Maharajas’ Express: Luxury Train Journey Through Rajasthan

You arrive in Delhi on day two and stay one night at Colonel’s Retreat, a quiet heritage property in the Defence Colony neighbourhood. Day three is when the trip proper begins: the Maharajas’ Express departs Delhi mid-morning, and brunch is served on board en route to Agra.

The afternoon stop is Agra Fort, the Mughal red sandstone citadel from which Shah Jahan, deposed by his son, watched the Taj being completed across the Yamuna.

Day four is the trip’s headline morning. The train is positioned for a sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal, which sees around 15,000 visitors on an average day and a few hundred at first light.

By afternoon you are at Ranthambhore, a 1,400-square-kilometer reserve that was the Maharaja of Jaipur’s hunting ground before independence and is now one of India’s three or four most reliable tiger-sighting parks. The afternoon game drive is in a 4×4 with a forest department guide.

Day five is Jaipur. A guided morning at Amber Fort, the 1592 Rajput stronghold above Maota Lake, is followed by a private dinner inside one of the city palaces. The train returns to Delhi overnight and you disembark on day six.

A short flight south brings you to Jodhpur, founded in 1459 by Rao Jodha as the capital of the Marwar kingdom and known by sight for the wash of indigo blue across the houses of the old city below the fort. Pal Haveli, a Rajput merchant residence in the heart of the old town with a rooftop overlooking Mehrangarh, is the right base for two nights.

The full day on day seven is spent with a local guide. Mehrangarh Fort sits 120 meters above the city on a sandstone outcrop, with walls that are in places thirty-six meters high, and is among the largest and best-preserved forts in India.

The descent on foot through the old city, the spice and textile bazaars, the step well at Toorji Ka Jhalra, is built into the morning. A cooking class with a Jodhpur family follows in the late afternoon.

A morning drive south through the Marwar countryside brings you to Chanoud, a village in the Pali district that few foreign visitors ever see. Chanoud Garh, a three-hundred-year-old Rajput fortified mansion, is still owned by the descendants of the family that built it; they have spent the past decade restoring it room by room and now run a fourteen-key heritage hotel from inside its walls.

The point of the night here is not really the sightseeing. It is the village itself: a working agricultural settlement where the family will walk you through the lanes, introduce you to neighbors, and serve a meal of Marwari food in the courtyard. By any measure, this is the single most distinctive stay on the trip.

Day nine is the trip’s longest drive, around six hours, but it earns the time. The route south stops first at Ranakpur, a fifteenth-century Jain temple complex carved from 64,000 tons of white marble, with 1,444 columns inside the main shrine, no two identical. From there a second stop at Kumbhalgarh, the Mewar fortress whose 36-kilometer perimeter wall is the second-longest continuous wall ever built after the Great Wall of China.

You arrive in Udaipur in the late afternoon. The city was founded in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II after Chittorgarh fell to Akbar, and laid out around Lake Pichola, which is older than the city by two centuries and entirely artificial. Fateh Garh, a heritage property on a low hill above the lake, is the base for two nights.

Day ten is a guided morning covering the City Palace complex, the largest royal residence in Rajasthan, and the Jagdish Temple. A sunset boat on Lake Pichola, with the Lake Palace and Jag Mandir lit on the water, is the closing image of the trip. Your transfer to Udaipur Airport for the return flight is on day eleven.

Speak with Do Not Disturb to plan your Rajasthan trip.