Chilling out in Bundi

Bundi is a really lovely town. There's a relaxed atmosphere here, the people are really friendly and we've been getting less hassle from touts than in other places we've visited. Last night on the way home we got mobbed by a group of kids playing in an alleyway - they were all smiling and screaming and cheering, and they completely surrounded us asking for us to take a photo of them (Stu: they also pinched me!)! Here they are:

Bundi is overlooked by an old ruined palace and a fort on a steep hillside. We went to visit the palace yesterday and you can explore a long way inside it, up through lots of little alleyways and stone staircases that open on to big open rooms decorated with murals and mirrorwork dating back to the 1600s. The whole place is full of bats and you can look out of the palace up to the fort battlements which are covered in monkeys.

Views from the ruined palace:


A parakeet in the palace (we see these parakeets everywhere; they're very pretty):

17th-century murals:

Yesterday we took a long ride in an autorickshaw to a huge waterfall in the countryside near Bundi. We drove through lots of villages (with children waving to us as we went by) and also through great expanses of empty land. At one point we drove around a big snake in the road, and later a huge sambar deer leapt across the road in front of our rickshaw and bounded off into the scrubland. The waterfall was beautiful and we climbed down to the bottom, past a busy Shiva temple, to have a swim in the pool at the bottom - so nice to have a cool swim after all the heat and the dust!

View from the top of the waterfall:


Swimming in the pool:

We're going to relax for a couple more days here in our gorgeous haveli room before heading on to Udaipur. Our room looks out over a small lake, and it's a lovely place to just sit and read.

And one more thing. This is what Boris Johnson would look like if he was reincarnated as a buffalo (Stu - this is possibly my favourite picture ever, well it's certainly up there with the best):