Travel Intelligence – Letter from India January 2001

Escaping Christmas

I start to dream during that ugly fortnight before Christmas. As the offices of London become fraught with mistletoe politics, bad red wine hangovers, and rude women from Hampshire overrun shops where credit card machines fairly buzz with seasonal goodiewill. I start to dream of a place a long way away from George Michael in seasonal song mode being piped at me in supermarket aisles.

I dream of a courtyard where the bougainvillaea climbs on a white wall and absorbs the late afternoon light to an even deeper darker pink than Pauline from personnel’s party-pouncer lipstick. I close my eyes and smell frangipani on the evening air. A place where it is warm enough just to wear a flippy dress, many thousands of miles away from the cold dankness I intend to leave behind on the Piccadilly Line at HattonCross.
And through luck and dogged determination I find myself looking at that dreamed of late afternoon bougainvillaea doing its thing on the white wall in a palace courtyard. But I am still being tortured by George Michael, and I am almost as unthrilled about this as I would be swapping lipstick tips with Pauline in the loo of a Thames not-very-merry-Xmas party barge.

This is how Christmas was shaping up in Udaipur in Rajasthan. The dreamtime setting of Shiv Niwas Palace overlooking Picchola Lake had been transformed into a cross between Santa’s grotto and an Am Dram set for Scrooge. The central courtyard had a huge tree in the corner decorated fit to bust, and there were strange gnomes peering out of cotton wool all around the bottom. The entrance to the exquisite drawing room in the courtyard of the palace was flanked with over-sized speakers giving us George Michael, Rudolf and Co. and White Christmas on a constant loop. But possibly worst of all was  the endless meterage of Yuletide buffet on Christmas Eve and Christmas night. It kicked off with roast turkey and bits at the east end of the groaning tables, passed through subcontinental and continental fare in tepid states under huge silver domes, and culminated, at its western nadir, with very thin slices of figgy pudding and cement-sturdy custard—just not what you fly 5,000 miles to have to face under the frangipani trees and a desert sky. But I did laugh very merrily when the reception manager made his way around the courtyard diners, rigged up in full Father Christmas gear and gumboots five sizes too big. He strode with giant gumboot-sized strides and ‘ho-ho’d’ with the best of them.

When I asked the big cheese at the palace he they felt it was important to recreate Christmas for people who were doing their utmost to get away from it all, he was nonplussed.

‘We give them what they want,’ he had to almost shout to make himself heard over the carol cacophony as big-booted Father C ho-ho’d on by.

This was not what I wanted. And the booby prize goes to those at the Taj group of hotels who decided that it would be a good idea to cover the Lake Palace Hotel, that great white floating gem in the middle of Lake Picchola, in Christmas decorations awful enough to have been rejected by every sale dump bin west of Tehran. And a special mention for the plastic laughing Father Cs stuck on the windows with peeling Sellotape.

All was forgotten 45 minutes away through the scrub edges of the Thar desert, 45 glorious minutes away from Santas, both gum-booted and Sellotaped. I was not sure that anyone would ever be able to achieve in India what the owners of Devi Garh have created from a crumbling palace in just two years of restoration and construction. Devi Garh is possibly the first really unusual and seriously high calibre hotel in India that compares with any other unique property around the world. The external restoration is in full sympathy with the original palace fort build during the 18th century. The trick that the owners and architects have pulled off has been the creation of pure, rinsed modern interiors with design and attention to detail based on tradition while being utterly modern in execution.

The other great trump of Devi Garh is either through luck or  ingenious design because the fort looks down on that rare gem, the perfect village. It is of such Rajasthani purity that you almost want to check with some of the gnarled ancients roaming the narrow streets whether they came from central casting via the Indian Tourist Board.

Memories of piped music and buffet acreage just disappeared in a cloud of desert dust on finding an alcove that hung over the gardens. The tall elegant waiter had to stoop to get through the secret doorway. And he did so without spilling a drop of champagne or breaking a single papaddum on his silver tray.

Devi Garh website: www.deviresorts.com