For breakfast, you can have pretty much anything you want on the Palace on Wheels, and it's served in a small lounge area in your car, so you share with the other 3 couples. If you ask for cereal, you get muesli with warm milk. I'm not a fan.
Udaipur, the White City, is the cleanest we've seen yet, with the exception of Simla. It's a city of 500,000, with 2 million tourists/year, surrounded by mountains and lakes. We start the day with a tour of the grounds of a haveli in the embassy/up-class section of Udaipur. The owner's daughter remarked that she loved the rain, but just didn't dig the clouds that came with it, so he built a series of fountains to please her. Later in life, she became a drug addict and a serial killer and wiped out her entire family, starting with Daddy. OK, I made that last part up.
Next, we go to (wait for it) a Fort. It's huge, it's spectacular, it's really astounding, but I'm on the lookout for places I might be able to use as discreet Barf Stations. I have the Restroom Radar on full alert Super Doppler Mode, as thundery developments are forming in the South, and I want to be ready.
We take a lunchbreak at the Fort's sumptuous restaurant, complete with good entertainment - music and Rajasthani dancers. I have 2 scoops of ice cream for lunch, Max even less, then it's onto a boat for a tour of the adjoining Lake Pichola. We circle the Lake Palace, where parts of Octopussy were filmed (it's a beautiful white palace seemingly floating on the lake), drift past the new Oberoi Hotel where you can get a room that starts at $1,500/night, and dock at a lesser palace for tea and biscuits. It's been almost 2 hours since we had lunch, so nourishment was essential.
I'm feeling like the Goodyear Blimp on steroids and search out a rest room. It's a very classy restaurant, with seating on a patio area overlooking the lake, and when I enter the rest room, there's an attendant with a disinfectant aerosol in his hand, pointing me towrds the toilet. Only problem is, the toilet has a very thin plastic seat, covered in some sort of grime. He's probably had that aerosol can in his hand for months. I exit immediately.
We have tea with Nathan and Bill, two gay guys from the train, who are both artists - one is a graphic designer, the other a teacher at George Washington U. Very interesting conversation about life in the Capital.
Before we return to the POW, we go downtown Udaipur to the City Palace, the largest palace in Rajasthan. It's actually a complex of several palaces covering an area of 5 acres and built or added to by 22 Maharajahs. Fortunately, we only do an acre or so, but it's still extremely interesting. Part of the complex is a park that has several astronomic sculptures, for want of a better name. These are huge sun dials and other instruments (you can climb all over them) that accurately predict several cosmic events.
Back at the Palace on Wheels, we pick at our dinner, hardly eating at all. Our appetite has disappeared after eating at 5 star restaurants for 4 weeks.
A word about alcohol: If you want a 1.5 oz. scotch on the POW, it will cost you about half the cost of a bottle at a liquor store ($11). I bought a bottle of unremarkable (but also un-Indian) chablis for the table one night and it cost $60. Imported booze is expensive, Indian booze is repulsive. Take your pick. I want to believe the non-drinking Hindus (yeah, right) overcharge as a means of discouraging consumption, but that would be too cool. It's all about taxes. Stick to Kingfisher Beer, if you go - a pretty good beer.
Listening to Indians talk can be amusing. On the other hand almost everyone speaks better English than I do Hindi. For example: our laundry didn't get done in Jodhpur because there was no "electra-city". The Lake Palace was used for weddings by "cele-britties" with the emphasis in both cases on the last syllables. The funniest example of Indian English will take place in Agra at the Taj Mahal, but that's another story.
See how I keep the teaser thing going?
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