Mt. Abu

My new favorite Hindi word is “wala;” from what I can tell the best way to translate it is “something that does something.” Like autowala is an autorickshaw driver, but I’ve even heard it used as Vanillawala to refer to Vanilla ice cream. Also another interesting Indian English term is the use of the word ‘only.’ Like for example, “you get those shoes from America only” or “you’re from America only.”
Anyway we left for Mount Abu and Udaipur in Rajasthan this morning at 9:30. The day before we finalized everything with the travel agent – for the car and hotel for 4 days/three nights, it was about Rs. 6,000. It was me, Caryn, Nihal, Karuna, and Gaurab. It took 5 or 6 hours to driver there, but the landscape was so great. There were all these crazy rocky hills and mountains. We were very lucky to have Gaurab there to be able to speak Hindi! The driver had his own ideas of what we should see, and he wanted to take us to all these temples – we did stop at some though, and we stopped at the Adalaj Wav which is the stepwell near Gandhinagar because Karuna and Gaurab hadn’t been there. Karuna made some nice egg salad sandwiches for the drive, and it was so nice to have something more American and not so oily and spicy!
So we finally got to Mount Abu and found the Lake Palace Hotel where we were staying. It was right overlooking this big lake surrounded by the mountains, so it was really pretty. There were lots of people in boats, and the weather was so nice and cool and breezy like a warm fall day. It was great to be out of Ahmedabad for awhile! At night it was even pretty chilly! But I was not going to complain about it at all after the heat of Ahmedabad! So we went to see this amazing Jain temple on the mountain called Delwara. There was a lot of marble and intricate carvings of the ceiling and on all the columns, and it was a complex of several temples. There were all these monkeys playing around on top of the temple. On the way down there were a bunch of monkeys along the road, so we stopped and gave them crackers out the window, so they were climbing all over the car and sticking their fingers in the window crack.
Mt. Abu is pretty small, but it’s really nice and calm and quiet. It’s apparently a popular spot for honeymooners and Gujaratis, and with the weather so nice I can see why. There were boys on ponies riding around and a market selling clothes and block-print stamps, flavorburst style ice cream, and handmade sandals. We just went back to the hotel for dinner; there was a restaurant on the roof overlooking the lake. We decided to order some alcohol since it Rajasthan isn’t a dry state like Gujarat. They had to actually go to the market to get some beer and rum; they didn’t have it there so it took forever!