Boat Ride in Udaipur - India Trip

From Bodh Gaya, we flew back to New Delhi, and stayed 1 night. We had dinner at the 4 star hotel we stayed. It was quite expensive compared to other places, but we had good Chinese food without curry. It cost my mom and me 1230 INR + tip. My Indian friends told me that we do not need to tip at restaurant unless you will go there for the 2^nd time. Yes we would need to have dinner at the hotel again 2 days later when we will be back from Jodhpur.

The next morning, we flew to Udaipur. One thing definitely worth motioning is the airport at New Delhi. We arrived the airport 1.5 hours before the domestic departure time. The line to check in and pass security were too long, and our flight was at gate 60. It was a long way, about 20 minutes walk/run from security to the gate. We barely made it to our flight. It was very tight that the gate closed 2 minutes after we have entered. In India, other airports in the smaller cities we did not need to arrive 2 hours before domestic departure. Sometimes even 1 hour is more than enough, but in New Delhi, 2 hours is the minimum time you will need at the airport.

 

I wanted to go to Ranakpur to see the most famous Jain temple, and Udaipur is the closet city to Ranakpur which has an airport, so we made a brief stop at Udaipur. The only thing I planed to do at Udaipur was the sunset boat ride in lake Pichola. We arrived Udaipur after noon, and sunset was at 5:47pm that day. We had a lot of time to kill. Wing and Water wanted to buy some cashmere scarves, and I wanted to buy a leather jacket, so we asked the driver to drive us to the local market. Cashmere, is a luxury fiber obtained from the neck region of cashmere goats. The word cashmere is an old spelling of Kashmir, the geographical region of India. The owner of the Cashmere store told me that there is a big leather store down the street, so me and my mom went to check it out. When we were walking on the narrow street, many motorcycles passed by us closely without even slowing down. It brought me back the bad memory when we were walking to the Ganges river in Varanasi. My mom and I didn’t find the store after 10 minutes walk, and we decided to return to the cashmere store for safety.

Nobody bought anything. We went back to our car and asked the driver to drive us to Lake Pichola. We would take the sunset boat ride there. The boat ride ticket is 700 INR per person, which was included in our tour package, but we still needed to pay 30 INR each to enter the city palace. The pier is inside the city palace.

Udaipur is a very popular tourist destination, it is known as the white city of India, because of the candid Rajput-style palaces standing all around the lake. And most of all because of the scenic white marble palace located in the middle of it.

Udaipur is also called as the “Lake City”, because of its sophisticated lake system. Five of the major lakes, namely Fateh Sagar Lake, Lake Pichola, Swaroop Sagar Lake, Rangsagar and Doodh Talai Lake have been included under the restoration project of the National Lake Conservation Plan (NLCP) of the Government of India.

The boat stopped at a center island, where restaurant and clean washroom are available.

This is also a good place to take pictures.

Indian street artist on the center island:

The people coming from the same boat do not need to leave the island at the same time. You can choose your own time to leave, as long as you catch the last returning boat.