Our journey to Udaipur was smooth. We hopped on a local bus in Pushkar to the train station, had lunch in a local roadside cafe and boarded our train for the five hour journey. We were pleasantly surprised to find a clean, well lit carriage full of large comfy individual seats with tray tables, some very smartly dressed Indians and a couple of tourists. We didn’t even know local trains like this existed for the money we could afford. They even had sockets in the walls! Perfect for our little laptop which Matt swiftly took out and plugged in. We think the English trains have something to learn here (or the ones we know of from a year ago!).
After a very pleasant train ride we were picked up by an auto (organised by the hotel) on arrival and were driven straight there. Lovely. The room turned out to be the nicest we have had yet with a balcony overlooking Lake Pichola and the fairytale City Palace.
We were so pleased with ourselves!
After a great nights’ sleep in a VERY comfortable bed we spent the day walking around Udaipur city taking in the sights and scouting the local restaurants for ideas for Christmas Day. ‘The Venice of the East’ is said to be the most romantic city in India and you can see why.
It’s also got the usual madness and is very touristy in the centre.
We explored the City Palace and thought about having a drink in the very pricey restaurant overlooking the Lake Palace Hotel but decided to get some pretty photos instead!
The city is famous for the floating Lake Palace (parts of Octopussy were filmed here as well as in the Monsoon Palace just out of the city) and is said to be quite extraordinary and the ultimate in luxury hotels. It was formerly the royal summer palace so you can just imagine just how grand it is. We decided to give it a miss this time as we had unfortunately forgotten to bring our fancy clothes and shoes. Shame.
The only Christmas decorations we saw in Udaipur...
apart from this little boy.
I decided to do a vegetarian cooking course on Christmas Eve with the wife of one of the owners in their home which was fun and I learnt a few things. Now I can cook YOU a curry mum! (It won’t be as good as yours though)
Some of the friendly faces we saw when we went ‘Christmas shopping’
And the obligatory cow
Christmas Day was ‘different’ for both of us and in retrospect we have now realised how homesick we were. We were feeling tired and finding it hard work with the constant hassle and noise but that passed once we started drinking our G&T’s by the lake at sunset!
We even bumped into an English couple that we met in Nepal and it was good to catch up and hear stories. Matt borrowed their sexy Santa hat for the photo.
We had a good evening and even had hangovers in the morning to prove it.
Unfortunately, due to poor communication in the hotel, the room we were in was booked from Boxing Day so we had to move out in to another room which was cheaper and not as fancy but at least it was in the same hotel. Not really what we would have liked to do that day... Matt decided to chill out in the room that day while I decided to go out for a walk. Near the City Palace is the Jagdish Temple, dedicated to Vishnu and his Garuda (every God has a form of transport that is specific to them, in this case it is the bird Garuda).
A Sadhu asleep at the foot of the temple
The architecture was very similar to what we saw in Kajuraho (where the Kamasutra temples are) so I could kind of understand what I was looking at which made a nice change!
I was told by a local boy there that it was carved out on one single piece of stone and took 25 years to build!
That afternoon, after deciding where we wanted to go after Udaipur and reserving seats on trains and buses, I suggested that we book a half-day horse safari through the Aravali Mountains the next day which Matt reluctantly agreed to. As it was Christmas we felt that a bit of James Bond would be in order so we met up with Debs and Glen and plonked ourselves in one of the many Hotel restaurants that show Octopussy (it is on every day in some places) and had a good meal in front of the TV! It was fun spotting the places that we had been or seen in the film.
We woke early the next morning to have breakfast and wait for our taxi to pick us up for the horse-riding to find that the owners had cocked up the booking and we needed to book the horses for another morning! Grr. After we had confirmed and double confirmed for the following day, we spent the rest of the day doing very little (I went to have my palm read which was interesting) and had dinner before going to a crafts village called Shilpgram. There was a 10 day festival going on and I thought it would be fun to see some traditional dancing and hear some local music. The boys were quite hesitant but as they said they didn’t mind we girls decided to drag them to along and after some haggling we jumped into an auto (it’s amazing how much you can fit in one of them!) for the 20 minute ride. We didn’t stay long as we were quite late getting there but I’m glad we made the effort and got to see the wailing Rajasthani dancers (they literally wail and make funny noises with their mouth while they dance) and some drumming and more dancing from North-East India.
Glen and Debs were leaving very early the next morning so we called it a night and went back to ours to pack as we were also due to leave the following night for the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra. Our pick up did arrive the next morning (this time half an hour earlier than expected), so we stowed the bags in a baggage area in the hotel and went. Funnily enough, no one at the ranch spoke English and after we took a couple of photos...
..we were plonked on two horses and led out of the ranch by two men on foot. After about 10 minutes I couldn’t help myself and tried to speak Hindi and English (Hinglish) to one of the men to ask them what was going on as we were expecting to go on a ‘horse safari’ where we could actually ride the horses! It turned out that they had us down for a 2 hour ride instead of a 4 hour one which we had organised with the hotel and they also assumed we couldn’t ride. Surprise surprise! Anyway, after some waiting around we went off for our ride with one guide on a horse and without anyone leading us. They were very pretty horses with funny shaped ears specific to Rajasthani Marwari horses.
Unfortunately, Matt’s beast was a feisty filly which he had to restrain constantly. It was a right handful as he would say. After an hour or so he got fed up and got off it as the horse just wasn’t having any of it. Only then did our guide do anything about the beast and jumped off his very docile animal to do a swap. Thankfully, Matt was much happier with his new calm obedient horse and so was I. We had a lovely four hour ride through the Aravalli mountains and local villages with not another tourist in sight!
After returning to the ranch we were given a small lunch and then driven back to the hotel to get washed and cleaned up ready for our journey.
Before getting on our bus at 10pm we went for a snack and a beer at a cafe by the lake which is where I met a single lady traveller who was riding her way around India on an Enfield. We got talking about what it was like to be a woman travelling in India and shared some experiences as we had been finding it quite tough recently in Rajasthan with the looks and questions we were being asked by locals. This is what everyone gets here to an extent but we think we have more attention due to me being an Indian woman with a white man (something that is as rare as rocking horse poo!). We know they are curious but we knew that some were also very disapproving of it all. So when you’re tired, hot, hungry or just plain fed up, there is only so much you can bear before the teeth become gritted a little. During my chat with the lady biker she said something that helped us a little from then on: ‘if you fight with India it will fight back’ along with her admitting that she hated India the first time she came! I think this helped galvanise us a little bit and we decided to let things wash over us a little more for a quiet life. As our spirits weren’t that high over the Christmas period we found it extra hard to be jolly and patient but after sharing stories and now Christmas is over, our spirits are feeling higher.
So with renewed hopes, we prepared to set off for a 6 hour overnight sleeper bus and our 12 hour daytime train journey to the Ajanta caves. This was to be the beginning of long period on the move.
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