Day 10: Udaipur to Delhi and Back Home
After a leisurely breakfast, meet your guide in the lobby at 9 a.m. for your trip to the Sri Eklingji temple complex, about a 40-minute drive out of town. Built in the eighth century (and rebuilt in the fifteenth), these 108 temples can collectively be viewed as sort of an ur-Khajuraho; the carving is nowhere near as graceful or refined as what you saw there, but one sees in its architectural structures and bas-reliefs an excellent blueprint of what would follow two centuries later.

This is a quick visit, and at any rate, the sun will force you back into the car by 11 a.m. or so. Then it's back to your hotel for a poolside lunch. At 2 p.m., head out on your own with your driver. Udaipur is famous for its paintings, and if you like, your guide can direct you to some studios that specialize in miniatures. With only 500,000 people, this is a small (well, relatively) and sleepy city, so it's a good place to walk among the bazaars without the attendant crush of people. The area around City Palace makes for good browsing, as do the stalls and shops of Bapu Bazaar (clothing), Bada Bazaar (jewelry), and Chetak Circle (crafts).

Your car will be coming to meet you at the hotel at 3:30 p.m. for your two-hour flight to Delhi, which departs Udaipur at 5:15 p.m. Once you land, an IVAT rep will meet you and assist you with check-in at the international terminal, a hellish place: Most outbound flights to Europe and the United States leave late at night, so these are peak travel hours. By the time you check your bags and pass through immigration and customs, it'll be after 9:30 p.m., leaving you just under three hours (before the departure of American Airlines flight 293 for Chicago) to find your own way to say good-bye to one of the great civilizations of the world, a place whose extremes—its messiness and brilliance—will never allow you to look at art, or history, or religion, quite the same way again. What could be a better gift than that?