That’s a BIG palace

I have visited the Mysore palace which is supposedly big. But this Udaipur city palace is something else. I was just walking walking walking.

The place is HUGE. It has 1300 rooms. I wonder how they managed to keep track of the number of rooms. It has two 5 star hotels inside it. It has the kings residence in it. It also has a huge museum, open to the public. You need to do a drone shot to get a view of the entire palace. 😃

How did the palace get so big? Various kings who ruled the palace kept on extending it. Looks like none of them wanted to stay in the rooms their father and grandfather lived. Instead of building new palaces they extended the same palace and lived in their own space. If you are a king, you can do anything.

As you enter the palace you see huge cages where tigers and cheetahs were trapped. Pretty interesting way to welcome the guests I must say.

The palace is built on a hill. It’s kinda built around the top of the hill. You will feel it when you walk inside. You walk up 3 or 4 floors and you land in the ground floor with trees growing. This is because you climbed a hill through the palace.

Some rooms and furniture in the palace were very nice. Look at this chair. It’s so pretty. It has a long history but I’m am not going to bore you with it.

The tiles on the walls of some spaces were apparently imported from England and Portugal. It has an embossed finish to it. I wonder why they had to import it when the Portuguese had colonised parts of India and the English had colonised almost the whole of India. It might be from the left over material they got to build their buildings. The Rajputs are going to hate me for saying all this. But who cares!

I visited the Aina Mahal in Bhuj which is room of mirrors. This palace also had rooms with Mirrors. It was exquisite and way better than the one in Bhuj. In fact I felt the palaces were more royal and big in Udaipur compared to their Gujarati counterparts. It’s probably also due to good maintenance.

There were some diesel powered fans and clocks in the palace. I remember seeing a video titled “It electricity was not discovered” and it reminded me of it.

Walking across the palace was tiring. I clocked 15k steps just in the palace that day. Got to see some of the boastings of the Rajputs.