India Awaits: Udaipur - India's romantic city Part I

I am such a lucky girl to have a husband who loves our anniversary. It is always something we celebrate with a special dinner or a weekend away - usually planned by him. It's going to be pretty hard to top the trip to the Maldives last year, but he is always willing to try. As we are on our countdown to leaving India, we decided that Udaipur would be a lovely place to celebrate 11 years of marriage.

Udaipur is known as the Venice of the East (in India, anyway and as I have been to Venice (and loved it) I was a little nervous as to how Udaipur would stack up. Well, I'm glad to say, it was by far, the most romantic Indian city we have visited. I was not disappointed.

We had quite an adventure getting to Udaipur, as there are no direct flights and we had our original flights preponed !! Yes, that is a word, and the flights were proponed by 6 hours...... so we had to change plans and fly to Ahmedabad and then have a driver take us the additional 4 hours to Udaipur. It was quite the ride with our driver taking liberty of teaching a few other drivers how NOT to drive on Rajasthani roads. We both agreed that if a fight broke out, Shakeel was on his own ........ We arrived safely into Udaipur at around lunchtime, only to see an elephant wandering down the street - hilarious !

Upon arrival at the beautiful Oberoi hotel, we were greeted with red roses, chocolate cake and rose petal bath. The hotel is just amazing, with lovely views and fabulous facilities. Inside the gates it felt like a whole other world.

In the afternoon, we went on a boat ride with high tea at sunset! What a wonderful way to see the city, and yes, it did feel a lot like Venice. That is until I saw some kids peeing on the river banks, a lady doing her weekly washing on the rocks of the riverbank and a man washing himself. Only in India !

The Taj Lake Palace is the hotel in the middle of Lake Pichola and it is placed on 4 acres of land, and has 83 rooms. The only access is by boat and it has been voted the most romantic hotel in India (and in some reports, the world). It was originally built as the summer palace for the Maharana of Udaipur. It looked beautiful !

The sun was setting as we cruised around the lake, and we saw the inspiration for the Taj Mahal - Jagmandir Island Palace. This site is much smaller and nowhere near as grand but the turrets on the palace are clearly the inspiration of Shajahan to the design the Taj Mahal.

After high tea we enjoyed the luxury of the beautiful Oberoi.