Udaipur is actually quite a large city but all the places of interest and therefore hotels, shops, eateries etc are concentrated in a small area. The most popular being the Lal Ghat area where we started our search for somewhere to stay. In the end we settled on Hotel Ganguar Palace which is based in a 250 year old haveli complete with café and roof-top restaurant. At Rs800 a night it’s not luxurious but it exudes character and history with its central courtyard, ornamental nook and crannies and traditional hand painted friezes. Many of the hotels boast roof-top sitting areas with the bulk of them giving good views over Hanuman Ghat and Lake Pichola. There was also free wi-fi available (when it was working) so we could start to research and plan this trip properly.
Having been to Udaipur before (about 7 / 8 years ago) we’d done most of the touristy sights and to be honest we just wanted to relax a bit. Udaipur is one of the few Indian cities where it is actually a pleasure to wander aimlessly taking in the sights, sounds and browsing in the shops. Besides which it was time for Steve to belatedly celebrate his birthday and we knew that Udaipur had plenty of great restaurants serving chilled Kingfisher. It was still too early to pop a tall cool one so we wandered around comparing the place to all those years ago. To be honest not much has changed other than there being many more tourists resulting in even more hotels, shops, cafes etc to cater for their needs.
We spent our non-wandering hours away from the hustle and bustle checking out various roof-tops. Breakfast, lunch, sunset beer and dinner with birthday beers were all consumed in different places with all of them offering great views of the city, lake and surrounding hills. Our last visit here was towards the end of the holiday so we bought loads of lovely souvenirs at exceptionally good prices. Luckily we can’t be carrying things around for the next couple of months as the prices have sky rocketed. Besides which, the elephants I’ve spied to add to my collection wouldn’t fit in my bag even if it were empty!
We lazed around the following morning enjoying our historical room – luckily it had a socket for us to plug in the kettle. The large cushioned window seat, or indoor balcony as Steve liked to call it, was worth the room tariff in itself. We hadn’t exhausted all the tourist sights 7 years ago so went to have a look at Bagore-ki Haveli. It’s only Rs30 to enter and we spent a good hour snooping about. There’s not a great deal on display but that’s kind of part of the point as the building itself is the main draw. We did actually set foot inside all those years ago but, only to watch the cultural dance show with the building providing an intensely atmospheric backdrop. It was great wandering up and down corridors and around the roof and courtyard areas whilst trying to imagine what it must have felt like to live in such a fabulous building.
From there we walked over the bridge to the Hanuman Ghat area which has seen much restoration work. The hotels are predominantly way beyond our budget but it’s good to note that tourist dollars mean crumbling edifices have been restored to their formal glory. The elephant that was outside the Palace yesterday was plodding around Hanuman Ghat’s narrow alleys. The pachyderm along with horses is a new tourist gimmick for Udaipur. It’s always great to see elephants but we’ve still yet to see an Indian elephant in the wild. They’re almost as rare as lions, tigers and rhinos these days – I wonder if we’ll be lucky in Corbett National Park?
In the meantime we have more of Rajasthan to explore and to that end we’re on the sleeper bus to Jaisalmer tomorrow night. That leaves us with all day tomorrow to enjoy being tourists in Udaipur. Arriving somewhere early and leaving late due to using overnight transport helps to maximise time and resources. The down side is that you often get to the stage in the day where you just feel like you’re hanging around waiting. However, the advantage here was we only had to pay for 2 nights’ accommodation but got to spend 3 full days in the city. Luckily our haveli had a courtyard area in which to sit and read and Steve found the wi-fi working so that kept him busy.
We’d fancied a look at the classic car collection and had spotted the museum when we first arrived in the dark. However, we couldn’t find it again and once again the Lonely Planet let us down – it writes about this place but fails to give an address or place it on the map. Never mind, it was lunch time and we spotted a place offering veg thalis with a palace view. The food was tasty but the highlight was a langur bouncing past the table as we munched. Then it was time to explore a few back streets we’d previously ignored although we had no fixed schedule. We noticed places advertising the sale of all manner of travel tickets and popped in a place to see if they could book train tickets on-line. He quickly sorted it all out for us and only charged Rs200 for securing 2 sets of seats on 2 trains for us. We would have gone to the station ourselves but we had no idea where it was so couldn’t guess how much a tuc-tuc should cost. We reckoned this was a very easy and probably cost effective way of sorting it out.
Since we still had time on our hand and hadn’t managed to find the museum we decided to go on a little boat trip on the lake. It cost Rs200 each for just a half hour trip but it was a most pleasant little jaunt. Seeing the City Palace from that perspective gives you a much clearer picture as to just how enormous it is. These days the lake must be much cleaner as it is now home to a number of avian species including ducks, coots and cormorants. We ran the gauntlet of the shops one last time – it’s not that people pester you to buy things but I only have so much will power to resist buying such beautiful things!
It was finally time to collect our bags and head off to the bus office on the outskirts of town. Actually we were a tad early but it turned out we weren’t the earliest birds. It all seemed to be organised rather haphazardly so we were amazed when the bus actually set off on time. See you in the desert.
