24th Sep 2009:
Compared to Jaipur, Udaipur was cool and there was breeze even if it was sunny. Hotel reception arranged a guide for us to take us to a place called Fateh Sagar . Fateh Sagar is beautiful lake situated in Udaipur City. Udaipur is called as City of Lakes for having lot of man made lakes. The lakes are still maintained in good conditions and few of them are being used as source of drinking water.
Just to give a brief history about Fateh Sagar lake – This delightful lake surrounded by hills and woodland was constructed by Maharana Jai Singh; it is an artificial lake dug up in 1678 and was reconstructed by Maharana Fateh Sing. The lake has 3 islands for some specific reason. Find out more from googling. :-) In the surrounding of this lake, there is Maharana Pratap Memorial hall. This is an old building built in 18th century. The guide went on explaining us the story of Maharana Pratap Singh – about his bravery and his wars against the neighboring parts. We tried our best to ignore him but the guide was good enough to hold our attention. The story of Pratap Singh’s horse, Chetak was really touching. The monument has the story carved on it, of how Chetak ended his life after rescuing Maharana Pratap Singh from the battle field.
By mid noon the city was turning out hotter. We, then, went to the City palace. City palace is really big and it took us a lot of time to explore. Without writing much from this palace may I show you few photographs which pretty much explain the fun we had in the palace?
After coming out of the fort, we then had nice meals in a hotel nearby. This is one of the very few satisfactory lunches that we had on the 12 days of trip. How can I forget the name of the hotel which served us that valuable lunch – It is Hotel Meera.
Colorful Shopping Streets
The Lake Pichola is again one of the beautiful artificially dug up lake which has Jag Niwas and Jag Mandir as islands. The city palace extends along this picturesque lake’s eastern banks which can be seen in one of the pictures below. When we reached the lake, we noticed a cable car taking people to the top of a distant hill. This was very close to the lake. We decided to reach top of the hills by cable car. I am glad we noticed this place which gave us certainly one of the best evenings in the entire trip.
As the cable car went up we got an ecstatic view of the Lake Pichola; and when we reached the top of the hill, we could almost see the entire Udaipur City. We managed to climb further and sat on a compound next to the temple. Udaipur city looked very neat, white color all over (as opposed to pink in Jaipur), well maintained, and very clean. The distant roads and railway tracks looked like pencil curves from the top of the hill. As we sat and watched further, a trail of flight of few pigeons caught our attention. Girish wondered how on earth the pigeons change the direction every second and move in sync with each other. I said there must be one fellow in the group who would give the commands and guide the others. Recalling this just makes me feel how jobless we were, sitting idle on top of the hill leaving our feet hanging down. :-D
We spent around 2 hours talking about silliest of the things and cracking silliest of the jokes. Then we moved down to a place to see the view of Lake Pichola and the City palace from the other end. The place held us back for the sun set too. It was certainly an amazing evening with very small crowd. On one side the Udaipur city looked like a wallpaper; on the other side the Lake Pichola with the Sun rays reflecting from the water and the water boats creating a pattern in the clean water were treat to watch. Behind the Lake Pichola, eyes could witness range of AravaLi hills lined up one after the other. It was as scenic as a school kid’s typical painting of a sun set behind the range of hills.
As it neared the Sun Set time, the Sun seemed to move down very fast; the hills formed a beautiful silhouette giving me a great opportunity to photograph! Few small kids around who came with family were running around a lot; they gave a pose to my camera too. A couple seemed to be enjoying the view. Everyone from our gang was in their own world. Girish was over the phone talking to his loved one (s) :) ; Lawrence was watching the Sun go down the Aravali hills and later on engaged himself in listening to music. Sangeetha was busy scaring small kiddos with her bulky D90 camera. I then took over and pulled the kids to pose for my camera. Chittra and Shashi joined the fun soon with their shopping bags.
After the sunset, the City palace and the Jag Mandir were lit up brightly giving us a delightful view again. This place calls me back; certainly the most romantic place to experience a sunset like that and I am sure I will go back to this place in future with my partner (when I get one) ;-)
So far so good; we enjoyed this evening to the fullest; and there was a sense of satisfaction, a feeling that we were on trip was showing up on our face. We reached down the hill and headed towards “Fateh Sagar” since my friend who belongs to this place had told me that there will be nice chats to eat. When we reached Fateh Sagar, we searched for a nice place for having snacks and found a place besides a small college troop. It was fun watching the girls, whose names were not so difficult to find out since they were printed on the shirts.
The cab was waiting for us to take us back to Jaipur to the same hotel where stayed before. After having a lot of fun we then had to leave Udipur so reluctantly which gave us one of the memorable days of the long trip. All this was followed by 5 and half hours of journey.
