Udaipur

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The Lonely Planet describes Udaipur as '... the Venice of the East...' because the city is built around a handful of huge lakes. The centrepiece of the city is the Lake Palace which was built in the middle of one of the lakes, also known as 'the floating palace' because it appears to rise right out of the water with no island around it.

With thoughts of fairytale palaces in our heads we arrived in the dark at around 5am in Udaipur. We asked our autorickshaw driver to take us to a 'cheap cheap' hotel and the best he could do was one that was 300 rupees a night, a bit out of our price range but we were too sleepy to put up much of a fight so we took the room and went straight to get some sleep.

After making up for a few hours of sleep we got up and went for an explore. Walking out into the bright sunshine and the hazy heat of midday we set off in the direction of the lake to get a glimpse of the famous floating palace. A short walk down the street led us to a bridge that crosses the lake, we walked up onto it and were faced with a not-so-spectacular view. We had read that the lake can get a little shallow in the dry season but today only a dribble of water remained and the floating palace looked more like the palace in a puddle. A little disappointed we decided to go and explore one of Udaipurs many other attractions, the City Palace. It was an interesting and quite beautiful building, it was huge and every section described one of the maharaja's that had once lived there. There were some furnished rooms which rather grand and a courtyard with colourful mosaics of peacocks on the walls. There were also some lovely horses in the palace stables outside.

That evening we made friends with some Australians and arranged to taxi-share with them the next day to visit a fort and a temple that were a distance out of town. We were particuarly keen to visit the temple as it had been recommended to us by a few people we had met.

We were up early the next day ready to sight-see, the first stop was Kumbalgarh. Kumbalgarh is a Mewer fort and was built in the 15th century and its perimeter walls extend 36 kilometers in length; claimed to be the longest in the world after the great wall of China. We spent a couple of hours wandering around, we walked up to the palace and climbed right onto the roof to take in the views, apparently on a good day you can see the sand dunes of the Thar desert from up there; we wondered if Mr Desert might see us!? While we were snooping around the palace we found a circular room that had the best echo, we spent a while in here making noises and listening to the sound bouncing off the walls.

We walked along the top of the fort wall for a while and then had a look at a couple of the many temples that were within its walls, 360 of them to be exact. It is a huge and spectacular place, we can only imagine what it must have been like when it was a working fort with soldiers and maharajas pacing the walls.

Next stop was the Jain temple we had been looking forward to seeing, on the way we stopped at a little local eatery for a quick snack. Once Luke and I had got our food we were gestured over by an Indian man who asked us to sit with him, we chatted to him while we ate and he told us some interesting facts about the temple, when we finished he gave us a piece of paper with his address on and said that next time we were in India we should stay in his house. When we arrived at the temple we were given a strict set of rules to obide by and luckily we were both dressed in long trousers and tops, our Australian friend had made the mistake of wearing shorts and had to hire a pair of pajama bottoms to wear whilst in the temple. The outside of the temple is very grand with domes and turrets jutting out in marble stone. Inside the temple is even more grand and it is home to a total of 1444 marble pillars, all differently carved, no two pillars are the same, there is one pillar which was erected ever-so-slightly at an angle as its creator believed that something about the temple should be defaced as only God is perfect.

We spent a while in the temple taking photos and generally being amazed by the beauty of all the carvings that literally covered the entire structure. Sunlight came down through gaps in the roof and illuminated the marble and as the shadows moved round the pillars the characters in the carvings seemed to come alive. It was one of the most stunning buildings we've seen, a definate rival for the Taj Mahal.

That evening we went for dinner at a local restaurant that plays the bond film 'Octopussy' every night. A few of the restaurants in Udaipur offer this as the floating palace and also the monsoon palace feature throughout the film. Neither of us had seen it before so it was fun to watch it where it had been filmed, also during the film they showed clips of Varanasi and the Taj Mahal. It was also nice to see moving images of the floating palace while the lake was full, it really looked like it belonged in a bond film.

The next day we spent trying to organise our next move, for a while now we have been undecided over whether to head north where the climates are cool but the views are of Himalayas and other scenery we had seen a lot of in Nepal, or to head south where the climate will be unbearably hot and humid but the scenery is lush, tropical coasts and backwaters. Unable to decide ourselves we enlisted the help of a man called David who was staying in our hotel and had been coming to India every year for the last 20 years, he knew it better than the Indians themselves. His first reaction to our dilema was to announce us both fools for even considering going south at this time of year, but when we explained to him that we'd already spent time in Nepal he took pitty on us and drew us a route in our guidebook that would take us down south via plenty of higher altitude stops to keep us from melting.

That evening we went to a traditional dance and music performace at a Haveli near the lake, on our way there we walked past a huge gathering of locals, they were crowded around a group of people sitting on the floor in a circle next to the lake, all the women were wearing the brightest of sarees and looked beautiful, it turned out to a be part of the procession of an Indian wedding so we stopped nearby for a while and took some sneaky pictures of the party before heading off to the Haveli. The traditional dance was wonderful to watch, dancers were accompanied by a man on a tablar, a man with some cymbals and an older lady who sang and played the harmonia. Women in colourful dress swooped around the dancefloor with flaming pots on their heads, a puppeteer made his puppets dance to the music and a lady danced on broken glass with 10 pots balanced neatly on her head.

Having finally decided to head south for the remainder of our trip we had booked the bus for the next day to Mumbai, we had a few hours spare in the morning so we had one last wander around the streets of Udaipur admiring its old buildings and colourful residents. We then sat for a while at our hotel and chatted with a lady who had been coming to India every year for six months the last twelve years but seemed to have only really spent time in Goa and other popular hippie hangouts. We have met a lot of people like this on our trip and we think that they are maybe a little lazy. We love traveling but to do it all the time would leave no time to achieve other goals and ambitions. They don't seem to be aiming towards anything or progressing towards fullfilling any dreams they might have. They just sit around for six months of the year doing not a lot. Rant over.

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