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 four-hour drive west brings you to Jaipur, founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II and the first planned city in India. The pink colour comes later: the walled old town was painted in 1876 for the visit of the future Edward VII, and the convention has been maintained by city ordinance ever since.

A guided half-day covers the City Palace, still partly residential, the eighteenth-century Hawa Mahal with its 953 latticed windows, and the Jantar Mantar observatory, where Sawai Jai Singh’s 27-meter Vrihat Samrat Yantra remains the largest stone sundial ever built and is still accurate to within two seconds. The Amber Fort, a Rajput stronghold begun in 1592 by Raja Man Singh I, sits eleven kilometers north of the city on a ridge above Maota Lake and is the morning’s worthwhile excursion on day four.

Two options worth flagging: an early-morning walking tour through the temples and havelis of the walled city with tea at a Rajput merchant home, or the Pink City Rickshaw Tour, a women-owned cooperative running custom e-rickshaws through the bazaars.

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.