Change In Plans

LAKE PALACE HOTEL IN UDAIPUR

Greetings from Varanasi, the holiest city in Buddhism. Although we are in Varanasi, this post is about Udaipur, and is mostly an overadjectived gush about the Lake Palace Hotel.  Varanasi is a completely different story, which I will save for the next post.

On Friday evening we drove five hours from Jaisalmer to Rohet, just outside of Jodhpur. We stayed at the same hotel where we had eaten lunch on Tallulah’s birthday (after the wild wildlife safari) several days earlier. A couple of hours after we arrived on Friday night, Lu got a huge smile, and said, “I know this place. This is where we had cake!”

We drove another five hours on Saturday morning, arriving in Udaipur in the early afternoon. We stopped in Pakorna to admire the outside of the remarkably beautiful Jain temples there. No one is allowed in until noon, because ‘the gods are sleeping’. I’m still confused about Jainism, helpful comment on my post notwithstanding, but they have created some spectacular temples for sure.  We also stopped to see a colony of huge bats (”flying foxes”) hanging asleep in a couple of roadside willow trees.

We stayed at the Lake Palace in Udaipur, which has been something that glamour-loving Zola has been looking forward to for weeks. For anyone who remembers it, this palace was in the James Bond movie, ‘Octopussy.’

The palace was built in 1757 by the king (maharana) of Udaipur, to be used as a summer residence. As the name suggests, it is in the middle of a large lake. The summer-palace notion is somewhat funny, because the full-time residence (the City Palace) is only 500 meters away, on the shore of the same lake. As with many of the other Indian royal families, after losing the privy purse in 1971, they leased a palace to the Taj hotel group to increase revenue and cut costs.

Arriving at the Lake Palace by boat was awesome. The whole building is white, with black-marble floors, and huge high ceilings. The gardens and fountains in the palace courtyards are beautiful. Most important, every window looks out on the lake: facing east toward the old town and City Palace, or west toward the low mountains in the distance.

CITY PALACE COMPLEX FROM THE WATER

In the afternoon we went back to shore, and toured the City Palace. Udaipur is most renowned for having never been subjugated to (or allied with) the Muslims of the Mughal Empire. The Mewar royal family has ruled continuously since 623 AD. There is a helpful chronology, in English, of the 75 monarchs of the reign just inside the palace gate. It was interesting to see how frequently the throne was handed to an adopted son (5 out of the last 6 successions) because the king died with no male heir, despite multiple wives. There is something more to this story than I understand yet.

The City Palace was started in 1559 for defensive purposes. Udaipur saw off the last of the Muslim invaders in the early 1600s, and after that, the additions to the palace were mostly around recreation and leisure. In the courtyard there is a huge wall for elephant tug of war, and a great parade ground for show horses.

Because the golden age of Udaipur was in the 1800s, two to three centuries after the golden ages of Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, etc., the decorative style of the palace is very different from the ornate stone carvings and screens that we had seen elsewhere in Rajasthan.

A lot of the City Palace decor was imported from Europe (tiles from Delft, mirrors from Belgium, colored glass from the U.K.), and a lot of the artistry was in frescoes and paintings. Fashions change, I guess. The classic Indian ‘miniature’ style of fine-brushstroke realism is evident throughout the palace. The portraits are great, but the landscapes reveal how far behind the Indian painters were in understanding perspective, shading, and foreshortening.

One other manifestation of peaking in the 1800s is a room in the palace dedicated to the British Colonel, James Tod Jr., who befriended the kings in Rajasthan between 1806-1824. There was also an unnamed room which displayed sketches or photographs of the British agents to Udaipur from 1805 to 1947. Most were Lieutenant Colonels, and the (generally grim) portraits are a stereotype of stiff-upper-lip imperialism.

After touring the palace and a park, we went back out to the amazing Lake Palace. The kids and I went swimming in the old marble outdoor pool, with a great view out across the lake. My sybaritic son was blissful when one of the hotel staff brought him and Tallulah chocolates to eat while he luxuriated in the hot Jacuzzi. Not exactly roughing it.

India (the person) and I hired a babysitter, and had a sublime dinner without kids at the rooftop restaurant. There was confusion about the reservation, so they seated us at a lone table on a terrace facing the floodlit City Palace across the water.  The tasting menu of Rajasthani dishes (served in tiny bowls arranged on a platter) was extraordinary. More so was the light on the rippling water, and the reflection of the other palace. For us, it wins the ‘best ambience’ lifetime restaurant award hands down.

Unfortunately, again, we stayed only one night. This was a peak hotel experience - setting, building, service- unlike anything I have ever had before.

This morning we were up, out, and across to the shore, before 6 am to start the long trip to Varanasi. We will definitely make it back to Udaipur.