Where's the water?

We had a 5:30 a.m. bus departure this morning, heading south to Udaipur. We had told the guy at our hotel that we were leaving at 5:00, and he assured us he'd be up. We went downstairs just before 5, and spent about 15 minutes banging on doors for someone to wake up to open the locked gates for us so we could get out. I'm glad I didn't realise the impossibility of escaping the hotel before we spent 3 nights there, as I'd spend all night worrying that there would be a fire. Eventually we got out, found a rickshaw to the bus stand and headed out.

We got to Udaipur around 12:30 and wandered around a bit before choosing a hotel. Udaipur is a large town of about 400,000, surrounded by hills and centering around a huge lake. We walked around the alley streets, across the lake and walked along the ghats to Ambrai restaurant for lunch and a beer. The restaurant overlooks the lake and the Lake Palace Hotel, a ritzy place built in 1754, that was once the royal summer palace of Maharaja Jagat Singh II. It was used as a set in the James Bond movie Octopussy, and no one in town will let you forget this fact. We would have like to enjoy a martini (shaken, not stirred of course) with our meal, but beer is hard enough to find and we didn't press our luck.

After lunch we headed back across the lake, had a very quick dip in the cold water of our hotel pool, and relaxed for a while. In the evening, we walked around town some more before having dinner and heading to bed. Oh yeah, and the lake in Udaipur is completely dry at the moment, so we walked right across it, among the grazing cattle and kids playing cricket or flying kites. Not much of a romantic lakeside town.