Pancakes, palaces and lakes

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Arriving at Udaipur was a little hazy after the trauma of the sleeper bus - to add to this already fun-filled journey, this ‘direct bus’ had actually involved a bizarre transfer at about midnight from a random fuel station forecourt, through town (I’ve no idea what town) to another bus for the next 5 hours of the journey.

This ‘free’ transfer involved a considerable argument between the rickshaw man that ferried us and the bus company, after he found out no one was going to pay him! Anyway we felt sorry for him and ended up paying for the ride, quite surprising in hindsight considering the mood in which we left Jaiselmer! Eventually we arrived at Udaipur bus stop at something like 5AM.

When I say ‘bus stop’, a more realistic description would be ‘the usual patch of dirt outside some shops on the outskirts of town’. Despite appearances these transport hubs can be surprisingly efficient and luckily Lexa could just about recall the name of a hotel that some Aussies had recommended and we found a rickshaw driver that seemed to understand where we were talking about. Soon we were whizzing through the dark and silent streets, absolutely freezing our ker-niggets off and hopefully going in the right direction.

Sure enough the man did his job and we arrived at the Minerva hotel and a rather drowsy owner who we had just woken up showed us a room. After 12 hours in a smelly Tupperware box it looked like heaven and we did our best to catch up on the sleep which the ‘sleeper’ bus hadn’t delivered.

With only 36 hours or so in the city we really only had time to wander the streets and get a quick feel for the place. The city is clustered around the edges of a large lake, surrounded by hills and is probably most famous for the Lake Palace that you can see in the photos. All very nice if you can afford it… I think an evening meal at the Palace was about £50 for the 2 of us, bearable if you are here on holiday, but about £48 over our current budget for the night! There are numerous very tall hotels/restaurants that have roof top terraces offering views over lake, accompanied by spectacular flights of steps to make sure you’re hungry when you get there.

The centre of the city is essentially a big collection of souvenir shops, silk painting schools, tailors and hotels spread through some narrow and twisting streets. Having said that, there are a number of waterways, bridges that can be reached by some intriguing back alleys and with a markedly less aggressive marketing style than Jaisalmer, it felt quite pleasant to wander around.

We also paid a visit to the City Palace which was rather a blur of rooms with lots of mirrors and amazing paintings, but many of them were rather tired and in need of a bit of a touch up. The National Trust could have brought it to life a bit. The roof tops and walls accommodated the usual collection of entertaining monkeys larking around, but the security guard moved us on from a quiet vantage point we had found, before I managed to get many good photo’s.
So, Udaipur was nice and if we had the money we could quite happily have stayed to indulge ourselves at the Lake Palace Hotel, lazing around in the spa, sipping cocktails and taking a sunset cruises around the lake. Meanwhile back in the real world…. we finished sharing a banana pancake, walked back to the hotel to save on a Rickshaw ride and packed, ready to move on the next day to the slightly unusual destination of Amedabad, our next stopping off point half way down to Mumbai (Bombay).

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Comments

[Martyn]

Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur
The closest I've got to this place is reading about it in 'Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery' as I made my 'Aubergines in the Pickling Style'. Apparently the recipe originated with the chef here. Yummy!