Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Udaipur streets, painted cow and all....


Jagminder Island Palace

Having a beer today at Jagminder Palace in the middle of Lake Pichola in Udaipur (and a particulary cute photo of my fiance!)

The queue!

This is the chaos inside the City Palace that resulted in us taking double the time to see the place! It was however chaos organised in a very British queue!

Inside the City Palace, Udaipur


Getting our palms read

Apparently I'm going to be famous when I'm 47 (Dene's not)!

Sunset over the lake


The view from our hotel - Lake Palace, Udaipur


Doing the laundry in Mumbai


Chowpatty beach, Mumbai


Celebrating our last night in Bangkok


Halloween in Chiang Mai

Given that Dene and I have missed having our normal Halloween party we had to compensate and party in Chiang Mai instead - the local efforts at fancy dress were....unusual but there were the usual Darth Mauls and Osama Bin Ladens amongst the crowd!

Bollywood

Well we've reached India and although it's a bit of a shock to all senses, we're loving it! We had an absolutely amazing time in Thailand - rocked fom start to finish with the help of a lot of friends! Spent some time on a beach in Phuket (which, if you could forget about the go go bars a plenty would have been a relaxing experience) and a few days in Bangkok where we bumped into a couple of friends we met in Chiang Mai on Khao San Road which led to a night of drinking whisky buckets, dancing on podiums and eating cheese and ham toasties at 6 in the morning! Once again, Dene came out the worst (!) but we just about managed to make our flight to Sri Lanka for a one night stop over before heading to Mumbai.

Mumbai is crazy to say the least but we approached it from the comfort of our posh hotel and a chauffeur driver taxi which dropped us off at all the main stops. So we enjoyed it although can quite appreciate that it would be a difficult place to live or stop in for any lengthy period of time. Everyone is cricket mad so you see little boys, living on the street without much to say is theirs except for a cricket bat. We're now in Udaipur which is outstanding. So beautiful and can quite see why a Bond film has been shot here. We're staying in a hotel overlooking the lake with a fantastic view of the Lake Palace. We've had plenty of stares which we're getting used to as there aren't that many tourists here - Dene got asked to have his photo taken with a local for the local to show his folks!

We've hired a taxi and driver for the rest of our stay so next stop is Jaisalmer on the Pakistan border which is supposed to be something out of Laurence of Arabia - forts, camels sand duens, that sort of thing - right up my street! We're getting quite nostalgic about coming home now - don't want to stop being travellers!!!! But will be lovely to see everyone again.

D&N x