Delhi to Udaipur, past where most trips stop

Arrive Delhi

Met at Indira Gandhi International and driven in. Most flights from Europe and North America land late at night or before dawn, which is why the first night is a real night rather than a technicality: we hold your room from the morning of arrival so that a 03:00 landing does not mean sitting in a lobby.

Nothing scheduled. If you land in daylight and have energy, Lodhi Garden is ten minutes away, is full of fifteenth-century tombs and people exercising among them, and is the gentlest possible introduction to the country.

Delhi, old and new, in that order

Out early. Old Delhi first, because it is the part that gets unbearable by eleven: Jama Masjid, then the lanes of Chandni Chowk on foot and by cycle rickshaw, through the spice market at Khari Baoli, where the air will make you cough and everybody who works there will find that funny.

The afternoon is the other three cities that share the name: Humayun’s tomb, which is the building the Taj is descended from and is much the better piece of architecture; the Qutb Minar complex; and a slow drive down the Lutyens avenues that the British laid out in the 1920s and 30s.

Delhi to Agra

Leave after an early breakfast and take the Yamuna Expressway: 230 km, three to three and a half hours, plus half an hour to clear central Delhi. It is a good road and a dull one, which is what you want on a transfer day.

The afternoon is Agra Fort, which almost everybody skips and should not. It is a red sandstone city of a fort, it holds the marble apartments where Shah Jahan spent his last years under house arrest by his own son, and from its east wall you see the Taj across the river bend — which is the view he had. Do the fort first and the Taj second, and the second morning lands differently.

The Taj at opening, then east to Ranthambore

At the gate before it opens. The foreigner ticket is INR 1,300, which includes shoe covers, a bottle of water and the e-rickshaw token for the last stretch, and there is a further INR 200 to go inside the mausoleum chamber itself. Pay it. The inlay work on the cenotaphs is the reason the building is famous and you cannot see it from the platform.

A caution worth having in advance: the marble is discolouring. Pollution, dust and river-borne biological growth have been yellowing it for years, the conservation body has been running well below its staffing, and the courts have been pressing the government about it since long before your booking. The building is open and it is extraordinary. It is not white.

Then east. The train from Agra to Sawai Madhopur is the civilised way to do this leg and we book it under the Foreign Tourist Quota, which opens 365 days ahead against your passport rather than the 120 days the general quota gets. If the quota is gone, we drive, and it is a long afternoon.

Ranthambore: two safaris

Out at dawn and again in the mid-afternoon. Ranthambore runs ten safari zones and they are allocated by permit, not by choice: zones one to five have historically produced the higher tiger sighting rates, zones six to ten are quieter in both senses. We book 30 to 60 days ahead to have any say at all in which zone and which slot you get, and even then the allocation is the park’s.

Between the two drives, the fort. Ranthambore Fort sits inside the reserve on a flat-topped hill, is tenth-century in parts, and is still a working temple that Indian families climb to on a Wednesday. It is the best two hours in the park that do not involve a jeep.

Ranthambore: one more drive, then Jaipur

A third safari at dawn, which is the one that most often works — three drives is roughly where the odds become reasonable rather than optimistic. Breakfast at the lodge afterwards and leave by mid-morning.

Jaipur by the middle of the afternoon. The rest of the day is deliberately light: a walk through the old city inside the pink walls, which was laid out on a grid in 1727 and is still using it, and the Jantar Mantar observatory at the end of the afternoon when the instruments throw long shadows and finally make sense.

Jaipur: Amber, and the city palace

Amber Fort first thing, up the ramp on foot. We do not put clients on the elephants, here or anywhere, and we will say why if you ask. Foreigner entry is around INR 200, though the published figure moves and we cover it in your quote either way. The mirrored hall and the Ganesh Pol are the set pieces; the water gardens below in the lake are the thing people photograph on the way up without knowing what they are.

The afternoon is the City Palace and the textile quarter. Jaipur is a working craft city — block printing, blue pottery, gem cutting — and the difference between a workshop and a commission-paying showroom is the single most useful thing a guide does for you all week. We take you to workshops. We do not take a commission, from anybody, ever.

Jaipur to Jodhpur

A long westward drive across the Aravalli range and out into drier country. We break it at Pushkar or at the Ajmer dargah depending on the day of the week and how busy the shrine is; both are working religious sites and neither is a photo stop.

Jodhpur in the late afternoon. The blue of the old city is real, it is lime and indigo wash, and the explanation everyone gives you about Brahmin houses is only half of it — the rest is that it keeps insects off and the walls cool.

Jodhpur: the fort above and the city below

Mehrangarh in the morning, and it is the finest fort in India by some distance: a sheer cliff with the walls built straight up off the top of it, cannon marks from a siege still in the gate, and an audio guide that is genuinely worth taking even with a guide beside you. Give it three hours.

The afternoon is the old city on foot: the clock tower market, the spice sellers, the stepwell at Toorji ka Jhalra that was excavated out of a rubbish dump in the last fifteen years and is now where the neighbourhood swims. Evening on a roof, looking up at the fort, which is lit.

Jodhpur to Udaipur, by way of Ranakpur

South through the Aravallis on the road that most people fly over. The stop is Ranakpur, a fifteenth-century Jain temple in white marble with more than a thousand carved pillars, no two of them the same, standing in a wooded valley with almost nobody in it. It is the single most surprising building on this route and it exists on the itinerary because of the drive, not despite it.

Into Udaipur in the late afternoon. Sunset from the eastern shore of Lake Pichola, then dinner.

Udaipur

The City Palace in the morning — it is the largest in Rajasthan and the route through it is one-way and slow, so we go at opening. Then the boat on Lake Pichola, which is the only way to see what the city is actually shaped like, and Jagdish temple on the walk back up.

The afternoon is free, and the two things we push are the miniature painting workshops in the lanes behind the palace, where you can watch squirrel-hair brushwork done at a scale that seems impossible, and Sajjangarh above the city for the last hour of light. Neither is compulsory and doing nothing beside the lake is a defensible use of the day.

Depart Udaipur

Breakfast, then the transfer to Maharana Pratap airport for the connection to Delhi or Mumbai. Udaipur is a small airport and the domestic connection is usually smoother than driving back the way you came, which would take two days.