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Published: March 22nd 2005
Udaipur by night
Udaipur's famous City Palace by night as seen from one of the many roof-top restaurantsIn Ahmadabad we had three hours between the two journeys, which we decided to spend in the station's restaurant. Our train was to leave at 11 p.m., but the place already closed at 10 p.m., so we walked to the platform to find the train already there. This train was almost empty, it did not seem very popular, no wonder as it took nine hours for only 380 km! This time we chose one middle and one upper berth because the last time it had been very cold on the upper berths. We immediately realised that this train was smaller, the single berths on the other side of the aisle were missing. This stretch was a metre-gauge one and we had read in the papers that the government was about to unify the track system to the wide-gauge. Still, we slept reasonably well and as the train managed to be one hour late, we could watch the outside world a bit. We were rolling through hilly landscape that was already quite dry, but often a tree without leaves but full of bright orange blossoms caught our eyes. The train station in Udaipur was a mere construction site due to the changing
Lake Palace
Let's all hope and pray that the monsoon will come this year and fill the lake up of tracks, our train was among the few to arrive or depart. We found a very nice rickshaw driver, the hotel we had chosen was very beautiful, even provided with a swimming pool. We were soon to find out that
Udaipur is the centre of miniature painting. But they also know how to paint on a bigger scale, proved by many house decorations and our hotel likewise. It had a beautifully carved exterior and all the rooms were painted with floral motives on the ceiling, even the bathroom. This room was undoubtedly the most beautiful one we had had up to now, but unfortunately the bed was horribly uncomfortable. It had two innerspring mattresses that were already so worn that the springs kept popping out. Stephan had to cover it with pillows from a chair, otherwise he would have been unable to sleep at all!
Udaipur is situated on a big
lake, but we had heard and read that something was going wrong with it. We decided to have a look ourselves. It did not take us long to find out that we had heard and read true, the once huge lake was now reduced to a mere puddle.
City entrance from lake
Udaipur really has a wide array of beautiful houses and palaces Still attracting many water birds, flamingos among others, it looked ridiculous. The most expensive luxury hotel in town, was supposed to be surrounded by blue waters and could only be reached by boat. These days, a canal had been dug and had to be deepened every day to keep up appearances. Local people were quite desperate, hoping for the monsoon, which had deserted them in 7 consecutive years. The rest of the day we wandered around in the old part of town admiring the wall paintings and finely carved houses, many of them in blue. Once, our glances were attracted by something glittering in a courtyard and we were let into what turned out to be a
Jain temple. In a side room that was specially opened for us, we discovered an astonishing work of art. Although we did not completely understand what it depicted - we guess it to be an essential religious scene maybe comparable to Christ's birth - we were overwhelmed by the artistry. There was a hill, a river and several paths - all cut out of semi-precious stone! The river was of lapislazuli, the footpaths of malachite and the buildings on the hill of marble.
Palace guard
The guards and other staff were all stylishly ddressed We walked round and round, unable to put our eyes off it, eager to touch the glossy, smooth cool surface. Of course we were expected to give a donation, which we gladly did.
We found a very nice restaurant in a lovely quiet garden, where in addition the food was delicious. All the times we were there, we were in the jolly company of monkeys, squirrels and a myriad of birds, all of them unknown to us. We even saw a very peculiar species, very big and slim, with rather dull dark grey-brown feathers and a strong beak with a hump on top! Klaudia thought it might be a sort of hornbill, but was not sure whether these birds existed in India. An enchanting place indeed, where we loved to bide our time! On one of our strolls, we passed one of the numerous schools of miniature painting and were talked into the place. Somebody elaborately explained the techniques to us, that for the paintings of higher quality only natural ingredients were used, ground lapislazuli for the colour blue for example, and that they painted with squirrels' hair. The guy did such a good job that we really bought
City Palace
This is only a very small part of the huge complex something!
We were to spend the Holi Festival in Udaipur, the festival of colours. People gather in the streets with their friends and throw coloured powder in red, yellow and green as well as water at each other. We were indetermined whether to take part or not. In the end, this decision was taken out of our hands, because Stephan fell ill. He had caught a bad cold, maybe by swimming in the cold water. The pool looked very inviting, it was quite large, too, but for a reason we did not understand the water was always cool. He had a temperature and we did not have the right medicine with us. Due to the Holi Festival, many shops were closed for two days and we could not do much sight-seeing, apart from a beautiful museum in an old palace.
The last day of our sojourn in Udaipur, we finally managed to see the
City Palace, a huge complex of several palaces covering an enormous surface. We wandered through a number of picturesque palace enclosures, some of them beautifully decorated. We saw artistic peacock mosaics, rooms decorated in interesting blue tiles and others with a multitude of mirrors,
City Palace detail1
The balconies in the middle are decorated with shining little mirrors or with impressive miniature paintings, some of them directly on the walls.
We stayed too long in Udaipur altogether (almost 6 days, under normal circumstances 3 days would be sufficient), but we used the exceptionally fast internet connections to fulfill our dedicated readers' great expectations.
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narpat singh
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wonderful udaipur
Udaipur is really most colourfull city of the world