The Golden Triangle & Rajasthan
The Golden Triangle is the most sold itinerary in Asia and usually the most rushed: Delhi, Agra and Jaipur in five days, three of them spent on the road. Ten days is the length at which it stops being a transfer schedule and starts being a journey.
We stay in havelis and small palaces where the family is still in residence, eight rooms in Jaipur, twelve in the Shekhawati, rather than four-hundred-room hotels on the ring road. The difference shows up at breakfast, when someone sits down and tells you what the frescoes mean.
Agra is the one place where the hour is non-negotiable: the Taj at sunrise from the east gate, with the crowd behind you rather than in front. The rest of the day belongs to Fatehpur Sikri and the marble inlay workshops that still cut by hand.
Private transfer and a quiet first evening at Lodhi Garden among the fifteenth-century tombs.
Humayun’s tomb at opening, the lanes of Shahjahanabad by cycle rickshaw, and the Qutb complex in the late light.
The expressway down, with Sikandra and the Itimad-ud-Daulah, the small marble tomb that came first, in the afternoon.
Sunrise from the east gate, breakfast after, then Fatehpur Sikri on the road west and into Rajasthan.
The 1727 city plan explained ward by ward, the Jantar Mantar instruments, and the jewellers of Johari Bazaar with a gemologist.
Amber Fort on foot at opening, then out to Bagru to print cotton with a family working the same indigo tanks as their great-grandfather.
North to the painted merchant towns of Nawalgarh and Mandawa, and a haveli with its original frescoes for two nights.
A morning walking the painted courtyards with a conservator, an afternoon in the millet fields with the family who farm them.
The road back east, with a late afternoon at the Crafts Museum and dinner in a private home in Nizamuddin.
A slow morning and the transfer to Indira Gandhi International for the flight home.
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