Day 20 - 20th Feb - Udaipur

We spent some time in the morning looking at options for where we were going to travel next and got chatting to Jodie, a sunny and enthusiastic Canadian girl.

Since Matt and I were only staying for one day, we took a tour together. The driver, Firaz took us to a market and explained lots of the things we saw there. He even taught us the actual price of fruit and veg.
He took us around the different lakes - some of which would have been very pretty was it not for the layer of scum and rubbish that floated at the edges. People stood around the periphery washing themselves and their clothes.

As well as a few camera shops, Firaz took us to the cenotaphs of the local royal family and told us to ignore the signs to tell visitors to take off their shoes and that photos weren't allowed as we were going to bribe the security man with 10 rupees each.

He then took us to some quite nice gardens built by Maharaja Sanram Singh for his wife and her friends and servents. It had lots of little fountains that were constructed in the days before electrity and was gravity-fed from the purpose-built lake above. There were lots of pretty flowers but Matt spent most of his time there bargaining for camera stuff before the man he was bargaining with got bored and started selling to someone else.

Jodie and I needed the loo and discovered the joys of multiple squat toilets without any dividing sections, just three squat loos side-by-side. It was the second time I'd seen it but this time the one individual toilet was too disgusting to even step inside. We took it in turns to guard the door against the growing queue of impatient Indian women while we precariously avoided the piles of poo that we all in the wrong places.
The last lake we visitied was very nice though and we tried to go on a pedal boat but they wouldn't go and fetch them from the middle of the lake so instead tried to persuade us to take the more expensive option. We walked around it instead.

A point of interest about Udaipur: the James Bond film, Octopussy was filmed there and many of the hotels still had nightly showings. We didn't see one.

Back near the hostel, Rizwan (the hotel owner) offered to buy the camera that Matt liked as he might be able to get it cheaper than us and we took a walk into the city and debated whether or not to visit the city palace - the second biggest in India. This turned out to be not such a great thing when we had to trudge around it in weather that was now getting very hot. We didn't understand much of what we saw but really enjoyed getting to know Jodie and asking her endless questions about Canada and her job at in real estate.
On our way back to the hostel we were harrassed by a dog that really didn't seem very happy to see us.
Back on the rooftop, Matt inspected his new camera and we chatted to a really helpful South American couple. They gave us lots of advice about visiting South America and the girl Natalie, told us about an excellent cooking course she'd done that day.

One of the things I really wanted to do on my travels was learn to cook in the different countries and so Jodie and I went to find Shashi's cooking school as she wasn't answering the phone. When we got there she was on the balcony, watching the Shiva celebrations.  She told us that she had already turned down 6 people for the following day as it was a holiday but we must have looked so pathetic that she agreed to teach us.

On the way back we came across the dog again. We tried to find a different way and came across a family who advised us there was no other way through. This time though, the dog was more determines and it followed us quite a lot further. The family told us to throw stones but didn't actually come to help so we weren't so convinced. We ended up calling Rizwan to come and help us and lead us back in safety.
Rizwan was a really nice guy and had a very dry sense of humour. He was hilarious but we couldn't always tell of he was joking. He invited us to 'have a chai party' and entertained us by setting us puzzles about swimming ants and teasing me about the 'musical competition' and 'fireworks' - which I eventually worked out was about farting!

Matt tried to sort train tickets with a very slow computer connection while I played with starws with Rizwan's little girl. We got the tickets to Delhi sorted but there were only tickets left in the tourist quota for getting to Varanasi so we may have to go to train station for those.