Much of the Lake Palace Hotel’s beauty has to do with location, location, location. What is there not to like about a resplendent palace sitting in the middle of a lake that has open-air courtyards, a marble swimming pool and magnificent terraces. The Monsoon Palace looms high above in the Aravalli Mountains while more palaces can be seen on the shoreline. The Monsoon Palace was built by Maharana Saijian Singh (see…I told you they are all named “Singh”) to basically watch the monsoon clouds. It is now under the control of the Government of Rajasthan and has only been opened to the public recently (not open when we visited Udaipur).

It was time to look at a few of the Lake Palace hotel suites to see what the additional charges would be. You only live once…so…why not! And, to add weight to a “suite stay,” the concierge told us that the Royal Butlers are descendants of the original palace retainers. Shown to three different suites, we finally settled on the least expensive of the three, the Sandhya Suite.

The Sandhya Suite had the “usual” bedroom, living area with gorgeous views of Pichola Lake and Aravalli Mountains. A small alcove with a comfy window seat to gaze out…View image…and, truthfully, I would have been content to hibernate in the Lake Palace Hotel and forget about sightseeing!

ex-Marine finally pried me out of the room to sit above the lotus pond and have a beer (once we found it, the grounds are over four acres) before taking in the obligatory sights of Udaipur on land and by boat. As was written before, food in all the palace hotels was extremely expensive and we could barely afford to order anything on the menu. The upside was a weight loss.

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