Making Tea on Mount Abu

Here's a video of Charles, our guide for our Mount Abu trek, making some Masala Chai (spiced tea) from scratch, on top of a mountain. Yum!

We really enjoyed our trek with Charles, you can view his blog by clicking here. Click the 'About Me' section to get in touch with him!

Trekking in the Aravalli Hills

We've just got back from trekking with Charles in around Mount Abu, which was fantastic! It was a great trek, really off the beaten track, through the undergrowth and across rocky outcrops. It's much cooler up in the hills which was really pleasant. Charles pointed out really interesting things along the way: ancient shrines on the hillsides, peacock feathers, porcupine quills, bear droppings, praying mantis, bitter red berries called 'falsa' which we ate, and a kind of cactrus called 'punsia' (the sap from this is used in an ayurvedic remedy for arthritis). When we got to the top of the bit we were climbing the view was incredible - we were so high up it was like looking down from an aeroplane! We gathered tinder and Charles then made a fire and cooked up some masala chai, and we rested sipping tea and admiring the view - bliss! On the way back down he took us via a small camp by a cave where a nomadic woman was churning butter while her husband was away with the cows. It was really interesting to hear about the nomadic way they live.

Stu and Charles:
Looking out at the view (Ania in the foreground, Charles silhouetted on the left):

The trip lasted about three hours, and then on the drive back into town Charles took us by his favourite 'chaat' (snacks) stall, where we all ate fresh samosas, bhel puri (puffed rice, salad and spicy sauce) and pani puri (small puffs of thin pastry with a watery bean sauce) - totally delicious! The whole afternoon was really enjoyable and the trekking was the main reason we came to Mount Abu so I'm very pleased to say it has made the visit here worthwhile.

Chaat stall:

If Bognor Regis was in India...

The Rajasthani dance and music evening in Udaipur was brilliant. It took place in an open-air courtyard inside an old haveli, and featured a puppet show with traditional Rasjasthani marionettes, plus several dances by women with pots of fire on their heads, or covered in bells, and all accompanied by musicians singing and playing drums. The final number was a woman who danced balancing pots on her head - each time she went to get another pot we thought she couldn't possibly balance any more, but she ended up dancing with a collosal stack of 10 pots on her head!

On our final day in Udaipur, we took a boat ride around the lake, which was very picturesque and a lovely way to spend an afternoon. On the way back we saw the Maharani's palace guard doing some exercises, all in a very impressive uniform (with the senior guard sporting a really incredible moustache). In the evening we wacthed fireworks from the rooftop of our hotel as it is the beginning of a 10-day Durga festival. We both really enjoyed Udaipur - it was much friendlier and cleaner (relatively speaking) than other places we've been. There's a really green movement to keep the city clean and a lot of the guesthouses have solar panels on the rooftops. We also had one of the best meals we've eaten here - an amazing cheap thali in a place across town where all the locals go and eat - not touristy at all, and people keep coming round to heap more rice, curries and chapatis on your place until you can't eat any more. And all for R70 (about 99p)!

View from the boat across the lake in Udaipur. In the distance is the monsoon palace on the hilltop, and in the foreground is a posh hotel on an island in the middle of the lake (both locations feature in Octopussy, of course):

The palace guard in Udaipur:

We've now moved on to Mount Abu, which sounded really nice but has left us both quite disappointed. It's Rajasthan's only hill station, and a lot of Indian holidaymakers come up here to escape the heat. The views from the bus as it slowly wound its way up into the hills were incredible, and the town itself is on the shore of a pretty lake surrounded by lovely hills. However, the atmosphere isn't great. It's like a crap British seaside town, with loads of tacky shops selling tat and bb guns (for some reason). We've had more hassle here than anywhere else - we get stared at 24/7 and people keep taking photos of us on their camera phones which is getting really infuriating (sometimes people ask first, sometimes they don't - we've taken to saying no when given the option, otherwise it would take forever to get anywhere).

On the plus side, we've met some really nice backpackers, and Charles, the son of the owner of our guesthouse, is really nice. He took a group of us out to see the Durga festival in action a couple of nights ago - we watched live music as one by one the children and a few of the women started dancing in a big circle until they were all in unison, clapping and twirling and doing a dance that involved tapping two sticks together. Yesterday we went to visit the Dilwara temples, which is a Jain temple a short walk outside town. The temples were really crowded with tourists, but they were really beautiful - the most intricate marble carvings I've ever seen. Photography isn't allowed inside the temples so I can't show you what I mean, but they really were exquisite. Apparently the marble-carvers were paid according to the amount of dust they collected from the carvings, in order to encourage them to carve ever more intricate designs.

Today we may do a trek with Charles in the hills around Mount Abu, which I hope will leave us both feeling better about the place! Tomorrow we're moving on from here, which we're both glad about. The weekend holidaymakers have gone back to the cities today so it's not quite as mental here as when we arrived.

The Durga festival celebrations in Mount Abu:

Sunset at Nakki Lake in Mount Abu. The lake is full of people on pedalos:

Udaipur

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, we’re in Udaipur now and it’s probably my favourite place in India so far! But I’ve got to get us here from Bundi first, so hang on a second…

We checked out of the Lake View hotel in Bundi at about 9:30am on the 5th, with over twelve hours to kill until we caught our sleeper bus to Udaipur. We went down to the lake to read and sip some of Tony the Cook’s chai (spiced tea), which is still maybe the best we’ve had! There we met Londoners Toby and Max, who had just moved into the room we’d vacated. Guys, thanks for your help in killing those twelve hours, they whizzed by!

So anyway we caught our ‘luxury’ sleeper bus just after 10:30pm. These private sleeper buses rule! You get a berth (double in our case) with a sliding glass door and curtain for privacy, then you crawl in with your luggage and go to sleep! I woke up once or twice during the bumpy, eight-hour journey, but I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it went and how comfortable it was.

As I write this, it’s the afternoon of our second day in Udaipur. We’re staying at the Panorama and we love it! Our room is a very reasonable R300 a night; and the hotel has a rooftop restaurant with great views of Udaipur’s lake. They also have two pet tortoises here who hang out near our room (one adult, one baby). The grown-up one is called Dollar and she’s over 45 years old, while her baby, Euro, is about a year old. Dollar likes me a lot because I keep feeding her leaves.

Udaipur features heavily in the Bond-film Octopussy and consequently dozens of hotels and cafes in the town show the movie EVERY NIGHT. Brilliant. We watched it last night whilst I enjoyed my first meat curry in India (Butter Chicken, it was delicious AND I wasn’t ill: yay!). We also put away a massive bottle of Kingfisher beer each. And why not?!

Before that we spent the afternoon in Udaipur, visiting the Bagore Ki Haveli, home to an amazing collection of Rajasthani puppets and a museum. We also saw the Jagdish temple, which is beautiful. Ania bought a small picture of an elephant, painted by hand on silk, from an artists’ school. In Rajasthan the elephant signifies luck and the city of Jaipur; the horse represents power and Udaipur; while the camel stands for love and Jaisalmer. So we have luck, but no love or power. Which sums up our experiences in India’s hotels! Ha!

Today we visited Udaipur’s palace, which you can see from our hotel. We are right on the waterfront here, but as recently as July the lake was completely dry. One guide told us people were playing cricket on the bed of the lake! The water is now sixteen feet deep in places!

Tonight we’re going back to the Bagore Ki Haveli to watch those Rajasthani puppets in action. There’s a live show which also features traditional dancing. Tomorrow is our last full day here as we’ve booked our bus on to Mount Abu for the 9th.

I’m enjoying India much more in the quieter places than I was in the crazy city of Delhi and I’m getting into the swing of it: booking our hotels by phone (difficult with the language barrier), haggling with shop owners and rickshaw drivers and returning friendly greetings in the street in my broken and very limited Hindi.

All in all, we’re having masses of fun. Udaipur is making that especially easy! Tomorrow, maybe a boat trip and a film starring Sir Roger Moore. I just can’t decide which one, though…

And now for the photos!

The view over the lake from the Haveli. Our hotel is out of shot, but on the side of the land you can see. The floating island on the left (in front of the hills) features in Octopussy. It's where Bond embarrasses baddie Kamal Khan in a game of Backgammon!:

One of the many impressive rooms in Udaipur Palace:

The outside of the Jagdish Temple:

The puppet room inside the Bagore Ki Haveli. Somehow less scary because there's lots of them!:

Me with my new pal, Dollar!:

A Message from Bundi

We've been trying to add this video for a few days now, but it was pretty huge, so I've just reduced the size. I hope it works and that you enjoy it! We're in Udaipur now (just arrived via a night-bus) and will post properly about that soon!

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):

Bharatpur, Ranthambhore and Bundi

Since we last wrote we've met a lot more travellers and from all over the world. During our time at Mrs Singh's in Bharatpur, we met a couple of couples, one American/Dutch and one Columbian who were very nice; a fellow Englishman called James who we spent

a few happy hours chatting to at our hotel; and a German couple who we shared our train seats with when it was rammed going from Bharatpur to Ranthambhore. It's really nice to meet fellow travellers and everyone seems to identify with one another! It's a bit like Freshers' Week at uni, you bond quickly because of the shared experience.

We spent a couple of hours in Bharatpur itself last week and it didn't really blow either of us away, I wouldn't recommend it. Deeg on the other hand is great! It's about one hour away from Bharatpur and well worth the journey for the palace alone, which is relatively modern and was used by the Maharajas up until the 1950s. There were fountains everywhere, only used two days each year because of water shortages; and a lake on either side of the palace, which runs underneath to keep it cool. We went inside the building itself with a guide and saw the main room, used for dining and lounging. We also saw the Maharaja's bedroom which as you would expect was grand. On the ceiling of the main room they have enormous fans, which are operated from outside (so the poor servants wouldn't even feel the benefit of the cool air). They also had a stuffed female tiger in a glass box, complete with scary face (why?); and two stuffed elephant feet, one designed for use as an ashtray and one as a perfume holder. Isn't that how we all want to be remembered?!

I must make some room now to say how much we enjoyed our stay in Bharatpur at the Falcon Hotel, near Keoladeo Ghana National Park. Mrs Singh and her daughter Tina were really welcoming and the hotel was super-comfortable. We spent several lovely evenings chatting to them and ate the best food we've had in India, freshly prepared in their own kitchen. A new discovery of mine is Malai Kofta, if you can find it back home, get it!

From Bharatpur we moved on to Ranthambhore National Park, home to tigers! Sadly we didn't see any, though. The village nearby is completely geared to safari-goers and closes for three months of the year. We arrived on the 30th September, ready for the first day on the 1st October and the town had a distinct feel of not being ready yet! Painters, builders and cleaners were working hard everywhere to get things ready; and several items on our restaurant menu were available yet, though we did eat well. So no tigers, but we did see lots of monkeys, peacocks, parakeets and two kinds of deer (sambar and spotted) in the beautiful surroundings of the Park. The nearest we came was a reasonably fresh tiger print on the track, which you can see below. It was exciting just to know they were nearby! We were amongst the first to try tiger spotting this season, starting our day at 6am!

At 2pm yesterday we got on a bus at nearby Sawai Madhopur to come to Bundi, where we are now. Guidebook says the bus journey is: 3.5 hours. Reality: 5 hours, 45 minutes. We didn't find this out until about 3 and a half hours in and this was our lowest point of the trip so far. It was crowded, hot and noisy; and Ania and I have now agreed on no bus journeys over an hour long! But we survived (just) and last night arrived in Bundi in the dark at about 8pm. We are staying in the gorgeous Lake View hotel, set in the Meghwahanji Haveli. Havelis are extravagantly decorated Rajasthani houses. There's lots of nooks and crannies in ours and a staircase to a flat roof where we have a great view. The building is 200 years old and is a little shabby, but we love it! The area is very 'buggy', I had to brush a few off our bed and kill dozens of ants in our room, but that one negative aside it's perfect.

Our photos for this post:

Us two, pictured with Mrs Singh and Tina (yes we are using forced perspective here, I'm not really a giant):

A couple of shots of Deeg Palace:

Me being a Maharaja with our guide paying his respects (!), also at Deeg:

The Ranthambhore tiger footprint, those elusive bastards:

Two more shots from Ranthambhore, inside the Park:

Ania reading inside our room at the Haveli in Bundi:

The view from the roof above!: