5 Days in the Octopussy City

After escaping from the dirt and noise of Jodhpur, I'm happy to say that I had a wonderful time in Udaipur.  In keeping with my gradual transformation into a more relaxed tourist, a lot of my time in Udaipur was just spent relaxing.

As I mentioned in the title, James Bond fans will recognize Udaipur as the home to the movie Octopussy.  In case you haven't seen it for a few years, just about every hotel/restaurant does a showing at 7PM.  I did that my first night there...it was intersting how the movie made it seem like Udaipur, Agra and Delhi were the same place...they talked about flying into Delhi, showed a scene with the Taj in Agra and then the rest of the Indian part of the movie took part in Udaipur.  Also funny was the very poor bootlegged VCD copy our hotel used...there was at least a 2 second delay between the picture and the sound.

The main tourist site there is the City Palace, which was the home to the rulers of Udaipur who incidentally are the longest serving monarchs in the world...the dynasty goes back to the 6th or 7th century.  The palace itself is pretty good...however, I made the mistake of going in the morning when all of the tour groups were there.  This made it considerably less enjoyable and despite having a decent audioguide, I definitely rushed my way through there.    The other big site is the Lake Palace...where Octopussy lived in the movie.  The Maharaja has converted it into an ultraluxury hotel...the only way to get there (besides staying there) is to splurge on a dinner/lunch there...with the prices they wanted (I heard $75 for dinner) it wasn't worth it for me.  Instead, I ended up taking a sunset boat cruise around the lake.  The views of the Lake Palace, the City Palace and the sunset over the lake were wonderful.  As all my friends back home know, I like to cook.  So I ended up taking a cooking class while I was there.  I was joined by two Israelis and our teacher was a guy by the name of Vijay who runs a spice shop.  It was an outstanding class.  He started off talking about Indian spices (how to recognize good spices, how to make the actual spice mixtures they use, etc) and then showed us how to make 10 different dishes.  Of course, we got to eat all the dishes when we were done with them.

I also took a day trip up to see the fort of Kumbulgarh and the Jain Temples at Ranakpour.  It was a taxi tour set up by one of the local travel agencies.  Both the fort and the temple are incredible.  But the whole day was a bit rushed.  With how slow our taxi driver drove (~30-40KMh max) and the state of the roads, we only had 1.5 hours at each spot and didn't stop for lunch.  Both places are worth a visit...but if you're just doing as a day trip from Udaipur, you should just visit one...both are just too much for one day.

I know that all sounds like a lot, but I managed to spend a lot of time just chilling out in the lakeside cafes, sipping my chai, reading my book (currently reading Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe) and watching the world go by.