India’s Golden Triangle: Delhi, Agra & Jaipur

You land at Indira Gandhi International and are met by your driver, who takes you into the city. Day two is the city itself, and Delhi rewards the time. A pre-dawn walking tour to the ghats along the Yamuna is the right way to start, before the traffic builds: temple aartis in session, chai stalls setting up, the contrast between the meditative early hours and the noise of Old Delhi a few streets away.

The rest of the day covers the headlines on your own terms. The Mughal monuments (Humayun’s Tomb, the Red Fort, Jama Masjid) are concentrated in Old Delhi; the Lutyens-designed colonial capital, India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan sit in New Delhi a short drive south. An evening rickshaw tour of Chandni Chowk, the seventeenth-century bazaar laid out by Shah Jahan’s daughter, covers the spice market, the silver lanes and the street food kitchens that operate after dark.

A five-hour drive east takes you to Agra. The afternoon covers Agra Fort, the Mughal red sandstone citadel from which Shah Jahan, deposed by his son, watched the Taj being completed across the Yamuna. Mehtab Bagh, the Mughal garden directly opposite the Taj on the river’s north bank, is the right place to be at sunset.

The Taj itself comes the following morning, at dawn. Around 15,000 people visit on an average day; at first light that drops to a few hundred, and the marble shifts colour over the first hour in a way no photograph captures. A second viewing in afternoon light from the gardens makes the case for two visits rather than one.

The optional yoga session at the Taj-facing rooftop terrace on day seven is genuinely good, and the countryside cycling tour out to the back of Mehtab Bagh, returning along the Yamuna, is a quieter way to see the monument. The return drive to Delhi takes around four hours and is timed to your departure on day eight.