Udaipur Masala

Friday 9th May

- return of the killer GPO
- Sahelion-ki-Bari gardens
- Moti Magri
- boating on Lake Pichola
- the Jag Mandir
- high tea in the Durbar Hall

India can be a tiring place that tries the patience and confounds common sense, all of which can get on top of the most determined of outlooks. the way the country works sometimes appears so ad hoc that you wonder how anything ever gets accomplished. on the other hand, it is clear that there are those more aware of the possibilities of tourism and eager to extract their pound of flesh whenever they can. today gave many examples of these traits, but it started waking after an excellent night's sleep for a change. we were aiming for a 10am trip to the GPO to post home another batch of things that we had somehow bought, after first stopping off at Philippa's tailor once more. a little early, we had a mixed fruit lassi and a chocolatine again a few doors down at the bakery, where the pastries were not fresh as we had assumed from their new arrival on the service counter but instead rather stale and clearly exhumed from the back of a cupboard somewhere. the clientele consisted of a heavily bearded and frazzled German man with a penchant for kicking Edd's chair 'accidentally.' we picked up Phil's trousers - fine work, she happily noted - and caught a suspiciously unhaggled rickshaw the two or three kilometres into the new city to the GPO.

our rickshaw driver claimed his name was Ganesh, which seemed at least unlikely, and he told us that the GPO did not wrap parcels, which seemed doubly so. one might have at least half assumed that this was a scam to get us to use a local shop, but he was in fact correct - the GPO did not have a parcels service. how foolish of us to think so. we took our stuff to somewhere that did, not a tailors but a small cubbyhole of a shop stuffed with sportswear, swimming kits, tennis balls and cheap trophies. the woman who ran it was a pleasant and talkative soul with fine English. she and her son sewed up our bags in cotton which may have lacked the usual GPO finesse but featured the addition of wax seals, plus three rather than one customs declaration forms, which were ineffectually sellotaped to the outside of the package, rather than being sewn into the fabric as we had previously experienced. we spoke about Udaipur, our plans and respective backgrounds, as you do. she said that she was thankful that Udaipur was free of the sort of pollution that you get elsewhere in Rajasthan, but we privately agreed that this could only be true if one was talking about air quality, and even this was stretching the truth a bit thin. she and her son repeatedly waved away the beggars that had congregated outside a shop containing Westerners - like many Indians with whom we have spoken to at length, she did not have any time for them whatsoever.

back at the GPO, we sought out somewhere to at last send our parcel and were led through several backrooms filled with mailed or shredded paper until we emerged on the staff side of the main post office room itself! a man serving the public acknowledged us and asked us to wait. another customer came in as we had and did the queue-jumping trick, but since we were already on the wrong side of the glass it seemed to matter less somehow. he was sending a sack tied with a bit of string - it made our carefully sewn package appear very over the top. mind you, regular readers may recall that we'd seen a motorcycle in Jaisalmer wrapped in sacking and emblazoned with an address, so it seems that you can send anything here. when we were served, the staff member slapped on the paid stamp - and then asked us to find the tape to secure it, since (like the stamps, here) it was not backed with glue. someone else helped us to find that and then we were left to do what you have to do so often in India - cross your fingers and have faith, in this case that the package would ever be seen again. the whole process from wrapping to sending took a full two hours.

by now, we were certainly ready for a change of scenery. Ganesh appeared, Mr Benn's shopkeeper style, as soon as we finally left the GPO. we drove several kilometres through the new city with its wide, almost boulevard-style roads and actual pavements to the Sahelion-ki-Bari, or 'Garden of the Maids of Honour.' this had been built and laid out essentially to give the women of the palace something to do. fed by waters from the nearby Fateh Sagar Lake, it's a small but perfectly formed little place lined with bright colours and wedding-cake style fountains with accompanying stone elephants jetting water from their trunks.



there was an entrance fee, but it was only R5 for a change. we enjoyed a constitutional through the lush greenery, soaking in the change of pace.


at the centre of the gardens was a strange, free 'education centre' which appeared to be where teaching materials go to die. the large room was filled with a random selection of stuffed crocodiles, pickled snakes, volcano diagrams, logic tests, models of the human body and musty displays that looked hand drawn by students focusing on physics, optics, the weather and so on. everything was coated in dust and disuse and the room smacked of some extended joke without a punchline.

deciding to walk to the nearby Moti Mogri hill park, our guidebook and local maps combined were of little use and the end result was an extended hike along hot roads while being passed by yet more of the country's never-ending supply of severely adolescent-acting young men on motorbikes, one of whom tried to knock the sun-sheltering umbrella out of Philippa's hand. when he again appeared on foot as we stopped to get a drink, she made to hit him with it and we have to admit that we were gratified to see that he was genuinely perturbed.

the road skirted the edge of the Fateh Sagar lake, home to Nehru Park, a small island-bound gardens. we finally found the entrance to Moti Mogri and paid our admission fee, to be checked immediately by a guard standing behind us who had watched the entire sale. mind you, way back at the Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur, the guard had noticed that we had not been given the correct tickets, so sometimes the constant bureaucracy is useful.

the Moti Mogri is small wooded hill containing one of two bits of interest, not a major destination by any means but a pleasant diversion nonetheless.

crowned by yet another statue of Pratap Singh on his bloody horse, it's also home to the Moti Mahal, the now thoroughly ruined but atmospheric former palace of Udai Singh, where he lived while the Lake Pichola palace was being built down in the city that bears his name. one evocative, tiered tower still remains.

shrouded in mostly silence and occasional birdsong and with good views over Fateh Sagar and Nehru Park below, it was a fine place to rest after our long slog from Sahelian-ki-Bari.

navigating a coach load of gabbling Indian tourists at the entrance fee point who gave the impression of being headless chickens, we haggled a rickshaw to take us back into the old city with the aim of visiting the Jag Mandir by boat, jettisoning our afternoon nap once more. we paid - again - for the 'honour' of entering the wider complex grounds and got a very expensive ticket each for a boat ride around the lake and a stop off at the Jag Mandir. we had some time before the next trip and found ourselves pleasantly repeating our drinks beneath the fruit bats of yesterday.

fruit bats, with accompanying tree, Udaipur

with a little encouragement to get on with it after inaction due to low numbers, a grand total of five people and one hugely bored boatman set off in a simple ferry with bright, coloured plastic seats on a short float around Lake Pichola.

we chugged past the City Palace complex, again marvelling at how much of it there was, down to the shallows near our hotel's end of the lake, then past the Lake Palace Hotel itself. bar two people on the rooftop dining area, it seemed bereft of guests.

one of our fellow boaters was a Delhi tour operator with an afternoon free. he told us that, however low we thought the lake was, a few years ago it had been so dry that rickshaws were driving guests right out to the Lake Palace along the dry lake bed! he also said that statements had been made by the authorities asking people not to use the lake as a laundry and so on, but they had done very little themselves to make any effort to clean it. directing all of the drains somewhere else other than the lake would surely be a start. the Lake Palace still exudes a certain serenity, but it lacked the isolation that had surely been intended without a good, deep water surround. perhaps we'd try it out one day just after the monsoons. assuming one of us won the lottery.

having read up about the Jag Mandir, we were quite excited to see it, but it was a major disappointment. this was not the fault of the structures themselves, but the palace hotels' designs. you could still find a few green marble pagodas and one impressive tiered building, but the main purpose of the island appeared to be corporate events.


one whole area had been turned into a bar, another a restaurant. both wanted R195 for a lassi, R125 for a coke (which is like charging over £2 for a can in the UK). half of the island was out of limits to us, due to some poorly explained but vigorously enforced reasons. our guidebook made it sounds like a great place to go for a wander, but the only place to wander here was back to the boat - never mind the sign suggesting we 'stay as long as you like to soak in the ambiance.'

stone elephants at the Jag Mandir, with the Lake Palace in the background.

all of that said, we enjoyed the boat ride journey itself most of all. even at a low level, we had been nowhere near such a body of water in five weeks - and we were sailing on it! just floating over the gently rippling waters on an unaccountably breezy day beneath warm sunshine and scattered white clouds was entirely narcotic. it reminded us of the seaside, England and home. never mind that the trip cost 33% more than a year ago, as much as one night's room rent. each.

worth it for the view - Lake Pichola, Udaipur

having spent so much money already today in the services of living the so-called high life, we decided we'd try high tea in the Durbar Hall again, and today there was no conference. an Edwardian-era ballroom lined with serious looking portraits of important persons, huge oversized glass chandeliers, weaponry and heavy carpets suspended from the ceiling.

it speaks of a time long gone and a past-time no longer practised - except for moments such as this. we took tea in the adjoining sunny terrace overlooking the Lake Palace. for our payment - again a huge increase on the reported amount of a year ago - we received a very large and heavy silver teapot of excellent, freshly brewed tea, which was - appropriately enough, considering the colonial nature of the venue - clearly British rather than Indian. we also got four slices of a fine, light madeira cake and two technically perfect scones, accompanied by the weird non-jam that counts for preserves in India, and a pot of cream out of can.

the liveried staff were strong on service and the long terrace was lined with hand-painted Flora Danica crockery. nearby, a tabla player and a colleague striking a delicate instrument with tiny hammers created a beautiful if repetitive noise. we ate our scones in stitches, not having eaten anything remotely as full of carbohydrates - or as stodgy - since well before leaving the UK. overpriced and faintly ridiculous, the experience was a one-off and a good laugh that not even the luxury hotel's dirt cheap tactic of adding unheralded VAT to the bill, increasing the costs still further, could dampen.

tired and stomachs full from the still-expanding scones, we rolled back across the bridge for a very brief shower and then paid all of our bills for the Panorama in full due to an early start tomorrow before popping around the corner to see Chris and Abby. together, we walked back into town in search of somewhere Chris had read about, but while their beers were lovely (and Chris got invited to someone's village, possibly due to the turban-like head-dress he was wearing with aplomb), their food was overpriced. yet the venue literally next door that shared the same entrance was - somewhat stupidly - very reasonably priced, so we had a long and thoroughly enjoyable meal and a chat.

we really like Chris and Abby. real people persons and at least as interested in those they meet as the various sights in the countries on their world tour, they appear to be both engaging, outgoing, relaxed, entirely content with themselves and easy with those they meet. we very much hope that we will be able to continue our nascent friendship back in England as we have agreed, although there is still a remote chance that we will see them in Gujarat.

the evening came to an end well past 11 in a tiny little guest house-cum-someone's home called the Queen's Cafe, opposite Chris and Abby's hotel. we would have loved to have continued into the night, but we needed to leave our hotel by 6am in order to catch our train, so goodbyes had to be said with regret. we struggled back up the narrow stone stairs to our room, finalised our packing and said goodnight to a fine and hefty day to a soundtrack of a far off but possibly approaching storm.

the inherent frustrations of India would stop many other countries in their tracks, but somehow this vast place crawls along slowly, frequently impractical and rarely efficient but firm in a belief that things will work out in the end. the lives of the people we meet and speak with are so different from the tourists happy to spend £2.50 on boiled rice in a country where it should never cost more than 40p for a tourist and just a few pence for an Indian. the history and sights of the place are matched in beauty and detail only by the neglect much of it is shown by the authorities and many of those who live here. the culture seems to be so fundamentally ad hoc that it's easy to wonder if any plans are ever made about anything, or if plans are even considered. India's 'problems,' both socially and culturally, are too vast to allow minor considerations like recycling or the environment to interrupt finding the next meal or ensuring that you have a roof over your head for the night. we have these things to go back to in London - and take it entirely for granted. every day stimulated by so many weighty but important thoughts to take to your bed. but this evening we were also reminded of Chris and Abby's always positive public persona, notwithstanding some of the experiences that we have all had. India can certainly break you, but it can also energise, excite and amaze. even if they haven't yet quite got scones right.

missing you all!

edd & philippa