[2019]

OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS

9201 Udaipur & the Lake Place Hotel

From Delhi we flew to Udaipur, though the flight was interspersed with stopping at almost all all places we were going to visit later on.  In Udaipur we stayed in the Lake Palace hotel.  This is reckoned to be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, and we certainly thought it was.  We arrived just after sunset and boarded our boat to the hotel in the dark, with the hotel floodlit in the middle of the Lake.   

It is a small hotel, only two storeys high. But it is beautifully elegant -- it was built for the Rahnee.  It is built around a central courtyard with a beautiful formal garden and pools.  It has all the amenities, including a swimming pool, but it only has 20 or 30 bedrooms.  It was pure luxury, but having said that, beautiful as it might be, it was very westernised -- almost an offshoot of the American hotel circuit -- and I felt that something was missing. The main Palace itself, which we visited later, towered over the edge of the Lake.  There was no doubt that this was in India, every room oozed Indian culture.

From the hotel for we went to two nearby temple complexes.  The first was rather strange by Indian standards, being in the centre of a town and being walled. Near that we also went to a temple which was -- by total contrast -- on the edge of a lake.  By then we had begun to appreciate the form of Hindu temples, with their towering roofs and small chambers inside.  Worship is focused on the outside -- which is ideal for their hot weather.

Back in Udaipur we also visited the Rajah's own palace, and then his gardens with hundreds of fountains, including those that you walked through -- sometimes without knowing they were there until they started.

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