15th February: Umaid Bhavan and the old centre of Jodhpur

In the morning we made the most of the buffet served for breakfast, and in particular their delicious pancakes bathed in maple syrup, yummy! It was a very comfortable hotel, and it would have been quite hard to leave had John's mother not found another great hotel to stay in Jodhpur. Yes, by then, we had become pretty demanding for our accommodation. Farewell, basic hostels (well, for another couple of weeks).

We arrived in Jodhpur after a few hours' drive from Pushkar on a decent road through the desert. The hotel in Jodhpur was charming, with a pretty garden separating the rooms from the restaurant and the main building. It was a few kilometres away from the city centre and we only had a few hours of daylight remaining, so we quickly checked in, dropped off our luggage, and hopped back in the car for the afternoon's visits: Umaid Bhawan, the 20th century palace of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, and the Clock Tower at the heart of the old city.

The palace, sitting on the top of Chittar Hill, is visible from miles away and looms over you as you approach. It is also strikingly modern for a building dating from the 1940s. It was commissioned by Maharaja Umaid Singh as a drought relief project, or so we were told, and it employed more than 3000 men and women for 15 years, starting from 1929. The Maharaja chose a British architect, Henry Vaughan Lanchester, to design his palace, which was the largest private residence in the world at the time with no fewer than 347 rooms.

Approaching the enormous palace

The palace was decorated in exquisite Art Deco style, although the attempt to ship the furnishings constructed by Maples of London was frustrated by the Germans, who sunk the valuable cargo during WWII (the sign describing this as a "tragedy" might be overdoing it, given the context). Instead, the Maharaja turned to a Polish amateur interior designer named Stefan Norblin who had fled Europe during the war. We saw a few of his sketches in the palace's museum. I would have liked to see the actual rooms (and in particular the swimming pool and the marble squash courts), but a large part of the palace was converted into a luxury hotel in the late 1970s and they have a very strict admission policy for residents only (they wouldn't even let John's parents through the gates to check availability for the night we would spend in Jodhpur on the way back from Jaisalmer). Before heading into town, we glanced over the great collection of old cars stored by the gates.

The splendid Art Deco interior of the place

One of the courtyards inside the palace

The museum contained an impressive collection of fine antique clocks

We were then driven to the old centre of the city, where we were dropped off to have a wander through the old Sardar market towards the Clock Tower that lies at its heart. The tower was built by Maharaja Sardar Singh in the late 19th century and has a very British look. We did not really engage with the many stalls around the market, but we enjoyed looking at the old (and rather decayed) buildings around the Clock Tower. We also had a good view of the Mehrangarh, Jodhpur's magnificent fort, overlooking the city 100 meters below. As sunset was approaching, we found a rooftop terrace atop an old haveli that had a great view of the fort.