(The pics here are of the City Palace in Udaipur and the Floating Palace. The latter is on an island in the middle of Pichola Lake. Udaipur has about 500,000 residents.)
I entered the Kanika Herbal Beauty Parlour in Udaipur, India not knowing what to expect. It was a 6×10 room with a large mirror atop [...]

The Taj Mahal is on the cover of a book about places you must visit before you die. And here I am in Agra, the city of the Taj.
Our group is to visit it at 10:00, but several gals went the previous day at sunrise and said it was magnificent at that time of the [...]

Some random observations and stories about my trip.
Tuk-tuk’s eye view
We get around town in the 3-wheeled, motorcycle-engined “tuk-tuk” (pronounced “took-took”) — we surmise the name came from the ever-present horn tooting. The drivers get perilously close to trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, buildings, and cows, but so far we’ve not seen any in an accident. [...]

We have noticed sometimes school children wave to us as our bus passes. We feel like celebrities no one has heard of, even though we’re not in a rock star-size bus.
But today it got even better.
After a stop for a monument viewing, a dozen of our group clustered outside the gates on a bench and [...]

India has been described by friends who’ve traveled here before as a land of contrasts. They were not exaggerating. I’ve traveled to third-world countries before and seen cardboard shanties next to good hotels. However, it is the sheer volume of one over the other here that makes it so startling.
Some examples:

On the 4-lane divided highway, [...]