Udaipur (Mis)adventures

"Udaipur has verily been described as the 'City of Sunrise' and the 'Venice of the East.' Here the visitor will find his dream of India come true, for the city combines real beauty with the picturesque associations of a great and glorious past" The Handbook of India, 1958Upon booking our train tickets to Udaipur, my travel companions, Kristen and Anna-Lisa, neither of whom had traveled in India before, expressed a lot of concern over the way Indian travel works. "We're only on the wait-list for tickets? It's an overnight train? We have to arrive at 3:30 AM? What do you mean by Hijra? We're taking an overnight train and going straight to school on Monday?" And that sort of thing. I assured them that, yes, it all seems very risky, but traveling in India is generally blessed by Karma and magic and that their concerns only marked the coming of a strange and wonderful adventure.

Our train, naturally, was three hours behind scedule arriving to Jaipur on Friday night, but we passed through a time-warp on the way to Udaipur and somehow arrived there only half-an-hour late. Stepping out of the station at 4 AM after a partial-night's sleep on train beds, we found a rickshaw to carry us down winding, unlit, cow-scattered streets to Hotel Udai Niwas. Arriving after-hours to a hotel in India, one finds not a night receptionist, but the entire staff of the hotel sleeping on the lobby floor. We disturbed one such employee to show us to our surprisingly adorable room.

DAY 1
There is really only one thing to do in Udaipur, so as soon as we were fully recovered Saturday morning, we headed straight for the City Palace. There, one finds breathtaking views of the huge lake in the city and the beautiful palace buildings that appear to be floating on the water... That is, one finds these views when there is water in the lake... Right now, just before monsoon season, Rajasthan is at is driest. Pichola lake, as it turns out, is Pichola field around this time of year. We looked out of the ornate palace windows to find not the fairy-tale "Venice of the East," but a green, slimy expanse of landscape spotted with grazing cows. I smirked and commented to my slightly crestfallen friends, "Wow, I bet that's beautiful with water in it!"

Water or not, Udaipur is still a beautiful little city. The palace is room after room of amazing artifacts and architecture. My personal favorite part of the palace was the diorama displaying mannequins of the Maharaja and his favorite horse, or as I dubbed it, his favorite horselephant.



After lunch in a cute rooftop restaurant advertising its "view" of the "lake," we began wandering toward the Bharatiya Lok Kala Museum, a museum of folk arts a little way out of the city. The excursion would have been a leisurely afternoon stroll had I not been assaulted by a holy cow within the first five minute of the walk. It is true what you've heard, cows wander the streets of every city in India just like pigeons or squirrels. Lord Shiva himself was a fan of bovines, so it would be a huge offense in Hinduism to treat a cow with anything less than adoring reverence. I have always known urban holy cows to be sweet, docile creatures, having been raised on food-offerings and blessings. I felt I had no reason for concern then, when one such cow walked past me within a few inches in the narrow street. But I was proven wrong when the creature decided to start rearing its mighty head (horns first) right at me, doing its best to impale me, first in the thigh, and then in the hand as I tried to escape. I am now slightly bruised, but as I understand, very blessed. I'm sure I'll treasure that memory for years to come.

Cow-attack aside, we made it to the museum without any problems. The museum was deserted, painfully hot, and only mildly interesting inside, but we stuck around long enough to catch the daily Rajasthani dance performance and puppet show in the museum's little auditorium. There, we witnessed a Vaudevillian display of traditional dances, a man balancing ten huge pots on his head while walking on glass, and some puppet plays. The power went out in the auditorium for several minutes during one dancer's solo, but it came back on in time for us to see a strange sex-change puppet story. Your typical boy-meets-girl, girl-turns-into-another-boy traditional folk tale. I feel I may have lost a bit of content in that story's translation.

Day 2
Having already done almost everything there was to do in Udaipur, my travel companions and I concluded our second day in the city was best spent shopping. First, in a dingy silver-smith shop we bought earrings and sat sipping chai and sharing stories with Vinod, the shopkeeper. He showed us a solid silver bar, explained his medieval-looking jewelry scales, and told us all about how he inflates prices for certain groups of foreigners. Even with this insider knowledge I couldn't talk him down on the price of the bracelet I wanted.

Several shopkeepers later, we found ourselves sitting for chai once again, this time with Rakesh, a painter with a truly amazing display of ear-hair (see picture). Amused that we could speak a little Hindi, Rakesh was happy to chat with us for a very long time. He put aside our skepticism about the authenticity of his miniature paintings when we asked how he does it. "I'll show you!" he said. He sprang from his seat to a tiny cupboard in the back of the tiny store to pull out a set of tiny paints and tiny paint brushes. He grabbed Anna-Lisa's hand and squinting through his glasses, methodically painted a tiny elephant on her thumb-nail. "The biggest animal on your little finger!"
Monsoon season began as soon as it was time for us to think about heading toward the train station. We took shelter in a small cafe and the skies opened up for flash-flood caliber rainfall. We made our way out of Udaipur through several inches of flowing water on the street and pounding rain soaking us entirely through.
We three, soaking wet, white girls then sat in the train station working on our Hindi homework. This was a novel enough sight to generate a huge audience of amused Indian onlookers, starers, over-the-shoulder-readers, and picture-takers.

We made it onto the train after the typical chaos of maybe/maybe not having seats, fighting with ticket collectors, and finally settling in next to an ancient man with a deadly cough. Needless to say, no one had slept much on the train by the time we rolled into Jaipur at 6AM. Luckily, in one more stroke of Indian travel magic, school was canceled today due to a nation-wide workers strike.