9 Days in India: The Golden Triangle and Western Rajasthan by Private Car

Most long-haul flights land in Delhi between midnight and eight in the morning, so the first day is a half day whatever you hoped on the plane.

• Your driver meets you at the airport and takes you to the hotel.
• If you can, hold the room from the night before, so that you can sleep until late morning.
• That rest is the reason Days 2 and 3 go well.
• In the afternoon, with your guide, begin in New Delhi at Humayun's Tomb.
• Finished in 1572 for the second Mughal emperor, it is the first of the great garden tombs: a high dome, red sandstone with white marble inlay, and a walled garden divided into four.
• The Taj Mahal is this same idea carried out in marble, eighty years on.
• Seeing the earlier building first changes how you read the later one.

Old Delhi works in the morning and fades by early afternoon, so you start at Jama Masjid around nine.

• Shah Jahan completed it in 1656.
• It is the largest mosque in India, and its courtyard is the one open space in this crowded quarter.
• From there the lanes of Chandni Chowk run west.
• Your guide will put you on a cycle rickshaw for the long stretches and on your own feet for the narrow ones.
• Khari Baoli, the spice market, is among the largest of its kind in Asia, and the air stings your eyes, which is the correct response.
• The silver lanes and the wedding-card alleys show you a working district, not a preserved one.
• Eat as you go, and let the guide choose the stalls on your first two days in India.

The drive to Agra on the Yamuna Expressway takes three to three and a half hours, and it is a smooth, modern road.

• Your driver can stop where you like.
• A fast train also runs between the two cities in about 100 minutes, but this plan is built around the car, which brings your luggage and your guide straight to the hotel door.
• Today you see Agra Fort, and not the Taj Mahal.
• The fort was the seat of Mughal power for about a century.
• It is a walled city of red sandstone, with Shah Jahan's white marble palaces set inside.
• Find the Musamman Burj, the octagonal tower where Aurangzeb is said to have held his father in his last years.
• It looks downriver, straight at the Taj.
• Standing there before you have visited the tomb is the reason this day is arranged as it is.
• In the last hour of daylight, cross the river to Mehtab Bagh.
• From the far bank you see the Taj in profile, in low orange light, with few people about.
• In December and January bring a jacket, because the temperature drops quickly after sunset.

Be at the gate before it opens.

• Building ran from 1632 to 1653.
• The reason to come at first light is physical rather than historical.
• The Makrana marble is faintly translucent, and over the first half hour the building moves from grey to pink to white.
• There are a few hundred visitors instead of a few thousand.
• Walk up to the plinth.
• From the garden the surface looks carved, but close to it you see pietra dura: semi-precious stones cut and set flush into the marble, flower by flower.
• That inlay is the real achievement of the building.
• Step inside the mausoleum once.
• It is dim and you pass through quickly, but the finest inlay is around the cenotaphs.
• Return for breakfast, check out, and take the road west.
• Fatehpur Sikri lies about an hour from Agra.
• Akbar built it as his capital in the 1570s and left it after fourteen years, and it still stands, in red sandstone, usually quiet.
• Allow two hours.
• You reach Jaipur in the late afternoon.
• This is the one hard day of the trip, with a very early start and several hours in the car, so keep the evening empty.

Go to Amber Fort early.

• It is a Rajput palace climbing a hillside outside the city, four courtyards deep, and the mirrored Sheesh Mahal at its centre draws a queue by half past ten.
• At eight there is none.
• Allow two and a half hours.
• The ascent can be made by jeep.
• The middle of the day belongs to the walled city.
• Jaipur was laid out on a grid in 1727, so the City Palace, Jantar Mantar and Hawa Mahal sit close together.
• Jantar Mantar is a park of huge stone astronomical instruments that still work.
• Without someone to explain them they are puzzling, and with a good guide they are among the most interesting things in the city.

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

• Leave by eight and stop for lunch on the way.
• The country thins into scrub as you go west.
• Trains run on this route too, but the car lets you break the journey when something catches your eye, and it ends at the hotel entrance.
• You arrive with the afternoon still intact, so go straight up to Mehrangarh.
• The fort stands on a rock 120 metres above the old city.
• It has never fallen to a siege, and the Jodhpur royal family still owns it, which is why the interiors survive as they were.
• Late afternoon is the best hour on the ramparts.
• From up there the blue houses below make sense in a way they never do from the street.

This is the day that nine days buys you, and it should not be spent back inside the fort.

• Start at street level in the old city.
• The lanes below Mehrangarh are blue, once a mark of Brahmin households and now simply the look of the place.
• They are cool and quiet early.
• The clock tower and Sardar Market work as real markets in the morning and turn into souvenir shops by the afternoon, so timing matters.
• Jaswant Thada, a white marble memorial a short walk from the fort, needs about half an hour.
• It is the calmest place in the city.
• In the afternoon, leave town.
• A jeep drive into the Thar scrub around the Bishnoi villages is the honest version of a desert trip from Jodhpur.
• You meet potters and weavers who are really at work, and you may see blackbuck and chinkara in the open.

Jodhpur to Udaipur is about five hours, and it is the most beautiful drive of the trip, as the desert gives way to the Aravalli hills.

• Ranakpur lies near the road.
• It is a fifteenth-century Jain temple with 1,444 carved marble pillars, and it adds about two hours.
• On this itinerary there is room for it if you leave by seven.
• Visitors who are not Jain are generally admitted from around midday, so plan to arrive after that.
• Udaipur is a different register from what came before: after Mughal Delhi and Agra, and Rajput Jaipur and Jodhpur, here is a low, green lake city.
• The City Palace runs along the eastern shore of Lake Pichola, a series of buildings added by successive maharanas over four centuries.
• Visit it in the afternoon, then walk down to Jagdish Temple and out along the ghats.
• End the day on the water.
• The late boat on Lake Pichola passes the Lake Palace and stops at Jag Mandir, and for many travellers it is the best single hour of the journey.

Udaipur is a good place to finish because it asks nothing of you.

• Flights to Delhi and Mumbai leave through the day, and flights are not included in your tour.
• The morning before yours is best spent on foot.
• Walk the ghats early, while the city is washing and the light lies on the water.
• Sajjangarh, the monsoon palace on the ridge, gives you the lake system and the hills behind it in one view and takes about ninety minutes with the drive.
• Bagore Ki Haveli, an eighteenth-century merchant house on the waterfront, holds a small folk performance in the early evening if your flight is late.