Despite the plain wooden board that served as a bunk, I slept reasonably. Broke the news to Val about the radio, which of course did not exactly make her bounce with joy, tho’ she was not as distressed as she might have been – I think we are both less materialistic than we used to be. There’s a quote from Tolkien that I read recently that goes something like, “He who cannot cast away a trinket at need is poor indeed.” Which isn’t to say we don’t have lots of things we value, but, individually, they have come to mean less.
We arrived at a little after 9, + were immediately approached by people trying to persuade us to the Keerti Hotel. Since, after a little thought, we decided that that was where we wanted to go, we allowed one of them to arrange a horse-carriage to take us there. It was a fair enough place, + we were soon assigned a room. After showering etc, it was already about 1 o’clock, so we used the afternoon to orient ourselves with a walk around town, + to wind down after our journey. One annoying thing that we discovered immediately was that Udaipur had a large no. of its own kind of touts – young boys, generally articulate, trying to persuade one to visit their own “art school”. We ignored them all, of course, but were on the look-out for certain things – the heavy Rajasthani skirts, + some simple but effective puppets. We wandered thro’ the maze of narrow streets, up to the huge palace complex at the top of the town. This is now a big museum, but we didn’t feel we had the energy to do it justice today. We strolled down to one of the town’s recommended restaurants, where we ate a tandoori chicken, + then back to the hotel, notwithstanding the annoyance of getting lost along the way. A quiet evening with the radio.
Despite the fact that we are running out of both money and energy, we have made a fair fist of seeing quite a lot of northern India, and are now, finally, going to explore the desert state of Rajasthan.
