Two Wheels Whirled

Hello from Udiapur!!!!

With new found strength we left Ahmedabad for Mt. Abu. We found a great place to stay, went on a fabulous hike, ate some fabulous food (I ate 7 chipatis!!!! A gave me such a hard time :) and then headed down the mountain for Udaipur. Wow, what a ride that was! About 100 of the 180kms of our ride was under serious construction - they were upgrading a 1 lane road (I kid you not - the pavement was not even wide enough to be a 2 lane road) to a 4 lane motorway!!!!! In places it looked more like a quarry than a road building site - they were blowing great big gaps in the hills and they were even putting in a tunnel (which was pretty cool to see :). We liked Udaipur immediately (and not just because we spotted, and stopped at, the Cafe Coffee Day on the way into town :). We chose the hotel because they offer horse trekking in the surrounding Rajasthan hills but it is also a great place to stay! We are right under City Palace - we can see the palace from the rooftop cafe :) Lastnight we walked to the lakeside, today we went to City Palace and then walked around the city and tomorrow we are off on the horse trek (A has never ridden a horse before :). We will let you know how it goes....but first some photos!

A few final pictures from Ahmedabad..

Here are our bikes after their makeover. We have some new seatcovers that are cooler (read less sweaty....you don't want to know the details, just trust us, the ride is much more comfortable :) than the vinyl factory fitted seat and check out those new number plates...I'm sure you can tell from a lot of our past photos that we like bats, and we also watched Batman while we were recuperating in Amhedabad :)

This is (a very tired looking) me at the New Lucky restaurant (our favorite place!!!!) with my "special" thali. This is the place where you share the space with the graves markers (and presumably the deceased underneath) - they are the green shapes on the floor in the background.

We liked Amhedabad a lot...but we were not happy to see this monstrosity as we left town - it's surrounded by slums, too....

Mt. Abu - Rajasthan's only hill station and home of the Dilwara Jain temples. We don't have any photos of the Dilwara temples because they do not allow photography (or leather or mobile phones....) They are beautiful - some amazingly fine marble carving. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilwara_Temples

These were on the side of the road at Abu Road (the town at the bottom of Mt Abu)

Here's A ready to head out on the hike and me on the hike :)

Great views!!!

We also saw this eagle...

It was Mahashivaratri - Shiva's birthday (a holy day) and we somehow got attached to the pilgrimage to the Shiva temples in the area. It made a nice twist to a regular hike :) They brewed some tea and handed it around and they had banners flying at each of the temple areas (4 of the 5 that we visited were out in the wilds - we saw lots of evidence of recent sloth bear activity!!! but no snakes, Mark :). Some of the temples were a couple thousand years old! This particular group does the temple route 4 times a year. Our timing was impeccable :)