Saturday 19th - Monsoon Palace and Lake Pichola

Another glorious sunny morning here in Rajasthan. We descend 3 flights of marble stairs then ascend 4 flights to the rooftop restaurant where we opt to breakfast alfresco. R disgraced the Scottish nation by putting honey on her porridge - then discovered it was already sweetened.
We decided to visit the Monsoon Palace, perched on the mountain top overlooking the city. The hotel organised a car and driver, a cheerful chap who take the traffic in his stride and told us he was happy when we were happy! The last couple miles of the drive was up a single track road with hairpin bends but fortunately no one was coming the other way. When we got to the palace we were approached by the inevitible smiling young man with whom we negotiated a guided tour. He was very informative and made the most of the palaces limited attractions. It turned out that he was the driver's brother.

We asked our driver to drop us at the Lake Gate of the City Palace to take a boat trip, only to be told 'no boats today because of the big wedding'! As it was getting hot we retired to the rather nice cafe in the courtyard of the Palace which was very busy and we had to share a table. The two Canadian men were good company as we lingered over a Kingfisher and we swapped travel horror stories.
We had been told that there was an alternative boat trip available so we went to enquire and managed to book seats on their Sunset Tour. We killed time by watching cricket on TV, along with everyone else in India and then took our seats on the boat as part of a United Nations line up of characters. Anybody who has seen the film Octopussy can skip the next bit. We hadn't and were well impressed with the fabulous views of the various palaces as the boat chugged around the lake.
When we disembarked it was just time to return to the hotel's rooftop restaurant for great food and free fireworks. Later downstairs in the lobby we discovered that half of the hotel's guest list was booked on the same train as us and D had great fun explaining to four French teachers how the Indian Railway works. When the train pulled into the platform there was the usual rugby scrum but we found our compartment, a four-berth this time, the French teachers were next door, and we were joined by a French lady travelling solo with the biggest piece of luggage you have ever seen. She was dismayed to hear we were getting off at 6.00 a.m.