baited into trying the boulder. Just once, I told myself and got onto it! And well I got my ass whopped again.

I think this was my lowest point of the trip. I was completely shitting pants on a climb which I had done with ease just a few months back. I finally properly realized how weak I had turned after taking almost two months break due to my ankle injury. I decided at that time to climb with ease for the remaining trip. No pressure, cause I was nowhere near my prime. After a few hours of loitering around, we had sun right on top of us drinking all the energy out of us. Exclusive photo of the same is linked just below 😂 (GluconD MY GOAT 🐐). With no GluconD around, we decided to hike down and rest for the long evening session. Or so we thought, one of the new friends had another experienced climber who knew about A LOT OF LINES. She started showing us around, and we got distracted looking at those beautiful lines, here we saw Shield, Crimpy Piano, The Middle, Indian Summer and loads more!! Path to India Summer from Shield had a cave, and it was covered in such lovely smell. There was Tulsi and lemon grass all around! I wish there was a way to record smell and link it digitally to reproduce, cause THAT SMELLED OUTDOORS!

After the “look at that beautiful line over there and over there and over there” session, we hiked down and headed directly to Wanderlust for lunch. There was enough time to kill before food got prepared, so we started playing Situations. This was unexpectedly super fun! We were dead tired but maybe our brains were not. Tickling brain with stupid little puzzles was enticing enough :). We had a really good time playing it and then enoying the HEAVY LUNCH. Did you know lunch tastes even better when you haven’t had breakfast and got your ass kicked for hours 🙈.

Taare Zameen Par

After lunch, while others were sleeping, I took onto the practice of village uncles. You see, our house was right alongside the highway. House door opened to the road itself. I took a chair and sat under some shadow observing everything happening in the village and on the highway road. This boredom somehow led to a stroke of inspiration and I scribbled a poem. It’s been a while since I lucked out on my brain just inking rhytmic words upon the paper. Suprising of all, I hadn’t even sent anything to actually talk about the experience on the trip 😭. Well, my brain knew the feeling already. I have worked on dozens of hard indoor projects for weeks and have managed to send them. Satisfaction at the end is SO SO ADDICTING! Well after the stroke of luck, I was pretty motivated and started writing another poem, but brain just said, “this is enough for today” and that attempt didn’t land anywhere :P.

To get my mind off writing, I started doodling and recognizing shapes in clouds. I really liked this part cause I was just sitting there for hours without thinking about my phone. My Perfect Days recreation goal has been coming to life slowly but surely. Deleting instagram at the start of the year hasn’t caused me to go into any kind of addict recovery loop. That’s awesome and it has also helped me pick up really good things to do instead in my free time. Or at times just sit, observe and appreciate things around me. LIVING IN THE MOMENT. 💃

Little Cave

By the time I had created hundreds of shapes from passing clouds it was evening already and we were ready for our next session!! All of us took our dosages of needed coffee and started hiking to the Little Cave area. This is an area right besides the plateau but slightly harder to reach, one has to hike up to a bunch of caves, then hike down and then slightly up again to reach it. It was a mini adventure on its own.

There is an open area, just before little cave, with loads of warmup boulders. We decided to warm up in this section. Some of my friends who had just come that day, decided to rest this session out, they also found an excuse in an amazing spot to stare at the sky. Sky was SO SO BEAUTIFUL. I had heard somewhere, a young boy’s teacher had mentioned they should look at the sky more often, cause adults stop doing so. Well, living in Bengaluru, if you not looking at sky, then you really do have a busy and stressful life. Stay strong friend! But for other cheerful mortals, Hampi’s sky was like 10X better than Bengalurus!

P.S. These are from my phone, thats why the sky looks very bad.

Photos don’t do justice to how beautiful the clouds looked. Striped rain and sunlight patches in far away distance. Golden sunlight falling on a far off mountain peak, cutting through dark clouds like a gateway to the heaven itself 👼. It was definitely hard to concentrate on the warmup amidst such beauties. Every few minutes someone would find an even more beautiful sight in distance in another direction.

Shed

Few astute readers would have spotted rain in the last paragraph, well I also mentioned it was far away. Unfortunately after just a few shoulder rotations, they were knocking on our doors!! (I feel like an American, using shoulder rotations as a measure of time, anything but the standard metric units 😂 ). A bunch of our group started panicking cause they could not spot any shelter. Little Cave, as the name suggested was LITTLE. It could not hold 10 people and all of our equipment. Luckily, your boi 😎 knew a shelter in a nearby bouldering area, called Access Denied. All of us ran to the shed, and it took no time to start pouring instead of dirizzling. We were all bummed cause we knew we were going to be stuck there at least for a few hours. And climbing after this?? No chance. :(

Well I made it sound grim, but a bunch of friends know how to liven up any situtation. Soon all of the baggage was tucked and covered with pads in the middle of the shed. And music was ON! It almost felt like a disco dance floor! Headlamps and floodlights were repurposed as red lights, and at point their frequency of flicker led me to believe someone might get a seizure 😂. Everything seemed SO TRIPPY. We all sung and danced to the music and made most out of the moment.

Few songs in, a part of the group realized they were now standing in foot deep water on open side of the shed, it was raining pretty heavily and this shed had poor water management :(. One of my friend was looking into the water with his headlamp on, and I noticed he accidentally created vibrant strands of water reflected on the roof of the shed. As the rain contributed more to the pool, we kept seeing interesting patterns. Small disturbance causing whole fabric to spring up in a seemingly random, but globally coherent dance. It was like our own planetarium at home. VIBES WERE IMMACULATE!! A good rain would cause a generation older to think about Chai and Pakoda, but newer ones think of ciggs and grass. To my surpise, someone actually carried all of the material up and was already rolling up a joint 🚬. Smokers are very dedicated people I learnt that day! And with the joint they made the vibes literally HIGH xD.

Firefly

We didn’t know how long we would be stuck there, it didn’t worry us, still everyone wanted to just go home at this point. People who smoked were now complaning about being hungry too. Luckily for us, rain stopped after an hour or so. We did some inspection on the clouds and decided this was the best time to SCOOT. All of us prepared to leave, formed a line to not get confused or hurt. All the equipment was taken up by boys (good lads in my group). Navigators at the head of the queue, headlamps carrier at the tail and all the girls in the middle. This got a bit dicey and funny cause the experienced climber navigating, who hadn’t smoked, got us lost in the forest. We promoted our leopard girl to the start, who btw had smoked heavily, and she helped us get back on the way 😂. Who said girls are bad at navigation!?

It felt weird cause we literally could not see a phone’s flashlight away. And maybe because of this, WE HAD A LOT OF SLIPS. Thankfully we all survived and were down the hill without any major injuries.

Once we reached the river bank, I had another “first” experience of my life. I saw a Firefly!! Unforuntately, there was only one 😓. All of us sat there for a couple of minutes watching it do its delicate dance, swinging with the breeze all over the river, until it went near a bush and disappeared!?. We are almost 100% sure some toad/frog ate it 😭. I get it minecraft, I get why you removed the feature of frogs eating firefly. DON’T SPOIL THE ATOMSPHERE. (They actually removed cause fireflies can be toxic to frogs, but hey go with my story for now!!).

I wondered on the way back, how magical it would feel to have fireflies all around you! Apparently, there’s a village in Maharastra where this happens, they call it the firefly festival. Someday I would like to visit the place! Maybe I get my Disney princess moment there after getting betrayed by butterfly heaven.

After this long arduous way back, we had a quick dinner at Wanderlist and instantly went to sleep. Of course again with a “promise” to start at 06:00 in the morning 😂.