Folks,

Today was a great day. I woke up and went down for breakfast in the outside courtyard next to Lake Pichola... In shorts and a T-shirts. Who knew that I would come to India, the land of spicy food and humidity) and it would take 10 days to wear shorts and a t-shirt!!

In the morning we went to see Udaipur's City Palace. The palace was quite interesting and is set beautifully near the lake. It has a great view of the Maharani's 3 other palaces - 2 in the middle of the lake for the summer and one way at the top of a mountain for monsoon season. If you've been following along daily, you'll know that we have now seen about 364 palaces and temples.

It was about 25 and sunny today, so we came back to the hotel at around 1 to enjoy all the activities... And we sure did a lot of activities! I swam, ate lunch, did yoga, got in a hammock, fell out of a hammock, got in a hammock more carefully, read a book, went on an animal safari, learned about the maharani that use to hunt on the property, went to the gym,had a steam, then had dinner!

Lucy and I went to Yoga at 3pm. There were four of us plus an instructor. There was a special outside Yoga temple on the property.. Pretty cool! Luckily for me everyone was a beginner.

We began with some simple stretching which I was OK with, but then we started getting into some weird contorted positions. I am proud to say that I did all of them... Though most looked nothing like what the instructor was doing.

The worst was he told us to lie on our backs and lift one leg to 90 degrees in the air... I got to about 30 degrees. The instructor then decided to come over and physically make me get to 90 degrees. The only thing that distracted me from the pain, was the thought of how I would get around the rest of my trip after my hamstring popped.

Later in the afternoon, Richard and I heard that there was a preserve on the edge of the resort that had wild boars, antelopes and peacocks. So we walked over with no idea what to expect and headed down a path into the bushes. We saw peacocks but nothing else.. Then we figured out that the boars and antelopes (were really deer) were in a big enclosure. We headed up a building to look at the deer and boars from above (25 and 15 respectively). There we were met by and old indian man who invited us up to a higher level of the building. We followed him up as he unlocked the door to an amazingly coloured room with paintings depicting the natural habitat of the area prior to development. He explained that the building was built 160 years ago for the Maharani to come to watch tiger vs. Boar fights during the monsoon ( there was sectioned area below where he said it happened).

He has been working there maintaining the hunting and now animal preserve for 50 years ( the hotel has only been there for 10. He's now emploed by the hotel. Very cool...and it looks like its part of the hotel.. We would never have known!