Rajasthan in twelve days, and what to leave out

So this is Rajasthan in twelve days written the way we actually build it: the order of the days, the driving hours between the cities rather than the distances, the stop we remove first, and how the whole thing reorders itself depending on the month you fly.

The honest arithmetic

Indian main roads average 30 to 35 miles an hour once you are off the expressways. That is the number that breaks most self-built itineraries, because a brochure line that says “Jaipur to Jodhpur, 335 km” sounds like four hours and is six.

Here are the legs on this route, in hours.

Add the two rules we build to. No more than one hotel change every two and a half days, and no more than two four-hour drives in any one week. A twelve-day route that respects both has room for five bases. Not seven.

The twelve days, in the order we would run them

Days 1 and 2, Delhi. Land, and do nothing on the first morning. Most flights arrive in the small hours and the single most common way to have a bad first trip to India is to go straight into Old Delhi at midday on no sleep. Day two is Old Delhi on foot with a guide, then Humayun’s Tomb and Sunder Nursery in the afternoon, which is a different city entirely.

Day 3, Delhi to Agra by the fast train. Two hours, city centre to city centre, and better than the road in every respect. Agra Fort in the afternoon light, then sunset from Mehtab Bagh across the river.

Day 4, the Taj at opening, then south. At the gate before it opens, back for breakfast, then five hours into Rajasthan. The Taj Mahal is closed to visitors on Fridays, and we build your dates around that rather than discovering it late.

Days 5 and 6, Ranthambore. Two or three safaris, dawn and mid afternoon. Nobody can promise you a tiger and we will not pretend otherwise. The fort above the park, which almost no visitor climbs, is worth the spare hour between drives.

Days 7 and 8, Jaipur. Three and a half hours north. Jaipur repays a full day and a half: the observatory and the City Palace, Amber early, and half a day with a block printing or blue pottery workshop, which is the thing people talk about afterwards more often than the forts.

Day 9, Jaipur to Jodhpur. The long one, about six hours. We break it properly rather than pushing through, and we tell you in advance that it is a long day.

Day 10, Jodhpur. Mehrangarh at opening. It is the best fort in India and one of the best anywhere, and it deserves two unhurried hours rather than forty minutes on the way to somewhere else. Then the Toorji stepwell and a walk down through the blue lanes to the clock tower market.

Day 11, Jodhpur to Udaipur. Five to five and a half hours, with a long stop at Ranakpur, a fifteenth century Jain temple carved in white marble with more than 1,400 pillars, no two the same.

Day 12, Udaipur, then fly. A morning on the lake, and the afternoon flight to Delhi for your international connection. If you have a thirteenth day, put it here rather than anywhere else on the route.

That is five bases, four driving days, and two of them broken by something worth stopping for.

The stop we cut first, and why

Jaisalmer. Every time, and it is not close.

Jaisalmer is a genuinely extraordinary place, a living fortified city in the desert, and it costs ten hours of driving to reach and leave, plus the two nights that make those ten hours worth having. That is three days out of twelve for one city. On a fourteen-day trip we will build it. On twelve, adding Jaisalmer means either dropping Ranthambore and Udaipur to one night each, which ruins both, or driving on eight of your twelve days.

If Jaisalmer is the reason you are going to Rajasthan, we say so plainly and rebuild the trip around the desert instead: Delhi, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Udaipur, with the Taj left out. That is a better twelve days than a version that tries to hold everything.

The second cut is Ranthambore, which surprises people. It is the convenient tiger park, three and a half hours from Jaipur, and the convenience is exactly the problem: your odds are lower than at Bandhavgarh or Kanha, and two nights buys you two or three drives that may show you nothing. If wildlife is the point of the trip, we would rather spend a travel day each way reaching a better park. If it is not, those two days go into Udaipur and the route improves.

What we do not cut is a second night in Agra or the unscheduled afternoon in Udaipur. The empty half days are what make a Rajasthan trip feel like a holiday rather than a schedule, and they are the first thing people try to delete when they are building it themselves.

One more, from the other direction. If you have seen the Taj Mahal before, take Agra out. One night for one monument costs a day and a half of moving, and the rest of this route is stronger. That is an unusual thing for a travel company to say and we mean it. It is the reasoning behind Boutique India in twelve days, which spends the recovered days at Udaipur and Jawai.

How the order changes with the season

The route above is the October to March version, which is when we send almost everyone. Within that window the month still moves things around.

December and January. Dense fog sits on the northern plains for much of late December and January, and it delays trains and flights by hours rather than minutes. So we run the route north to south, exactly as written, and we do not build tight same-day connections at the Delhi end. The Delhi to Agra train is early enough in the trip that a two-hour delay costs you an afternoon rather than a flight home. The desert is also genuinely cold after dark in these weeks, near 45°F (7°C) in Jodhpur at night, which visitors do not pack for.

Delhi’s air quality is poor from roughly November into January, and badly so in some weeks. If anyone in the party is asthmatic, we shorten Delhi to a single night in those months and put the recovered day in Udaipur. We tell you rather than hoping you do not notice.

March. The best under-used month in Rajasthan, and the order flips. It is warm and clear, the crowds are thinner and rates are lower, and the tiger parks improve week by week as the waterholes shrink. In March we will often start you in Udaipur, flying Delhi to Udaipur on arrival, and work north, so that the hottest, driest stretch around Jodhpur falls in the first half of the trip while your mornings are still early and your energy is high. We also add a night at Ranthambore rather than another city, because March is when it is worth the days.

April onward. By the second half of April the north is heating fast, and in May and June Rajasthan regularly sits between 104 and 113°F (40 and 45°C). We do not build Rajasthan itineraries in those months and we would rather lose the booking than sell you one. The full month-by-month picture is in the best time to visit Rajasthan and in our complete India guide.

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