Four stops before the checkout

Udaipur, India

cardio tennis workout Lake Ridge — City Palace, Udaipur in Udaipur, A long cream and white palace of stacked balconies, cupolas, arched windows and octagonal towers rising directly from a granite ridge above a lake, its courtyards inlaid with coloured glass and mirror mosaic

Stop one

Udaipur City Palace

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case: Priya normally leads here and she is far better on the Mewar material, so bear with me. Begun in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II, who founded the city after Chittorgarh fell to the Mughals, and extended by his successors across four centuries into the largest palace complex in Rajasthan. It runs along a ridge on the east bank of Lake Pichola — a chain of connected palaces in granite and marble, with courtyards, mirror rooms, mosaic peacocks and towers, tied together by a facade nearly a quarter of a kilometre long. The Mewar dynasty claims the longest continuous rule of any royal house in the region, and its rulers were noted for refusing marriage alliances with the Mughals. Part residence, part museum, part hotel.

Stop two

Lake Palace

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case: I'm told I undersell this one, so, plainly: built between 1743 and 1746 by Maharana Jagat Singh II as a summer pleasure palace, covering Jag Niwas island so completely that the white marble rises straight out of Lake Pichola. The Mewar royal family used it for two centuries, and it sheltered European women and children during the uprising of 1857. In 1963 Maharana Bhagwat Singh converted it into a hotel, one of the first Indian palaces to make that transition, later run by the Taj group. And it appeared in Octopussy in 1983, which is why the film still screens nightly on rooftop restaurants all over Udaipur. Nightly. I have seen it more often than I have seen my family.

Stop three

Jagdish Temple

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case: Thirty-two steps, and I'll count them with you, because the regular guide always does and it would feel wrong to skip it. Completed in 1651 by Maharana Jagat Singh I, a short distance from the City Palace, dedicated to Vishnu as Lord of the Universe: Nagara style, three storeys, a fifty-foot spire, and that plinth reached by thirty-two marble steps guarded by stone elephants. The exterior is carved with bands of dancers, musicians, elephants and horsemen. Inside, a black stone image of Vishnu, with a brass Garuda facing the entrance from its own small shrine. Largest temple in the city, still in daily worship, and the lanes around it are the busiest in the old town.

Stop four

Saheliyon ki Bari

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case: This is the stop I would keep, if the tour were ever handed to me permanently, which nobody has suggested. Laid out in the eighteenth century under Maharana Sangram Singh II for the queen and the forty-eight attendants who accompanied her in marriage: pools, lotus ponds, marble pavilions and fountains, planted with mango, palm and bougainvillea. And the fountains run entirely on gravity from Fateh Sagar Lake above. No pumps. None at all. There is a rain fountain built to imitate a monsoon downpour and four marble elephants spouting into a central pool, with the waterworks reportedly imported from England. Intended as a retreat for the royal women, it is a public park now at the northern edge of the city.

The Udaipur, India track

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case

Written for this world alone.

A single instrument is a pleasure. A matched set is a life's work. This is a full case of Dunlop ATP Championship — 24 pressurised cans, 72 balls, ATP Tour endorsed, Max Core construction with Durafelt HD cloth, all-court felt. Every ball out of the same run, so they play the same and wear the same.

Udaipur, which has been building matched sets out of water and marble for four centuries, is where I am taking my varnish and my opinions.

We begin on the ridge along the east bank of Lake Pichola at the City Palace, begun in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II after Chittorgarh fell to the Mughals, and extended by his successors into the largest palace complex in Rajasthan.

Granite and marble, courtyards, mirror rooms, mosaic peacocks and towers, and the whole chain of it unified behind a facade nearly a quarter of a kilometre long — which is the trick, and it is the same trick as a matched set: many separate builds, four hundred years apart, made to read as one instrument.

The Mewar dynasty that raised it claims the longest continuous rule of any royal house in the region and made a point of refusing marriage alliances with the Mughals.

Out on the water, the Lake Palace covers its island so completely that the white marble appears to float unsupported; Maharana Jagat Singh II built it between 1743 and 1746 as a summer pleasure palace, it sheltered European women and children in 1857, and in 1963 it became one of the first Indian palaces converted into a hotel.

Just outside the City Palace gate, the Jagdish Temple rises on a high plinth up a steep stair flanked by stone elephants, its shikhara banded with carved musicians, dancers and deities, a brass Garuda facing the door and daily worship still going on inside.

North of the old city, Saheliyon ki Bari, the Garden of the Maidens, runs lawns, lotus pools and marble pavilions with fountains fed entirely by gravity from the lake above — no pumps, no motors, and a set of them arranged around marble elephants. Four centuries and nobody has had to retune it.

You will work through this case everywhere from a hard court above Lake Pichola to an indoor hall in Ahmedabad, five hours south-west, and by the way, it is also perfect for an evening on the ghats afterwards, when the fountains are still running on nothing but the fall of the water.

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Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case

Dunlop ATP Championship Tennis Ball Case