India

Your flight is met at the gate and a liaison walks you past the queues; the luggage travels ahead of you. The drive in runs down the wide avenues of Lutyens' Delhi to The Imperial, whose corridors hold one of the country's finest private collections of colonial art. The first evening asks nothing of you: a walk under the palms, a quiet table, an early night against the time change.

Delhi · 1 of 2 nights · Private arrival transfer · Gentle

Old Delhi first, early, while the lanes still belong to the city: the great courtyard of the Jama Masjid, then the spice and silver streets of Chandni Chowk by cycle rickshaw, ending at a paratha stall your guide has been eating at since childhood. The afternoon crosses into another century: Humayun's tomb, the garden precursor to the Taj, kept for the golden hour when the sandstone turns copper. Dinner is Mughlai, at a table the concierge could not have found for you.

Delhi · 2 of 2 nights · Rickshaw and private car · Immersive

The expressway makes the run to Agra in three hours. Agra Fort comes first, with a historian who reads the sandstone the way other people read documents: the palace where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his son, in sight of the tomb he built. Then Amarvilas, where every room faces the Taj Mahal six hundred metres away. At dusk you cross the river to Mehtab Bagh and watch the marble change colour from the garden Shah Jahan planned as its mirror.

Agra · 1 night · Private car (3 hrs) · The reason everyone comes

The Taj at dawn is a different building: the queues are gone, the light is low, and the marble holds the night's cool. You enter at first light with your guide and have the long view to yourselves for a while. Breakfast back at Amarvilas, then the road west, breaking at Fatehpur Sikri, the red sandstone capital abandoned for want of water four centuries ago. By evening, Jaipur, and the lawns of Rambagh Palace, where the Maharaja's household once lived and peacocks still patrol the grass.

Jaipur · 1 of 2 nights · Private car via Fatehpur Sikri (5 hrs) · The long day, worth it

Amber Fort as the gates open, climbing through the courtyards while the light is still slanted and the coaches are still on the Delhi road. Then the City Palace, including quarters that remain in royal use and are opened privately by arrangement. The afternoon belongs to the maker's Jaipur: a family block-printing workshop where the fourth generation carves the teak stamps, and the gem cutters' lanes of the old city. Dinner under the frescoes of a restored haveli.

Jaipur · 2 of 2 nights · Private guide throughout · Immersive

A travelling day, done properly. The road west crosses the Aravallis into drier, older country: camel carts, stepwells, roadside temples with bells you can hear before you see them. Lunch is arranged in a country haveli roughly halfway. By late afternoon Mehrangarh appears on its cliff long before Jodhpur does, and you arrive at Umaid Bhawan, the last of the great palaces to be built and still home to the family that built it. Dinner on the terrace, the fort floodlit across the city.

Jodhpur · 1 of 2 nights · Private car (6 hrs, broken well) · A travelling day

Mehrangarh is the most complete of Rajasthan's forts and the morning is spent inside it, from the elephant gates to the zenana screens, with the museum's own curator where the calendar allows. Afterwards, down into the blue-washed lanes of the old city on foot: indigo houses, stepwells, a lassi at the clock tower market. The afternoon is for the craft that made Jodhpur a trading city, with introductions to the two antique dealers we actually trust. Evening at leisure in the palace.

Jodhpur · 2 of 2 nights · On foot with private guide · Immersive

South through the hills to Ranakpur, where a fifteenth-century Jain temple holds 1,444 marble pillars, each carved differently, in a forest clearing that still belongs more to langurs than to visitors. Lunch nearby, then the ghat road over the Aravallis drops you into Udaipur by late afternoon. The car goes no further than the jetty: the Taj Lake Palace is reached by boat, and the sight of its white marble rising from Lake Pichola is the point of the whole day.

Udaipur · 1 of 2 nights · Private car via Ranakpur (5 hrs) · The arrival everyone remembers

The City Palace runs along the lake for a quarter of a mile and is best taken early, before the courtyards fill. Afterwards, the studio of a miniature painter whose family has held the tradition for eleven generations, brush hairs counted in single digits. The afternoon is deliberately loose: the old city's ghats, a rooftop lunch, the Jagdish temple. At sunset you are back on the water, drifting past the palace facades as the pigeons turn and the lake goes gold.

Udaipur · 2 of 2 nights · By boat and on foot · Yours

A final breakfast on the water, then the boat to the jetty and a private transfer to Udaipur airport for the short flight to Delhi, where you are met and walked through to the international departure. Everything that needed handling has been handled; the only thing left to carry home is the trip itself.

Udaipur · Fly via Delhi · Met throughout · A quiet close