I’d not realised that I knew Udaipur before we arrived. You’ll have seen phots of the white palace on the lake with bougainvillea trailing into the water. It was also used in the Bond film Octopussy, where Roger Moore added his black dinner jacket to the mix.

We’re staying at Hotel the Tiger. We had to really.

Udaipur is a “high rise city” in the medieval sense. This five story high buildings crammed together, each one without the room to fit a lift. This means a lot of climbing. Fantastic that we’re on the top floor of our hotel - what a great view! Oh, that’s eight flights of stairs with ten bass to climb. Let’s have dinner on a rooftop terrace. Eight flights down plus five storeys up a spiral staircase. Not quite the rest day cycle tourists are looking for, but the views are nice.

We decided not to try to do too much on our rest day and we picked the City Palace as our goal. It’s a huge mass of 11 different palaces joined together with each Maharana seemingly deciding they needed to build their own addition and thousands of small rooms and dozens of courtyards are connected by zigzag corridors. The style stays pretty consistent though and it all goes together pretty well. None of it looked very comfortable, but they’ve been there for over 500 years, so it works for them.

The current Maharana lives in yet another extension at the far end of the palace, with a good view of the lake I expect.

The entrance to the Palace. Don’t worry, there’s somewhere to park your elephant just thought the gate.

The rest of the time we just hung out in the city, and found time to watch the Tour of Flanders. Well done Bettiol - a monument for your first pro win!

Udaipur has coffee shops! We haven’t seen that since Mumbai.

A good rest has me feeling much better too - so onwards and upwards tomorrow as we make our way to Jaipur to see forts. It should take us four or five days to get there.

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Day 119: Rest day in Udaipur