Sacred cow?

It is 5.30am. Outside it is raining. We have caught up with the southward progress of the monsoon and it is not a pleasant find. We are on a bus which has been on the go since 4pm yesterday, with one stop for ice cream at 11pm believe it or not. We’ve made a friend on the bus – a mischievous looking teenage boy – who says he has a friend with a good hotel in Udaipur and he is going to stay there too. Would we like to join him? Regardless of whether or not it is a great hotel, what I like about his scheme is that he can get us to it at this time on a freezing cold and wet morning when hoteliers everywhere must surely be in bed. How any of the other Westerners on the bus, who are sceptical of his offer, can hope to find a different hotel without a lot of hassle at this time, I don’t know. We don’t hang around long enough to find out.
After a teeth-chattering rickshaw ride, we arrive in a dark alley and discover that as well as it being black as night outside, Udaipur has a power cut. We end up having a rather comic welcome to the hotel by two people whose faces we can’t actually see. Somehow, out of chaos, a room and a candle are found for us and we gratefully fall soundly asleep.
At 11am when we wake up again, it is still raining. Hard. Udaipur looks thoroughly depressing compared to the glorious dry heat of Jaisalmer. We begin to wish we’d stayed up there longer. Our hotel friend promised us a window view of the Lake Palace – a fabulous maharani’s hotel, the spectacle of Udaipur and the backdrop to the James Bond movie ‘Octopussy’ – but all we seem to have instead is a wet building site.
We head off to explore, aimlessly and hungrily. Eventually we come across a small restaurant where we can relax. We have decided our prime objective now is to get to Goa (further south and on the coast) as quickly as possible. The route involves an unappealing 16 hour bus to Mumbai, then a ten hour train to Goa. Given our current exhaustion and disposition towards buses we give in to an idea which we have been harbouring: we could fly to Goa. A quick visit to the Indian Airlines offices (after getting lost and being rescued by the Geographer – how annoying…) confirms that this is a good plan and we can leave the day after tomorrow for $140. We still have to stay the night in Mumbai but planes don’t have bumpy back seats.
We spend the evening on the roof at the hotel for a pleasant dinner and compulsory Octopussy showing on a video with poor tracking. Not the best but still interesting. The hotel ‘owners’ seem to be a rabble of exuberant young lads, our friend being one of them. They are quite funny at times, sinister at others.

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