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Published: August 20th 2012
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We arrived in Udaipur around 8am that morning after having such a good sleep on the train. We took an Auto Rickshaw straight to our hotel. Evene while we were still driving into the town area we had a really good feling about this place.
Once we arrived at the hotel, a guy settled us into our room and we went straight up to the roof top restaurant and had some breakfast. It had a lovely view of the lake and the palace. We took showers then headed out straight away to explore the place.
We walked down to the city palace and spent a lot of time just wandering around the beautiful gardens. The palace is now used as a museum which holds a huge collection of art work. It was lovely, really grand and well preserved. After walking around the palace we booked ourselves onto a boat ride around the lake. The boat took us around different islands spread out around the lake. We stopped at one of the islands and walked around the green gardens and took in the view of the other surrounding islands. We later found out that not only is Udaipur the setting
for most of the James Bond film
Octopussy, and the island we looked around was featured in the film. This all made sense after seeing advertisements in the windows of hotels around Udaipur 'OCTOPUSSY SHOWN EVERY EVENING HERE AND OTHER FILM'.
We were back on dry land by around 5pm, so we walked back towards town and went for some food at a little place called Lotus cafe. The food was amazing! By far the best Indian meal we'd had. So we were very happy!
On our way back to the hotel we stopped by the place that holds famous Rajastani dancing every evening. We were just in time for the performance. It was set outside in what looked like a Temple surrounded by trees. Everyone sat cross legged and watched the women dance and the men play their music. It was really good, we both really enjoyed it. That night we had a drink and sat on the roof top on comfy seats and relaxed.
The next morning we took an Auto Rickshaw for a tour of Udaipur's sights further out of the city. The driver took us to a kind of ancient cemetary in which
huge temples had been built in memory of the deceased royal family. The security guards were dodgy as hell so we didn't spend much time there. We also went to see a few more temples but the views were what impressed us. After our tour we relaxed at the hotel, went for another nice meal and used the internet to make some arrangements for hotels in our next destinations etc.
On our last day our train wasn't until 9.30pm but wehad to check out of our room by 10am. So we booked a cooking class which had been reccommended to us. The class was supposed to take 4 hours but we stayed for around 5 hours. It was great. We were given print outs of all kinds of recipes for Indian dishes. We were told to arrive hungry as we would get to eat whatever we made. And we made a lot of food. We started off by making our own Masala Chai tea, then vegetable Pakodas, mango and mint Chutney, two vegetable curries, and three different kinds of Indian breads. We had so much food between us because the cooking class wasdesigned for 4 people but the other
two people hadn't turned up... again we were ridiculously full, and the food was beautiful. The woman teaching us was so lovely, her name was Sashi. She told us that her husband had died 9 years ago and due to the caste system (she was in the highest caste) she was unable to work to provide for her two sons. She said she struggled to do what she could but eventually a tourist suggested to her son that she could start cooking lessons. The family didn't think it would be possible because Sashi couldn't speak a word of English. The tourist took it upon himself to ask Sashi's son to translate all of her recipes in English and together they made the recipes for the cooking lessons. Sashi began to learn English and by the time we met her she's be speaking it fluently for 3 years. She was a lovely woman, the whole family were lovely actually. We cooke din their house and we bought a set of Indian spices so that we could attempt the recipes at home. She gave us a bracelet and an Elephant key ring each after we finished our food.
We'd had a
lovely time in Udaipur, and were really happy with our time spent there. We set off for our next sleeper train that night.
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