Our next stop was Pushkar, a Brahma (the highest Hindu cast) pilgrimage town that each Hindu is supposed to visit at least once in their lifetime. It is centred around a holy lake where pilgrims come to bathe (a bit like the Ganges, but cleaner). To appreciate the view of the lake, we ate on a rooftop restaurant where we were almost hit by a stray firework (apparently some families continue to light them even after Diwali is over), and then one of the giant monkeys decided to run right across our table before leaping off the building, into the trees.
The next day, we proceeded to a city called Udaipur. We were originally supposed to stay here for 2 nights, but discovered that our hotel reservation had mysteriously disappeared (and all other hotels were fully booked due to the holiday). Rana managed to find us a hotel that was really nice but a bit far from the centre, so we decided to shorten our stay to one night and extend our upcoming Camel Safari to 2 nights.
Udaipur, has some very charming streets, shops, and restaurants, but similar to a lot of cities in India, it is also very noisy, dirty, and full of motorbikes and touters. But... we discovered that you can hide from it all if you enter the magical City Palace grounds for about 50 cents. So we first had an amazing dinner at restaurant called Ambres (which had a beautiful night view of the City Palace) and then entered the palace grounds and quietly wandered the deserted streets. We enjoyed the calm so much that the next morning, we returned to the peaceful palace grounds and simply sat watching the boats pass by, and later went out on our own boat ride.
