This is bat country!

Udaipur – Day 7

I woke up in my comfortable hotel room and met BK, who immediately informed me there was a problem.

“Madam, today is strike,” he explained apologetically. Strike? I looked around, and noticed that all the shops were closed. The streets weren’t as crowded as usual, and the traffic was strangely thin (I later learned from the newspaper the strike was due to raising gas prices). It was sort of a relief, to be honest. While I am used to urban living, the traffic and crowds in India are something else entirely. The best comparison I can think of is New York’s Chinatown on a particularly busy day.

We headed off to the City Palace, which overlooks Lake Pichola. Udaipur is supposedly one of the most romantic locales in India - a title I think is a bit remiss, but more on that later. We reached the palace, resplendent and white, with carefully tended gardens, and I hopped out to check it out. At this point, the palaces, forts, and temples are all starting to run together in my head. They are all ancient, magnificent, and huge. After the Palace tour, I found the boathouse and waited to board my tour boat for a ride around the lake.

As I sat under a tree, admiring the view of the city and mountains overlooking the lake, I noticed a strange sound emanating from the tree overhead. At first I thought it was birds, but there was something off about the tone. To my horror, I realized I was sitting under a tree filled with sleeping (some stirring, hence the screeching) bats. Huge, furry bats. Most were bigger than the typical squirrel; some were the size of small dogs. They were hanging upside down, their immense, leather-like wings folded around them – right over my head.

I inched my chair out of the range of any potential guano and spent the rest of my waiting time eyeing them nervously. The boat finally appeared, and I boarded with an Indian family of three. We stopped at Jagniwas Island to look at the fancy hotel, and as I happily snapped photos the memory of the bats receded. We all re-boarded the boat for the mainland, and as I went to grab my camera to take a parting photo of the island, I spotted a huge, yellow spider on my hand. I shook it off, but remained completely freaked out (I HATE spiders). Between the bats and the spider, the city on the lake’s romance quotient had evaporated for me.

That evening, I was hoping to make it to a Haveli (“wind house” in English – beautiful old manors with exquisite arches, stone lattices and courtyards), but it, too, was closed due to the strike. I was bummed (it had the world’s largest turban inside!), but not as bummed as I became when I learned BK had planned yet another Medieval Times India dinner for me that evening. It, as luck would have it, was still scheduled to go on, in spite of the strike.

I managed to talk BK out of making me go. They are expensive, and at the last one, I felt like a bit of a side show (people were taking almost as many photos of me as they were of the dancers). Instead, he took me to a great restaurant that reminded me of New York’s Vatan. I was content, and happy to know that in the morning we’d be heading out of Bat City (as I now refer to it) and towards Pushkar.