Week 15, Udaipur the Lake City

I’m sitting in Mumbai after my 2.5 week journey through India, finally catching up on my blog entries. I met my mom at the Mumbai airport on 15 October as planned. She had a 16 hour flight from Atlanta to Mumbai, but she wasn’t too tired. On the 16th we flew to Udaipur.

The highlight of our stay in Udaipur was Diwali on the 17th. Diwali is the big Hindu festival, like Christmas for the Christians. The whole town was decorated with lights, and streamers, and everyone lit little oil lamps outside their homes and shops. The main square outside the Jagdish Temple was especially decorated and there we load of fireworks all night long.


I hadn’t been feeling well since my last day in the office, so I spent most of Diwali in bed at the hotel, the Mahendra Prakash Hotel. The hotel was nice and had a pool. Our room was at the far right on the first floor. The hotel also had 3 turtles that crawled around in the grass by the pool.


Then after Diwali Euan joined us, and we had one more day in Udaipur. Udaipur is known as the lake city. It’s a really beautiful little town on the shore of a big lake. There is a big palace (the City Palace) on a little hill overlooking the town, and two palaces built on islands in the lake. On our last day we went on a boat cruise on the lake. One of the island palaces (Jag Niwas) is a hotel that only guests can go to, but the cruise stopped on at the other palace (Jag Mandir). Here is a view of the City Palace from Jag Mandir.


On the 19th we took an overnight train to Jaipur. This time we took the 2AC class, which is one better than the 3AC we took back from Goa. Here Euan and I are on our top bunks.