India for the first time: a realistic first itinerary

This is written for someone planning India for the first time who has read a lot of enthusiasm and would like the other half of the picture. The single most reliable way to have a bad first trip to India is to arrive expecting a country that does not exist.

Say the intensity out loud

India is intense. Not dangerous and not hostile, but loud, crowded, hot and constantly asking something of you. You will be approached to buy things, repeatedly, by people who are good at it. You will see poverty at close range and no amount of reading makes the first encounter comfortable. Traffic follows rules you cannot see and will not learn in two weeks. Nothing queues in the way you expect.

None of that is a reason not to go. India is, for a large number of the people we send, the most absorbing country they will ever travel in, and many of them go back. But absorbing is not the same as restful, and the mismatch between those two words is where almost every disappointed traveller we have met has come unstuck. If what you want is a beach holiday with monuments attached, we will tell you honestly that Sri Lanka or Thailand does that better, and we will still be here when you want India.

The first 48 hours are the ones that decide it

Almost everyone who tells us they did not get on with India describes the same 48 hours. A red-eye landing at two in the morning, a hotel room at four, a wake-up call at eight, and Old Delhi at midday in full sun on three hours of sleep.

That is not India being difficult. That is anyone being unwell in a difficult place.

So we build a soft landing, and it is the least glamorous and most valuable thing in the itinerary:

• A quiet hotel with a garden or a courtyard, not the best-located one. On night one, location matters far less than the ability to sit down somewhere calm.
• Nothing scheduled on the first morning. Nothing. Sleep, breakfast slowly, and go outside when you want to rather than when a driver is waiting.
• A guide on day two, not day one. The right guide on your first proper morning changes the whole trip, because someone is standing between you and the volume, explaining rather than selling.
• The first walk in the morning, finishing before the heat. Old Delhi at eight in the morning and Old Delhi at one in the afternoon are two different experiences and only one of them is a good introduction.

By the end of day three most people have recalibrated. The noise stops registering as chaos and starts registering as a system you are beginning to read. That shift is the whole game, and the itinerary either gives you time for it or it does not.

Arrival timing, specifically

Most long-haul flights into Delhi and Mumbai land between midnight and four in the morning. Two practical consequences.

Book the room for the night before you land. A 2am arrival means the hotel needs the previous night reserved, or you are standing in a lobby until noon. This is the single most common thing missing from itineraries people have built themselves.

Count your first day as half a day, at most. A trip described as “fourteen days” that lands at 3am on day one and departs at 9am on day fourteen is a twelve-day trip. We write the arrival and departure days as what they actually are.

If you have any flexibility, a daytime arrival is worth paying for. It removes most of the first-48-hours problem on its own.

How much driving is too much on day two

More than an hour.

Day two is the day people most often ruin, usually by scheduling Delhi to Agra as a four-hour drive on the morning after arrival. It is a reasonable-looking plan and it stacks a long road leg, jet lag and a first exposure to Indian traffic into one day.

Our rules for the first week:

• Day one: no driving beyond the airport transfer.
• Day two: local movement only. A city day, on foot and in short hops.
• Day three: the first real leg, and if there is a train we use it. Delhi to Agra by fast train is about two hours, city centre to city centre, against three and a half to four hours by road. The train is more comfortable, more interesting and less tiring.
• Across the whole trip: no more than two four-hour drives in a week, and no more than one hotel change every two and a half days. Above that ratio an India trip starts to feel like work, and it is the ratio, not the number of days, that people are actually reacting to when they say a trip was too fast.

Ask for driving hours rather than distances before you sign anything, from us or from anyone. Indian main roads average 30 to 35 miles an hour. There is more on this in Rajasthan in twelve days.

North or south for a first visit

There is no single right answer, but there is a right answer for you, and it usually falls out of one question: do you want to be challenged or eased in?

The north. Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan, and a tiger park. This is the India of the imagination, and it delivers: Mehrangarh, the Taj at opening, the lake at Udaipur, the density of Old Delhi. It is also the loud version. Bigger cities, more traffic, more hustle at the monuments, longer road legs, and colder desert nights than anyone packs for. Fourteen days is the number that works.

The south. Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Kerala is the gentlest introduction to India we know and the one we send nervous first-timers and families to first: Fort Kochi, the tea hills at Munnar, a night on a boat in the backwaters, a few days on the coast. Quieter, greener, cooler in the hills, with shorter roads. Tamil Nadu next door is temple India in daily use rather than preserved, and for people who like history it is the stronger half.

How we choose between them. If this is your first trip to Asia at all, or you are travelling with young children, or someone in the party is anxious about the intensity, we start you in the south. If you have travelled in Asia before and the Taj Mahal is non-negotiable, we start you in the north. If you have eighteen to twenty-one days you can have both, with a flight day in the middle, and that is a genuinely excellent trip.

What does not work is half of each in ten days. Delhi to Kochi is about 1,500 miles, roughly Madrid to Warsaw. Two regions need a flight and three or four spare days, or they are just airports.

What actually goes wrong for the people who struggle

After a lot of debriefs, the failures cluster into five patterns, and only one of them is about India.

1. The itinerary was four holidays. Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Varanasi, Kerala and a tiger in ten days. This is the most common brief we receive and the most common reason a trip disappoints. Every stop gets its minimum and nothing gets its best.
2. They arrived on no sleep and went straight in. Covered above, and genuinely responsible for a large share of “I did not get on with India”.
3. They got ill on day two and never recovered the mood. Usually not from street food. Drink sealed or filtered water, eat hot food cooked in front of you, and be careful with raw salad, cut fruit you did not cut, and ice in the first few days. A busy street stall with high turnover is frequently safer than a tepid hotel buffet. More detail in Delhi belly, what actually works.
4. Nobody told them about the heat, the fog or the air. May and June in Rajasthan regularly pass 104°F (40°C), and sightseeing then is unpleasant and sometimes unsafe. Delhi’s air quality is poor from roughly November into January. Dense winter fog delays trains and flights by hours. All three are knowable in advance and routinely left out of itineraries.
5. They expected a guarantee. On the tiger, on the weather, on the traffic. Anyone promising a sighting is selling you something.

Notice that four of the five are planning failures rather than country failures. That is our honest position on India: it asks more of the plan than almost anywhere else we work, and when the plan is right it repays it better than almost anywhere else too.

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Tell us roughly what you have in mind and one of our India specialists will build you a first outline, including which stop we would take out of your brief and why. Free, non-generic, and with no obligation.

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Keep reading

• India, planned by people who are actually there
• India: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Rajasthan in twelve days, and what to leave out
• Kerala and the south, 14 days
• How far ahead to book Asia, country by country

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