Boutique India: 12 unhurried days
For travellers who judge a trip by the rooms and the rhythm. Twelve days across northern India in small heritage properties and one exceptional wilderness camp, with private guiding, no departure before nine, and an internal flight rather than a six-hour drive between Jaipur and Udaipur.
- Duration
- 12 days
- Pace
- Slow
- Hotel changes
- 5
- Best months
- Oct, Nov, Dec, Feb, Mar
- From
- $4,150 per person
India is the country where the difference between an excellent hotel and a memorable one is largest, and where the memorable one is often a 200-year-old family house with twelve rooms rather than anything with a chain name.
Who it suits: travellers who care how a room feels, second visits, and anyone who has been told India is exhausting and would like to test that at a different altitude of comfort.
Your specialist: Mai Est, Head of Consulting, with Arun’s Delhi office on the ground.
Day by day
Day 1: Arrive Delhi. Private transfer to a small colonial-era hotel in the quiet south of the city. Nothing scheduled.
Day 2: Delhi, privately. Old Delhi on foot at eight with a historian rather than a guide, finishing before the heat. Afternoon at Humayun’s Tomb and Sunder Nursery, then an hour with a textile dealer in a private showroom, which is how you learn what you are actually looking at in the markets.
Day 3: Delhi to Agra. A late morning departure, by fast train or private car. Check in to a Taj-facing room and watch the marble change colour from your own terrace for the rest of the afternoon. Agra Fort in the last hour of light.
Day 4: The Taj Mahal, then Jaipur. At the gate for opening with a private guide, then back for a proper breakfast. Drive to Jaipur in the afternoon with a stop at Fatehpur Sikri, roughly five hours in total including the stop.
Day 5: Jaipur, the forts. Amber at opening by jeep, before the gates get busy, then the private apartments of the City Palace which are not on the standard ticket. Afternoon free.
Day 6: Jaipur, the makers. A morning with jewellers and block printers who work for the fashion houses, a private lunch in a haveli, and Nahargarh at dusk for the view down over the city.
Day 7: Fly to Udaipur. One hour, mid-morning, instead of the six-hour drive most itineraries put here. Afternoon on the lake and an evening with nothing in it.
Day 8: Udaipur. The City Palace before opening if we can arrange it, then a private boat on Lake Pichola in the late light. The rest of the day at the hotel.
Day 9: Udaipur, free. Spa, the miniature painting studios, the Aravalli hills, or nothing.
Day 10: Udaipur to Jawai. Three and a half hours into a landscape of granite boulders and scrub where leopards live alongside the Rabari shepherd communities and are neither fed nor fenced. Afternoon drive with a naturalist.
Day 11: Jawai. Dawn and dusk drives, and the middle of the day in a tent that is more comfortable than most hotel rooms. Time with a Rabari family, whose relationship with the leopards is the genuinely interesting story here.
Day 12: Departure. Three hours to Jodhpur, midday flight to Delhi, international connection in the evening.
What is included
Small heritage and design properties throughout with breakfast, full board at Jawai, a private air-conditioned car and driver on all road legs, the Jaipur to Udaipur and Jodhpur to Delhi flights, private guiding on five days, early or out-of-hours access where it can be arranged, four leopard drives with a resident naturalist, all entries, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our Delhi office.
Booking notes, honestly
On the famous palace hotels. The Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur, Umaid Bhawan in Jodhpur and the Taj-facing suites in Agra are the three names people ask for. All three are real, all three cost two to three times an excellent alternative nearby, and only one of them, in our view, is worth it for every traveller. We will tell you which, and we will price the alternatives beside it rather than quietly upselling.
On lead time. The properties on this route have between nine and thirty rooms. From October to March they sell out four to six months ahead, and over Christmas and New Year considerably earlier and at the highest rates of the year. This is the itinerary where booking late genuinely costs you the trip you wanted.
On Jawai. Leopard sightings there are frequent but never guaranteed, and the camps that promise otherwise are baiting, which we will not book. Four drives gives you good odds.
What we would cut. If twelve days feels tight, we would remove Agra before anything else. That is an unusual thing for a travel company to say, and we mean it: one night for one monument costs you a day and a half of driving, and the rest of this route is stronger. If you have seen the Taj before, take those days and put them into Udaipur and Jawai.
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