Saturday begins with a hectic start, at least for me, as the tour guide that Éva has booked through the hotel shows up far earlier than expected. So within 20 minutes I have to get dressed, have breakfast and show up in the lobby to meet the others. With only a slight delay I manage and off we are to visit the numerous sights of Udaipur. We start with Jagdish Temple built around 1650, a beautiful temple with lots of stone carvings. When we enter the temple we see a group of locals celebrating loudly inside the temple with music and dance - they radiate so much liveliness, happiness and spiritedness - a sight hard to picture in the churches back home.
Next on our list is the city palace, a huge and impressive complex of buildings with probably hundreds of rooms. The tour of the city palace alone tooku us about 1.5-2 hours but one could easily spend more time there. Next on our list is a boat tour on Lake Pichola, an artificial lake which has several islands one of which features Lake Palace, a palace which nowadays has become a hotel and covers the entire island. Lake Palace has become widely known as one of the settings of the 1983 James Bond Movie Octopussy.Have a look at the trailer below:
Last on our tour after a very tasty Banana Curry and a brief stop at an artist house was Nehru Garden, a big park with flower gardens and a lily pond, named after the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. The rest of the day it is up to us to discover Udaipur.
