One visa, and four or five countries behind it

At a glance

What this country actually is

India is not a destination in the sense that Bhutan is a destination. It is a subcontinent with several distinct travel propositions inside it that share a currency, a railway and a visa, and almost nothing else that a visitor would notice. The mistake most first trips make is treating the word "India" as though it named one thing that a fortnight could cover.

The north is Mughal and Rajput: sandstone, marble, walled cities, desert distance and a great deal of noise. The south is water and green and much quieter, with churches and communist party flags in the same street and no monumental architecture to speak of. The east is a third proposition again, and the Himalayan north a fourth. Choosing one and giving it your whole fortnight is how India works. Sampling three of them is how a fortnight becomes a series of airports.

Two things about the country are worth saying before anybody books, because a brochure will not say them and a good guide will.

The first is that India is visually confronting on the way to almost everything. There is poverty on the road into every city, there are hands at the car window at traffic lights, and the gap between the hotel and the street outside it is wider here than anywhere else on this site. Nobody who has travelled well in India describes it as restful. Most describe it as the trip they think about most.

The second is that the famous buildings are under pressure and are not in the condition the photographs suggest. The Taj Mahal is not the colour it gets printed in. Decades of airborne pollution, of dust, and of biological growth rising off the river alongside it have turned patches of the marble yellow and green; roughly a third of the conservation posts at the agency charged with looking after it have been standing empty; and the courts have been leaning on ministers over the whole business since long before anyone reading this booked a flight. The building is open. It is everything people say. It is also not white.

How many nights, and what breaks if you take fewer

Ten nights is the working floor for one region done at a walking pace. Sixteen covers a region thoroughly, or two regions with a domestic flight between them and no sense of hurry. Below ten, the arithmetic starts eating the trip rather than the itinerary.

Here is the arithmetic. Rajasthan’s cities are three to six hours apart by road, and those distances are why the state built forts rather than suburbs. The Yamuna Expressway covers the 230 km down to Agra in three to three and a half hours once you are on it, and clearing central Delhi to reach it adds another half hour at the front. Jaipur is a shade over three hours now the new expressway is open. Four transfers of that order is a normal twelve-day route. Cut it to eight days and you have not removed a transfer — you have removed the second night in the places worth two.

The south is slower for a different reason. Kerala’s distances are short and the roads through the Western Ghats bend far more than they climb, so four hours is what four hours is regardless of the map. Nine nights is close to the minimum for the coast, the tea country, a reserve and the backwaters.

What breaks first, when nights come out, is always the same thing: the second morning. One night in a place buys you an arrival and a departure. Two buys you a morning in it before anybody else is up, which in India is the half of the day worth having.

The honest version of the multi-region question is on how many days, which does the same sum for every country we sell.

When to go, and what the wrong months give you back

Two seasonal facts do more work than the rest. The first belongs to Delhi and it is a season rather than a permanent condition: the capital’s air deteriorates sharply from about October and does not clear until late January. Crop burning in the states upwind arrives at the same moment as the winter inversion that stops anything rising, with traffic and construction dust sitting underneath both. The city was back among the world’s ten most polluted in October 2025 on a reading above 200, against an annual average of roughly 178 the year before, which is already inside the unhealthy band.

The right response is neither to cancel nor to keep quiet about it. In that window the city is worth seeing in the two hours after sunrise and worth leaving alone in the afternoon; the route should turn west into Rajasthan or south towards Kerala within a day or two of landing; and a second night in the capital should be doing arrival-buffer work rather than sightseeing work. Where somebody in the party has asthma or a cardiac condition, the adjustment is a single Delhi night at the start and the recovered time spent in Udaipur. A quote for November that never raises any of this has either not considered it or is counting on you not to.

The second is that the south runs on its own calendar, and the accident is useful: the dry window in Kerala is broadly December to February, which is precisely when the north is at its dirtiest. A traveller who can only come in January is better served by the south, and we would rather say so than sell the wrong half of the country in the wrong month. The full year across Asia is on when to go.

Getting there, and getting around

Three airports carry almost everything. Delhi (DEL) is the door to the north and to the Himalaya; Mumbai (BOM) is the better arrival for the west; Kochi (COK) puts you in Kerala without a domestic transfer. Long-haul arrivals land late at night or before dawn with tiring regularity, which is why the first hotel night should be held from the previous morning rather than booked for the day of arrival.

Entry is by e-Tourist visa and the whole business happens online. What you pay depends on when you land rather than when you apply: an arrival inside the April-to-June window is USD 10 for thirty days, an arrival in any other month is USD 25, and the one-year document is USD 40. Three per cent goes on top of whichever figure applies, which is the bank’s cut rather than the government’s. India charges by nationality under a reciprocal schedule and British passports sit above American, European and Australian ones on it, so a UK party should take its number from the official calculator instead of from an agency page quoting the US rate.

On timing: applications open 120 days out and close four days before you arrive, and most are decided inside about three days. A month ahead is comfortable. A week ahead is a bet on there being no public holiday. The longer-validity versions cap you at 180 days of stay in any calendar year, a limit almost nobody reaches and a few people discover the hard way.

On the ground, a car with a driver is the default and it is not extravagance: a sedan comes to something like USD 45 to 60 a day and an Innova-class SUV to USD 65 to 90, and those figures already carry the fuel, the tolls, the parking and what the driver is paid to be away from home. A site guide is engaged separately, by the day or by the monument.

Trains are the other real option and they are better than their reputation, with one procedural catch. Foreign passport holders can book under the Foreign Tourist Quota up to 365 days ahead, against a passport, where the general quota opens at 120 days; the last-minute Tatkal quota exists but is thin and priced accordingly. Registering an account usually snags on the requirement for an Indian mobile number, and an e-ticket cannot be changed — only cancelled and rebooked. This is exactly the kind of administration worth handing to somebody who does it weekly.

Onward by air, Delhi to Kathmandu is about 819 km and an hour and a half to an hour and fifty in the cabin, with IndiGo running it four times a day, Air India three and Nepal Airlines alongside them. That short hop is why Nepal and Bhutan attach so naturally to a north India route.

What it costs on the ground

India sits in the cheapest of our country bands: a private journey works out at something like USD 190 to 300 for each traveller for each day on the ground, before international flights. That is not a room rate. It is the whole day — the room, the car, the driver, the guide, the entrance fees, most of the meals and the company standing behind all of it.

The components, so you can see where a quote is built. Mid-range hotels run about USD 60 to 120 a night across the country; the Oberoi, Taj and palace-hotel tier starts around USD 180 and goes well past USD 400, and in Rajasthan the difference between those two bands is larger than it is anywhere else in Asia, because the upper tier is often a genuine fort or palace rather than a hotel dressed as one. The car is the USD 45 to 90 already mentioned. Entrances are small individually and add up: the foreigner ticket at the Taj Mahal is INR 1,300, a price that quietly bundles the overshoes, the water and the electric buggy that carries you the last stretch, and the mausoleum chamber itself is a separate INR 200. Take the chamber. The inlay on the cenotaphs is the work the building is famous for and none of it reads from the platform outside.

Where India differs from its neighbours is how steeply the per-person price falls with party size. Two travellers carry one car, one driver and one guide between them. Six split the same cost six ways, and the daily rate can drop by a third without a single hotel changing. The country-by-country breakdown before anybody’s margin is on cost by country.

In pictures

When to skip it

• If your only travel window is May or June and you want the north. Rajasthan in those two months reaches daytime temperatures that no amount of air conditioning makes reasonable, and the season is October to March for good reason. Go to the Himalaya or to Central Asia instead and come back in February.
• If somebody in the party has a respiratory or cardiac condition and the dates are fixed in November, December or January. The Delhi air in that window is a medical question rather than a comfort one. A southern route solves it completely; a northern route with a single arrival night in Delhi mostly solves it.
• If you want one country in seven days. India will give you three cities and four transfers, and you will spend the flight home wishing you had gone to Sri Lanka or Cambodia instead.
• If a tiger sighting is the point rather than a bonus. Ranthambore runs ten safari zones allocated by permit rather than by preference; the lower-numbered five have historically produced the better sighting rates, the higher five are quieter, and in the monsoon the productive half of the park shuts entirely. A trip built around big cats is a different trip, in a different park, at a different time of year.
• If the part of India you had in mind is Kashmir. The UK FCDO advises against all travel to Jammu and Kashmir, apart from air travel to and from and within Jammu city, and against all travel within 10 km of the India–Pakistan border in Gujarat and Rajasthan; it advises against all but essential travel to Manipur. We do not sell any of them, and we will not build a route that touches them.

Journeys that go here

Two country journeys and two grand voyages reach India, and they divide by region rather than by budget.

The north is Rajasthan and the Golden Triangle in twelve days, Delhi to Udaipur, which does the Taj and Jaipur properly and then keeps driving west into the desert cities that most four-day Golden Triangle trips never reach. The south is Kerala in ten days, Kochi to Trivandrum, which is coast, tea, forest and flat water and has no fort in it at all.

For longer, India, Nepal and Bhutan in twenty-one days runs Delhi to Paro to Kathmandu and is the only sensible way to hold all three of those countries in one trip. Sri Lanka and south India in nineteen days pairs the island with Kerala across a short flight, and is a better use of nineteen days than a slower version of either half.

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