so we continue...

Still in Ranakhpur, the hotel we stayed in here was probably the most basic of the tour. This wouldn't normally be a problem (we've been to a few festivals between us!), we appeared to be greatly inconveniencing the staff just by turning up. Not really a high point, despite the beautiful scenery and amazing Jain temple. The basic rooms went a little deeper than not being too clean and having no air con - they were also resplendent with a 'challenging' electricity connection (we don't mind on and off - noone can help that!), entailing a firework display in Dave and Katie's room (another couple on the tour), leading to a sleepless night on the tiles, in the company of many of the local population of creatures and insects. Another small foible here was that the hot water was powered by a wood burner at the back of each bathroom... the first we knew about this was when one of the grumpy waiters got a surprise viewing as he was walking from lighting the burner at the same time as I got out of the (cold) shower.. yep, definitely time to go.

We were back on a local bus again, although this time slightly more comfortable (by this I mean that the seats had some padding and reclined about 2cm). At this point we could tell you about the many near misses and white knuckle moments, but we've been there and won't do this to you again! What was fascinating though were the hundreds of people walking down the roads in the same direction - many of them with bare feet. Small groups of people carrying different flags and bags of belongings were on their way to a Hindu temple about 125km from where we were, on an annual pilgrimmage. Even as we travelled another 100km away, still we saw people plodding on... and on - some people must have walked hundreds of miles. There were tents set up at intervals along the roads with chai and food - and really loud music - how these people had the energy to dance I don't know.

Another four hours and we arrived at Udaipur. We pulled up to a plush hotel with a rooftop terrace restaurant that overlooked the beautiful lake and palaces. Especially compared to our last accommodation, this was very fancy - and we had a tv so were able to catch up with the news... both Pavarotti and Anita Rodd*** popped their clogs while we were here.

This city had the feel of a relaxed seaside town, and was much cleaner and with far less obvious poverty than anywhere else we'd been so far. We spent a couple of days pottering around the shops, and took a cooking class with some others from the group - something I never ever thought I'd see Dave do - he was quite the natural! (Possibly the threat that we had to eat whatever we produced upped everyone's games slightly). There was a cultural show of puppetry and dance - and whilst we've had our lifetime fill of the traditional Rajastani puppet show, the dancing women were amazing - one danced like a dervish with ten water pots piled on her head... we felt a strange mixture of fascination and concern for her chiropractor fees...

We saw our first elephant here, trudging the streets, and many donkeys pottering up and down the hills unsupervised - going up with backs laden with brick sacks, and trotting merrily back down for their next load. Monkeys were also in plentiful supply up at the deserted Monsoon Palace - a lovely sunset view was had by all.

Udaipur is the city made famous by the James Bond film, Octop**** as the majority of it was filmed there. We spent a relaxed couple of hours watching the film on scratched picture discs in a restaurant, overlooking the lake, ghats and palaces which feature in it... the novelty of the evening only being enhanced by the cheesiness of the film.

One of the most surreal dining experiences so far was in a thali restaurant called Natraj - the idea of thali is that you get a bit of everything on a large round metal plate... unfortunately, in this restaurant, the 'bit' part of that idea had been forgotten... there was only our group of eight in the restaurant, so we were slightly outnumbered by the 12 or so waiters... however, rather than a few of them sitting the event of our arrival out, they all decided to participate in the serving of our meals. Once we were seated and and presented with our thali plates, we were subjected to an onslaught of dish after dish, then refill after refill - each waiter looking wounded if a morsel was refused. Our wallets a mere 70 rupees lighter (about 85p), we left the restaurant and rolled onto tuk-tuks back to the hotel. Many rennies were consumed that night.

We could have happily stayed in Udaipur another week, but time to move on... this time to Jaipur, by sleeper train. We were a bit nervous about how this was going to work out given our experiences to date on public transport. No need to worry though, as a useful Indian law means that after 10pm everyone was obliged to vacate the lower seats, pull down the beds and turn the lights off if anyone wished to sleep. There were eight bunks in each open compartment, and since four of the occupants got (quietly) onto the train later on in the night, and another was a priest so was busy reading his prayer books, our only other companion was an accountant on his way back to Jaipur. He was chatty and shared his fruit with us, but declined our game of cards in favour of an 'Tax and Accounting Monthly' magazine... yep, we were all asleep pretty quickly!