10 Days in India: Golden Triangle, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Udaipur by Private Car

Nearly every long-haul flight reaches Delhi between midnight and eight in the morning.

• Reserve your first hotel night for the evening before you land, so the room is yours when you arrive.
• Your driver meets you at the airport.
• That small arrangement does more for the next ten days than any upgrade.
• In the afternoon, once you are functional, go to Humayun's Tomb in New Delhi.
• Finished in 1572 for the second Mughal emperor, and largely designed by his widow, it is the first great Mughal garden tomb: a dome of marble and sandstone in a walled garden of four parts with water channels running toward it.
• Eighty years later Shah Jahan builds the same idea in white marble beside a river.
• Seeing the original on Day 1 gives Day 4 its meaning.

Old Delhi has a working day that ends around two in the afternoon, so be at Jama Masjid by nine.

• Shah Jahan finished it in 1656 and its courtyard holds twenty-five thousand people.
• It is the one wide, still place in this half of the city, and the southern minaret gives the best view over the rooftops of the old town.
• Then walk into Chandni Chowk, with a cycle rickshaw for the longer stretches.
• You pass Khari Baoli, the great spice market, where the air is sharp enough to make you cough.
• You pass Dariba Kalan, the silver lane, and Kinari Bazaar, where wedding trimmings are sold.
• None of this is preserved for visitors.
• It is a wholesale district that has traded since the seventeenth century and behaves like one.

The Yamuna Expressway takes three to three and a half hours from Delhi to Agra, and the road is a good one.

• A fast train also makes the run in about 100 minutes, but our plan keeps you in your own car, with your luggage and your guide beside you.
• You do not see the Taj Mahal today, and that is deliberate.
• Agra Fort takes the afternoon.
• It is a red sandstone walled city that was the Mughal seat before Delhi took that role, with Shah Jahan's white marble pavilions folded inside Akbar's defences.
• Look for the Musamman Burj, the octagonal marble tower where Aurangzeb is said to have kept his father in his last years.
• It faces downriver, directly at the Taj.
• To see that view before you see the tomb is worth a day of ordinary sightseeing.

Be in the queue before the gates open, and walk straight down the central axis before the garden fills.

• Shah Jahan began the Taj Mahal in 1632 for Mumtaz Mahal, and it was finished in 1653.
• The reason to come at dawn is that Makrana marble is faintly translucent.
• Over about forty minutes the building passes from grey through pink to white, and at six there are hundreds of people present rather than thousands.
• Then go close.
• From the garden the surface looks carved, but on the plinth you see pietra dura: semi-precious stone cut to shape and set flush into the marble, flower by flower.
• Step inside the mausoleum once.
• It is dim, and you pass through in minutes, but the inlay around the cenotaphs is the finest in the building.
• Two hours is enough.
• Return for breakfast, check out and drive west.
• Fatehpur Sikri is an hour from Agra: Akbar's imperial capital of the 1570s, in red sandstone, abandoned after fourteen years, most likely because its water failed.
• It is largely intact and usually quiet, and it is the best stop on any road day of this journey.
• You reach Jaipur in the late afternoon.
• This is the longest day of the first week, so plan nothing for the evening.

Amber Fort is the reason Jaipur has two nights, and the reason to arrive when it opens.

• It stands eleven kilometres from the city on a hillside above Maota Lake, built by the Kachwaha Rajputs, who allied with the Mughals instead of fighting them.
• That is why the architecture is a true hybrid.
• There are four courtyards, a mirrored Sheesh Mahal that draws a queue by half past ten, and ramparts running along the ridge.
• Give it two and a half hours.
• The walled city fills the middle of the day.
• Jai Singh II laid Jaipur out on a grid in 1727, so the City Palace, Jantar Mantar and Hawa Mahal lie within a few hundred metres of one another.
• Jantar Mantar is a set of monumental stone astronomical instruments that still keep time to within seconds, and it needs a guide to make sense.
• Hawa Mahal takes twenty minutes and is best photographed from the rooftop cafe opposite.

Jaipur to Jodhpur takes five and a half to six hours.

• Leave by eight.
• The land flattens and dries, villages grow farther apart, and you arrive on the edge of the Thar.
• Your car puts you at the hotel door with your bags, and you can stop for lunch where the road offers a good place.
• Go straight to Mehrangarh.
• It is the most physically imposing building on the whole route, including the Taj Mahal, and it works on other terms: cliff and wall rising 120 metres over the old city, begun in 1459, never taken by assault, and still owned by the Jodhpur royal family, so the interiors are original and not rebuilt.
• Late afternoon is the right light on that sandstone.

Spend the morning below the fort, not inside it again.

• The lanes under Mehrangarh are painted blue, once as a mark of Brahmin households and now as the look of Jodhpur, and they are cool and quiet before ten.
• Sardar Market and the clock tower are a working market in the morning and a souvenir strip by four, so timing matters here more than anywhere else on the route.
• The afternoon goes out of town.
• A jeep run into the Thar scrub around the Bishnoi villages is the honest version of a desert day from Jodhpur.
• The Bishnoi have protected trees and wildlife as a religious practice since the fifteenth century.
• You meet potters and block-printers who are truly working, and you may see blackbuck in the open.
• Go late in the afternoon, not at noon, for the animals and for the light.

The drive from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer is about five hours, and the last two are the emptiest road of the trip.

• Leave at seven and you reach the hotel around lunchtime, with the afternoon and evening free, which this day needs.
• Jaisalmer Fort differs from every other fort on this route because people still live in it, around two thousand of them, within a twelfth-century citadel of yellow sandstone that turns gold in low light.
• Inside the walls are houses, shops, fifteenth-century Jain temples and lanes barely wide enough for a motorbike.
• Walk it in the late afternoon with your guide, and visit the merchant mansions of Patwon Ki Haveli below the fort if time allows.
• Then the desert.
• Camel and jeep runs go out to the dunes near Sam and Khuri in the late afternoon and end with dinner and Rajasthani folk music under open sky.
• To be clear about it: the main dune area in high season is busy and the folk show is a show.
• The desert itself, once the light fades and the day visitors leave, is not.
• If you can, sleep out there instead of driving back to town, and choose a camp a little farther from the busiest cluster.

This is the day Jaisalmer costs you.

• Expect nine to ten hours by road from Jaisalmer to Udaipur, back through Pokhran and Pali, with no useful flight and no fast rail link.
• Leave at six.
• Lunch is taken on the road.
• You reach Udaipur in the late afternoon.
• Take something from the morning before you go.
• A heritage walk through the fort lanes at first light, before the shops open and while residents are the only people about, is the best hour Jaisalmer has.
• It costs an hour of the drive instead of a whole morning.
• Then get in the car.
• Udaipur comes as a surprise after the desert: water, hills and a city built around Lake Pichola.
• See nothing tonight.
• Walk to the ghats for the last light and have dinner in view of the palace.

Udaipur is where the route is meant to end.

• After nine days of forts, marble and roads, it is the one place where doing less is the point, and the day is built around water rather than monuments.
• Start early on the ghats while the city is washing.
• The City Palace opens at nine and deserves the morning.
• It is not one building but four centuries of them, added by successive maharanas along the eastern shore of Lake Pichola, with a museum, courtyards, mirrored rooms and terraces over the lake.
• Afterwards walk through the old town to Jagdish Temple, a seventeenth-century shrine still in daily use, reached up a flight of steps that keeps most of the crowd away.
• Finish on the water.
• The last boat of the day on Lake Pichola passes the Lake Palace and stops at Jag Mandir island, and for most travellers it is the hour they remember.
• Flights are not included in your tour.