Udaipur - rest day

Monday February 11 - a rest day in Udaipur. I had no preconceptions of this town. There's a City Palace on the lake three or four km from the hotel. So we walked down to it after breakfast with a stop first at the Folk Art Museum.

A bit of road work... women doing some of the dirty work, leaving us amazed that they do it dressed so colourfully

The Folk Art Museum... everything so colourful...

One of their ceremonial dances

a regional mask

Ursula and Wendy looking more like cyclists on a rest day than the traditionally dressed ladies behind glass

We continue the walk through the normal downtown mass of motorcycles and tuktuks. This cow seems to have found a parking spot in the motor scooter area. Hope he doesn't eat the instrument panel.

The Jagdish Hindi temple in the middle of town...

...and then on to the City Palace which is now partly hotel and conference centre... as soon as we were in the grounds the noise level went down dramatically.

We ate lunch there and then took a boat trip on the lake rather than do the Palace Museums and interior - not enough time for both...

The palace and waterfront were in such contrast with the bustle of everyday life in the smaller streets only a few hundred metres behind the shoreline. I can see how people come up the "Venice of India" comparisons. I never expected to feel such richness. Our rest days so far have given us an insight into precolonial India and has me thinking that the biggest difference between western European life and Indian life in the last two or three hundred years is that the industrial revolution took place in Europe thereby setting it on a course that allowed European domination of trading. Maybe that's obvious to many of you who read this, but it's something I really hadn't contemplated in that way before. 

After the boat trip, we took a tuktuk back to the hotel and get ready for tomorrow's ride. It's now a matter of getting photos chosen and edited and getting an internet connection to post this.