Tuesday 29th january

Tuesday 29^th January

 

A long weekend – what bliss!

 

We tried to fit as much leisure as possible into the extra day.  Pete went up and down stairs to the garage workshop every few hours to put extra layers of varnish on his beautiful new drawers, specially designed to hold workshop items on 2XS – much better than having them crammed into narrow, unwieldy cupboards, or jammed under the couches.  But he did not go near the dodgy toilet and its associated problems, so it was a real holiday…

 

At 4.30 we had our first ever 3D movie experience.  I wasn’t sure if I would like 3D – I had heard that some people get motion sickness, and this is something I prefer (strangely…) to avoid.  But no!  We were both wildly enthusiastic about the whole 3D thing.  Such fun!  It was all a bit confronting – Life of Pi, which features a large amount of heaving sea and a very realistic shipwreck.  But – we loved it!  The scenes of Pi (aka Piscine Molitor Patel) surviving on his sturdy little lifeboat in the company of Richard Parker, a gloriously large and ferocious Bengal tiger, will stay in my memory forever.  A great movie!

 

India #78

 

Our experience of Udaipor was fortunate indeed.  We arrived in a beautiful magical fairytale city, with palaces floating on the edge of beautiful blue lakes.  I have since read other traveller’s tales and found them full of disappointment and mockery; the gorgeous palace in the middle of the lake is usually in the middle of a dusty plain…. In Monty East’s travel diary, he writes, “Udaipor is built around 4-5 artificial lakes, which because of the drought are virtually dry.”  So how lucky were we, to be there just after monsoon, and to see the city as it should be, with people swimming, washing, boating, using the lakes so happily.  It was also the first place we had been to which was a bit hilly, and I for one liked this very much.  I think Tasmanians are just used to hills and to having streets go up and down as well as round and round.

         

Our driver in Udaipor was Shambu.  I met him in a tiny shop just around the corner from our hotel, where they sold beautiful little leather books and albums, all made locally.  He was hanging out there talking to his friends, and he looked at me most longingly – surely I would like a lovely driver with a lovely autorickshaw??  Well yes I would… He was a delightful young bloke and we enjoyed his company very much, although he didn’t speak anywhere near as much English as our previous drivers.  He took us to a lakeside haveli (I think this is a generic word for a house turned into a hotel/restaurant…) for lunch and we sat there very happily on the edge of the lake looking at the floating palaces and the people disporting themselves in the water.  There were lots of women washing their clothes and their bodies in the ghats.  To my great surprise, the women were happily stripping off their clothes and bathing topless.  Pete somehow managed to miss every single sighting; he was always looking in the wrong direction, too sad!  I couldn’t work out why the women were so immodest, comparatively, when it is such a religious country, with women generally swathed from neck to ankle (other than the obligatory bare midriff).  Maybe they were of a lower caste and therefore invisible to the general population?  This wasn’t something I could ask Shambu….

         

We went back for a rest and a swim in the pool, and then had dinner in the hotel restaurant where we found three other lots of Australians and nobody else, quite amazing!  We badly needed a swim because it was SO hot in our room… The electricity wasn’t working and we couldn’t turn on the air-conditioner so we lay and sweltered, every day that we were there until the very last day when we suddenly realised that in fact the staff went around and turned off a switch outside each room as soon as the occupants had left for the day.  Everyone else was wise to this and turned their switch back on when they came back in.  So we needn’t have lain on our bed groaning with heat and bathed in a large pool of sweat at all!

         

Udaipor is famous, amongst other things, for miniature paintings.  The place is heaving with “art schools” where artists from very young children to much older people sit with magnifying glasses painting tiny gorgeous little pictures.  They were just lovely but once again there were TOO MANY.  Sensory overload!  I only bought one, a tiny tiger for Pauline.

         

While I was being overwhelmed by paintings and painters, Pete was struggling away in a shiny new travel agency trying to negotiate tickets Udaipor-Mumbai.  The agency all looked very swish, and the bloke in there was handsome and helpful.  But…the power was out, his computer didn’t work, the phone was down, he couldn’t send emails, it was all very complicated and the whole process took about two hours.  I was quite happy walking up and down the hilly little street looking in shop windows.  A nice young man came and talked to me, wanting to know where I was from and what I thought of Ricky Ponting.  How nice, I thought.  He also wanted to know what the weather was like in Melbourne, so we discussed that for a while.  He told me he was on his way to Australia the following week, with a display of artefacts from Nepal.  Well gollygosh how interesting.  I gave him lots of useful info, and then out came the sales pitch… The exhibition of artefacts from Nepal was in fact at that very moment just around the corner in the exhibition hall under that palace; maybe I would like to come and spend some money???