Udaipur was the first of two stops I had in Rajasthan, the "Land of Princes" southwest of Delhi, which is an amalgamation of many formerly independent or semi-independent domains of the Rajputs, or warrior-tribal-landowning leaders. Rajasthan is an area shaped by long-running wars between tribes, as well as its varied but largely arid geography and invasions by the Mughals and British, to name only a few. It is home to many of India's prettiest temples and most well-known traditional crafts, and many of its cities -- Udaipur, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, etc -- are top Indian tourist destinations.
After landing at the impressively new airport, stage one was meeting up with M. W., who had flown into Ahmedabad that morning and took a car service 400 km to the hostel in Udaipur. It took me about two minutes of driving down the highway to tell that this place was different: no huge buildings, much less traffic, and far, far fewer people. Compared to the compression and intensity of Mumbai, driving into Udaipur was like exhaling a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding in for a week.
After arriving at the hostel, which was orders of magnitude nicer than what I had left behind in Mumbai, M. W. and I grabbed some lunch and decided to hire a rickshaw driver to show us some of the highlights of the town, since the day was already half spent. Udaipur's dominating physical features are its three lakes, which have given Udaipur its nickname of "Venice of the East."
Our rickshaw driver took us to many secondary tourist sites, ranging from a park honoring Maharana Pratap Singh and his beloved horse Chetak (who could get a post of his own), to various gardens, to a museum of the history of the local Mewar dynasty.
By far the most impressive sites, however, were a whitewashed Jain temple (of which I couldn't take pictures) and a cemetery featuring at least 100 marble and limestone mausoleums and monuments to the dead Mewar rulers. Wandering around the cemetery, of a scale hard to capture in a photo, I was hit with both the longevity of this family (more than 70 generations to date have ruled Mewar) and the absurdity of the tombs they have built themselves. Their monumentosity seems diminished by the crampedness of their arrangement. Monuments on top of monuments, the place felt, especially in its abandoned state, like a jungle of stone rather than a palace.
Our last stop for the day was the aptly named Sunset Point, where M. W. and I watched the sun go down over Lake Pichola, snapping pitures of Jag Mandir island, the Lake Palace Hotel, and the City Palace. The camera MC got me really takes beautiful shots.
The next day we hit Udaipur's big sites on foot. While this town is comparatively less dense and crazy than Mumbai, I don't mean that it wasn't as poor and in some ways much more backward. Unlike Mumbai and Delhi, which were built or rebuilt by Westerners, or else destroyed and more recently rebuilt by Indians, Udaipur was built by the Maharana especially because of its security, and as a result it remains essentially a time capsuled medieval Indian city. The roads are narrow and twist around and around with nothing like urban planning, and unlike Mumbai this town has open sewers, which I discovered could completely changed the character of a place. Walking down the street was often more chaotic than it was in Mumbai, and the addition of cows every few meters made things more confusing.
Still, we found our way to Jagdish Temple, a roughly 400-year-old example of Indo-Aryan religious architecture in the center of the old city of Udaipur. We hired a local guide, who explained much more about Hindu architecture than I can write about in the context of this post. Suffice it to say that these temples are every bit as symbolic as our cathedrals, but in classic Indian style manage to pack a lot more detail into much less space.
From there, we advanced to the City Palace, the seat of the Mewar custodianship, which ruled Mewar for 1,400 years and whose capital for the last four or five hundred has been Udaipur. We took an excellent, if propagandish audioguide, but there's really much too much to go over in this enormous palace for one post. I'll just include some of my favorite rooms.
From there we wandered around the town a bit more, before making our way to the waterfront and taking a ferry to Jag Mandir Island, where we saw the Lake Garden Palace, the last of Udaipur's major attractions (other than the Lake Palace Hotel, site of filming for the movie Octopussy, which we did not visit). The ferry included some beautiful views of Udaipur, and once you get there it's basically another nice Mewar palace, but with an overpriced coffee bar.
We saw some creepy-looking monkeys, walked back to the hostel, and that was a wrap for Udaipur.
Well, this was a mammoth post. I was intending to get to Jaipur, as well, but for your sanity and mine I think that will wait for tomorrow (whenever that is).
Thanks again to everyone who's been reading this and the kind comments you've been sending to my email. Hope all is well with you.
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