The common way to get Udaipur wrong is to arrive with a Jaipur-shaped plan: a list of sites, a car, and a schedule. Udaipur does not have enough on the list to fill that plan, and people conclude after a day that there is not much here.
There is a good deal here. It is just that the city is the attraction and the monuments are incidental to it, which is precisely the reverse of Jaipur.
Day one: the palace and the water
City Palace, in the morning
The largest palace complex in Rajasthan, built up above the lake over roughly four centuries by successive rulers, which is why it reads as a series of connected buildings rather than one design.
Allow three hours. The route through it is a sequence of narrow stairs, small courtyards and mirrored and tiled rooms, and it opens repeatedly onto views over the lake, which is the thing that distinguishes it from other palaces of its type. Parts remain in private use, so some sections are closed.
Go early. It is the one place in Udaipur that gets genuinely congested.
Jagdish Temple
Twenty minutes, a short walk up from the palace. A seventeenth-century temple, still in active daily use, with carved elephants on the steps. Worth going in rather than photographing from outside; the interior is where the carving is.
Lake Pichola, late afternoon
This is the hour that justifies the trip. A boat out onto the lake in the last hour or two of daylight gives you the palace and the ghats from the water, with the light going warm across them.
The lake is artificial, dammed in the fourteenth century and extended since. The island palaces on it, including the one now operating as a hotel, are part of the same water landscape rather than separate sights, and they are best appreciated from a boat rather than visited.
Day two: the old city and the ridge
Bagore ki Haveli
An eighteenth-century merchant house on the ghats, restored and open as a museum. An hour. It is the best available answer to what an ordinary wealthy household here actually looked like, as opposed to a royal one, and it is the more interesting building for it.
The old city on foot
Give this the rest of the morning and do not plan it. The lanes between the palace and the lake are narrow, largely free of larger vehicles, and full of small workshops and miniature painting studios. Udaipur has a long tradition of miniature painting and a good deal of what is sold is made locally.
This is the part of the trip most likely to be remembered, and it is the part most easily lost to an over-scheduled day.
Saheliyon ki Bari
Forty minutes, and a genuinely pleasant garden with fountains and lotus pools, laid out for the women of the royal household. Its charm is that the fountains were designed to run on gravity from the lake above rather than pumps. Skippable if the day is full.
Sajjangarh, the Monsoon Palace, at sunset
On the hill above the city, inside a wildlife sanctuary, so you pay to enter the sanctuary as well as the building. The palace itself is unfinished and largely empty.
You are going for the view: the lakes and the city laid out below with the Aravalli hills behind. Go for sunset, allow an hour and a half including the drive, and treat the building as a viewing platform rather than a monument.
The honest caveat about the water
Udaipur’s lakes are monsoon-fed and their levels vary a great deal between years. After a strong monsoon they are full and the city looks like its photographs. After a weak one they can be noticeably low, and in poor years boat operations are affected.
This is worth checking before you build a trip around the water, especially late in the dry season. It is the one variable here that can genuinely change what you get.
Fitting it with the rest of Rajasthan
If you are combining it with two days in Jaipur, do Jaipur first and Udaipur second; the other order makes Jaipur feel like an assault. For the overnight leg between them, the class you book matters more than the train.
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