Double O Heaven - take 4!

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After departing Mumbai and making it out without surcumming to the Chowpatty beach belly - we headed up to Udaipur on a two-leg train journey taking almost 24hours....

We rocked up in James Bond's enemy’s hangout (Octopussy) around 7am and made it via the pre pay rickshaw booth (being very weary of all the scams and touts we'd been told about in Rajasthan) into town to 'meet some friends'. The driver did however convince us to check out his place and we ended up staying in a well nice room with views of the 'floating' lake palace for what was a pretty good deal - we thought!

The sun was shining and the desert type environment was totally magical. We definitely got the time of year right to come since the locals told us it hit 40 degrees in the summer regularly! We only had to deal with 20 degrees or so....

We spent the next few days checking out the sights and constantly keeping an eye on the evil lake palace... The city palace, a mid-day and very sweaty pedalow, some havelis and many shawl and shoe shops provided us with our entertainment for the 3 days. The shopping was a totally new thing for us since we had been liberated by Jane's consumerism and we realised we had lots of space for tourist tat in our rucksacks!

In case you hadn't already guessed - the Lake Palace was the setting for Kamal Khan's palace in Octopussy. We were never allowed to forget this in the town as they played the movie in every other restaurant every night of the week!

The town and the setting and everything surrounding it was amazing. It seemed to be straight out of a storybook or faytale and one of the romantic places we'd ever seen!

We had now banished the image we had of Rajasthan originally from our minds and were so keen to see more....

Oh and this was take 4 because I've now written this blog 4 times.... Indian Internet - definitely not export quality!

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