A day in Vadodara(Baroda)

After our visit to Statue of Unity we planned to explore Baroda or say Vadodara. It was a leisure day excursion, so basically we want to visit few places but don’t want to cover the full list mentioned on many websites.

We stayed in Eastine Residences. Will share the detailed review in my next blog.

Our day didn’t start early :), we left for sightseeing at around 11 AM.

We didn’t plan much to see, 2 main places that we want to cover were Zoo and Palace. Both had there reasons over any other place and those were we want to show animals to our little one and the Place looks really beautiful in the pics and had a lot of 5* reviews.

We started with Sayaji Baug Zoo, it’s quite big garden with a Zoo, a train and big garden inside. Ticket cost is Rs 20 pp. There is a museum as well in the same campus not sure abut the ticket price as we didn’t visit.

Renovation work was going on when we visited, I think they are building new and bigger cages for the wild animals and might bring more animals as well. I didn’t see any proper parking place outside the Garden.

Whole place is nicely maintained other then few old and small bird cages for small birds, many of bird cages were even empty. There are a lot of different varieties of birds.

The zoo is divided into different sections like one for birds, one for other animals like Rhino, Leopards, monkeys etc. and one for the King of the Jungle.

Our daughter really enjoyed here, you can even take stroller as the area is quite big and kids might create fuss after sometime.

Another attraction here was the train, yes you read it right. There is a toy train which runs inside the park and shows you different parts or the park.

You can take the ride at the start to check what all sections are there or afterwards to relax a bit. We took it afterwards. There is condition of minimum number of passengers then only it will play. The ticket price is Rs 50.

Do not forgot to take your shades and water bottles and if it’s bright sunny day then suns cream.

So, after all the strolling we were hungry and want some good Gujarati food. After searching and reading lot of review we went to Sasumaa Gujarati Thali.

I think it is the most famous place to have Gujarati thali and they do have branches in other cities in Gujarat as well. The thali was big as usual like other thalis with many items.

Taste wise it was good, they did prepared some Jain dishes fresh on request as my mom do not eat onion, garlic and many other things 🙂

This place was walking distance form our hotel, after lunch we went to see the Palace.

Laxmi Vilas Palace is huge palace and hug garden cum golf course. The palace is beautiful from outside as from inside there is not much to see, as the decedents of Maharajah Sayajirao Gaekwad III lives there.

We were really disappointed with this place, we have visited so many palaces much more beautiful then this that to w/o any restrictions.

They don’t even allow to take pic of palace from outside with a SLR or digital camera, only mobile is allowed outside and inside no pics at all.

This place has so many restrictions and after paying a lot for tickets what you see is just 2-3 rooms and one big empty hall. One room is armory and other has old broken crap of there family.

I really mean crap as it was in worst condition and even for that they want us to remove our shoes outside. The hall has some paintings and some sculptures that’s it.

For all this you need to pay a whopping Rs 225. Before this palace recently we have visited City Palace of Udaipur it’s ticket is also costly i.e. Rs 300 but as compared to this that was huge and a lot to see and much more beautiful then this.

They do give audio guide and it has voice of current owners of the Palace. There are issues with the guide and after sometime we turned it off due to the issues. The person is explaining a lot about his personal life in the palace which makes it slow is not useful.

Due to this it takes more then an hour to complete the visit otherwise as I said there is nothing to see.

Forgot to mention above there is one more restriction i.e. you have to keep your mobile on silent.

I won’t recommend anyone to visit this place, you will find a lot of 5* reviews for this place on Google and TripAdvisor but after visiting this I won’t give it anything more then 1*.

We gave the same review to a family who were thinking to purchase the ticket.

This completed our Baroda’s sightseeing. Stay tuned for next blog which will be about our stay in Baroda.

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