Tuesday 04 February

Uidapur

We’re staying in a Heritage Hotel in Uidapur – it’s the Amet Haveli, stunning rooms with views over glorious Lake Pichola (although we had a cheaper one with an internal courtyard view).

Our hotel in Uidapur is beautiful – a converted palace by the lake. The doors are a quite small with a lovely decorative door arch – poor Matthew cut his head on our first morning – there was blood everywhere!

At breakfast there was no dairy-free milk, but they asked us to wait for 10 minutes while they sent someone to fetch some. That’s my kind of place!

After breakfast we explored around the hotel and then walked through the old city to the Uidapur City Palace. Begun in 1559 and built over the next 400 years, the City Palace is enormous – and half of it is closed to visitors! Many parts of India were princely states in the British empire – but after independence in 1947 they merged with the newly independent state. 

From the City Palace we took  boat trip to Jagmandir Island Palace. Being in the boat was sublime – cool by the water and quiet. The gardens were lovely, although it was a shame that the fountains weren’t running.

After we led the City Palace we were heading to lunch at a place on Matthew’s spreadsheet – but we’d not walked very far when we saw a sign for a restaurant that offered vegan options! We thought we should give it a try and we weren’t disappointed: it was called Millets – thalli for Mike and lemon millet for Matthew. 

We walked back to our hotel for a snooze then went up to the roof for a nice view of the sunset over Pichola Lake.

In the evening we wandered around the old town – winding streets full of brightly lit shops, cafes, restaurants, temples stray dogs, cows and people. There was a cafe listed in Happy Cow (our vegan app) that we wanted to try. After a little bit of doubling back on ourselves, we eventually found it in the roof of an apartment building. It was lovely – with fantastic views. 

Uidapur was worth the long journey to get here.