Safe in Udaipur
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
21
29
Trip End
Apr 01, 2009
Udaipur,
Rajasthan,
India
Thursday, November 27, 2008
So although the Taj Mahal was amazing, we were happy to be leaving Agra, but had decided to change our plans to miss out most of Rajasthan as although it sounds beautiful we were both feeling pretty jaded by all the endless touts and rickshaw drivers and snow globe sellers etc. As Dan mentioned, he'd managed to get some tickets for the cricket in Delhi so after a few nights in Udaipur we would pop back to Delhi and then head on down south to Bombay for a few days and then to Goa and Kerala.....less time beating off people with a stick and more time lying on the beach.
Sounds good, so we boarded the train at Agra (which actually turned up on time!) and settled down for the night in a relatively empty carriage. We stopped in Jaipur in the middle of the night, and I had just reached into my bag to get my earplugs (noisy Australians arguing over which bunk was theirs) when our mobile started ringing. I was still half asleep and the mobile was zipped into a little pocket in my sleeping bag, but I managed to work out that it was Dan's home number. Wondering what had happened that would mean Dan's parents would be ringing to wake us up in the middle of the night, I answered it and spoke to Dan's mum.
"Oh my God thank God you're alright, where are you?" she asked.
"On the train" I answered, a little confused.
"But you're not on your way to Bombay?"
We were about 400 miles from Bombay and it was the middle of the night, so we hadn't heard about what had been going on there for the last 4 hours. Terrorists had started shooting people with machine guns at the Taj Mahal Hotel, India's most prestigious hotel, and were rounding up hundreds of hostages - looking specifically for people with British and American passports.
We had changed our plans and were going to be in Bombay in less than a week - thank God we didn't have enough money to be staying in upmarket hotels. But then we heard that they had also opened fire in the booking hall of the city's main railway station, and killed several people in one of the popular backpacker cafes which was mentioned in a novel we'd both just read so we'd been planning on going there. So many if's and but's, and we were still hundreds of miles away, but we both felt scared and so lucky to be safe.
We started thinking irrationally...what if this was part of a coordinated attack on lots of different tourist areas, what if there was a bomb on the train, what if there were gunmen waiting for us when we stepped off the train in Udaipur?!! But the attacks were only in Bombay, and we were safe on the train. We eventually got back to sleep, and woke up at 6am to find that the train was running 2 and a half hours late (not bad, and its probably too much to ask for the train to depart and arrive on time, although they ought to take some lessons from the Trans Siberian people as that train was only 6 minutes late after running for 6 days!!).
Everything was calm in Udaipur, and we found a rickshaw to take us to our hotel. We noticed how clean the streets were, and how quiet it was compared to grotty noisy Agra. As is always the case when you have booked a hotel we were nervous that we would turn up and it would be a complete hole, but it was beautiful, and we were so happy to be there after a very surreal night on the train. We had booked a standard room, but I managed to convince Dan to let us look at the "deluxe" room, and then bugged him until he agreed that we could probably afford the extra 4 pounds a night for a balcony, four poster bed and one of those really cool "rain showers".
We spent most of the day doing nothing, trying to catch glimpses of the news and still completely shocked by everything that had happened. We actually spent the next 4 days doing pretty much nothing - we stayed in Udaipur longer than we'd planned as the cricket had been cancelled, and we were trying to decide whether we neede to change our plans or not. We had a lovely hotel, and it is a pretty chilled out place so it was nice to just relax for a bit, and take the chance to see the James Bond film Octopussy a couple of times! The second most prestigious hotel in India is the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur - it's an island that's a hotel, or a hotel that's an island...either way the effect is that it looks like it's floating in the middle of the lake. Quite a lot of Octopussy was filmed in the hotel, and around the rest of Udaipur......in 1983. And they still wheel out the TV and show the film at most of the town's restaurant...every night! Not a bad film, some terrible acting by Roger Moore and co, but such crackingly cheesy lines as during the requisite car (rickshaw) chase....
"I think we've got company"
"Well this is a company car" before the turbo-powered rickshaw performs a wheelie to escape from the baddies.
So terrible that we were both in stitches both times we saw it!
We spent one afternoon doing touristy stuff, and visited the City Palace, which was quite pretty, but full of historical paintings of the Maharajah of Udaipur hunting and shooting tigers/bears/leopards, and kind of spoiled by all the technical lighting and sound equipment dotted around everywhere ready for the nightly sound and light show, which we both agreed we would avoid at all costs.
We didn't really do anything else of note while we were in Udaipur, just enjoyed relaxing round our hotel and walking round the town. But it wasn't until the second night at the hotel that we discovered its star attraction (apart from Octpussy of course!). They have a tortoise living there, and she is 70 years old!! At first we thought it might be a statue that we hadn't noticed before but then she started trotting across the floor towards us (she was moving pretty fast, probably faster than the average 70 year old human!!). We looked for her on the landing every time we went up an down the stairs, and the next day we were even more excited when we saw a miniature version trotting along beside its mummy...the 70 year old biddy tortoise has a 6 month old baby (IVF?????) Very very cute, I want one!
So that was Udaipur, we had planned to go swimming on our last day there as some of the posh hotels let the pikeys like us pay to use their pools, but we woke up and it was pouring down with rain.
We had spent a long time thinking about whether to carry on as we'd planned to before all the attacks in Bombay, or whether to change our plans. We had been desperate to make it down to the beaches in the south, but lots of reports were saying that they expect further attacks and Goa is one place they think may be targeted, although thankfully this has not been the case as yet. We already had a ticket booked from Madras to Singapore for after Christmas, and we managed to change the booking to fly out of India on December 2nd, 3 weeks earlier than planned. It was a difficult decision as we had both been excited about spending a couple of weeks exploring India, but hey, things are never meant to go to plan, are they?
