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Published: March 4th 2008
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Hello from Southern Rajasthan. We have spent the last week steadily travelling eastward, and are now at a cross-roads in our Indian travels with Agra in sight.
Udaipur was the first place we have seen for a while with water.... yes water just sitting out in the open minding its own business.
We stayed right in the center of things close to the Ghats (stepped concrete landing spots on the water) adjacent to the lake palace. Sorry, we don't have any photos of the palace interior as it is an ultra-luxury hotel where non-guests can only land if they wear something formal and stump up for an extremely expensive meal. Although Simon had just had a new business suit made which could do at a pinch, the rest of our gear (ie tramping boots...) was just not up to snuff.
It is currently wedding season over here, and in Udaipur our hotel was right next to a ghat dedicaded to Shiva's wife - so it attracted all the weddings! These started with a procession of the bride and family, complete with marching drums. Usually this was in the late afternoon, and once the drumming stopped things quieted down....untill
the end of the ceremony (at about 10 pm) when the streets exploded with the sounds of what we could only assume was a brass band and rather powerfull fireworks.
We also took in the usual collection of cenotaphs and a nearby fort (photos attached) in a day trip out of town, as well as the best example of a Jain temples in the area. The Jain religion is pecular in that it was never exported from India, and these days it's followers are much less than the majority Hindu population. The Temple we saw was pretty impressive on the inside, with 1400+ carved white marble colums nested together in a reasonably compact area.
This day trip was also a novelty for us as our transport was a CAR! We haven't been in an actual car for three months now, and we happily played with the seat belts (which worked!) and the windows as we were driven around for the day.
After Udaipur our next stop was Chittograph, the highlight of which was - you guessed it - another fort. This site was rather unique in that it had a couple of towers which were heavily carved
Preparation for a wedding in Udaipur
It's currently wedding season - lots of drums at all times of the day and night.... with decorative motifies. The largest of the two (the Tower of Victory) was the best as for once we were allowed inside to climb to the top. It was very much an "Indiana Jones" experience as we were early enough that very few people were around (we had the thing to ourselves) and we had to us our torch at one stage to guide us through the dark winding interal staircase :-) The inside was just as decoratively carved as the outside, although dissapointingly there was the usual deposits of graffitti on the top story of the tower.
Next stop for us was Bundi, another smallish (<100,000) town on our way east. This was our last fort stop, and probably the most laid back of the lot. The palace was sited half way up a rather steep hill, and had a minimum of staff present selling and checking tickets. After this it was almost like the local authoriuties ran out of man-power as the fort was deserted and to be honest, overgrown and falling down a bit in places.
Our last stop in Rajasthan was Sawai Madhopur, which borders the Ranthambhore national park, famous for being the only
place in Rajasthan were you can view tigers in the wild. Unfortunately it is also infamous for corruption, and the park authorites letting poachers in to harvest the tigers :-(
We took a 3 hour safari in the park which kicked off early morning and rambled around the tracks and trails, periodically dropping by watering holes. We saw a whole heap of various deer, peacocks and troops of monkeys, but sadly no tigers :-(
We are also pleased to report that we reached the top of a waiting list for a pretty popular train - meaning that we are now off to Nepal! So this means we are going to spend the next couple of weeks in cyber-limbo as are current plan is to do the annapurna sanctuary trek 😞http://www.nepaltrekkinginfo.com/nepal/trekking/annapurna/annapurna_sanctuary_trekking.html )
With a bit of luck this should place us back in India to the festival of Holi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi) on 22 March.
So thats going to be it from us for a bit.... more news of mountain adventures to come in a couple of weeks :-)
S & S
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