Exploring Udaipur City

I woke up at around 8am with 40km still to go until Udaipur. I had a really good nights sleep! I opened the curtain watching the world go by and then put a film on until the bus conductor loudly started screaming “Udaipur, Udaipur” with a lot of other incomprehensible words. We got off the bus where we got an Ola to take us to our hostel for only 27 rupees thanks to my online discount. The hostel was right in the middle of Udaipur, on the island connected by bridges on Pichola lake.

We found our hostel, Whereabout Hostel, checked in and then chilled out on their roof terrace which had an awesome view of Pichola lake. We read through some of the Lonely Planet books which were there to get a better sense of what what here in Udaipur as we hadn’t done much research about here. After a little while our room was ready for us to check in, so we dumped our bags and then went to grab some lunch at a place called “Queen Cafe” that we had read about in Lonely Planet book. This place was tiny, and run by these two old people and their daughter Meera who also did a cooking school. As it turned out, Meera also did the cooking for the cafe and soon after ordering she brought us two biriyani. It was a bit odd as she just sat there and watched us eat the food, clearly doing the hard sell on her cooking school. After the food, she even insisted on taking us to her kitchen to show us where we’d cook. We were up for the idea, but it was so expensive so we would consider it long and hard.

We walked around the old part of the town over the little bridges which connected little islands and lakes and we were quite surprised at how pretty it was here after coming from Mumbai. Even though we’d had some good sleep on the bus, we were still quite tired, so we went to the hostel rooftop and had a little planning session for Udaipur and the next few places we were going. We knew of this view point which overlooked the Palace Island Hotel to watch the sun go down. This was a place which had been a main filming point in James Bond Octopussy and it was really nice and quite grand.

By this point we were quite hungry, and looked around a few different parts of town but they were all quite expensive. So we went back to near our hostel and got a Thali for 120 rupees. We were sold, and it was all fresh too, so we sat down and almost immediately there was a power-cut. Luckily the guy doing our cooking was creating enough light with the occasion flame up of his pan, so it didn’t delay our food. The power came back on and we were served an enormous thali which was delicious. We went back to the rooftop and tried to watch Slumdog Millionaire on the iPad, but there was no subtitles and half of it was in Hindi...oh well, so we just headed to bed for a good sleep.Read more