Jaipur, Jodhpur & Udaipur — the Three Cities

Into Jaipur, planned from nothing in 1727 on a nine-block grid for Sawai Jai Singh II and painted pink in 1876 to receive the Prince of Wales. The afternoon takes the City Palace, part of which the royal family still occupies, and the Jantar Mantar next to it — nineteen masonry instruments built in the 1730s to measure time, declination and the positions of the planets, of which the great sundial is accurate to a couple of seconds. Hawa Mahal, with its 953 windows, is a short walk away.

Up to Amber early, the Kachhwaha seat before Jaipur existed, begun in 1592 and built in ascending courtyards of sandstone and marble with the mirrored Sheesh Mahal at the top. Jaigarh above it holds the Jaivana cannon of 1720. The afternoon works the old city — the bazaars laid out on the original grid, Jal Mahal in the middle of the Man Sagar, and the royal cenotaphs at Gaitore, which almost nobody visits and which are among the most beautiful things in Jaipur.

West across the Aravallis, around seven hours of driving with the break, Pushkar at mid-morning — the fifty-two ghats around the lake and the Brahma temple, one of very few anywhere; the dargah of Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, fourteen kilometres away, is added on request. Into Jodhpur in the late afternoon. The old city below the fort is painted a deep indigo, originally to mark Brahmin houses and now much more widely, and it is best seen from above at the end of the day rather than walked into on arrival.

Mehrangarh in the morning, which is the finest fort in Rajasthan by most reckonings — begun in 1459 and standing 120 m above the city on a sheer rock, with the cannonball marks of the 1808 siege still in the gate and a museum of palanquins, howdahs and miniature painting inside. Jaswant Thada, a marble cenotaph of 1899, sits just below. Then south, breaking at Ranakpur, whose fifteenth-century Jain temple has 1,444 marble columns, no two carved alike. Into Udaipur in the evening.

The City Palace, the largest palace complex in Rajasthan, grown by successive Mewar rulers from 1559 into a facade nearly a quarter of a kilometre long above Lake Pichola, with the Jagdish temple of 1651 outside its gate. The afternoon takes Saheliyon ki Bari with its fountains and marble pavilions, and the Bagore ki Haveli on the ghats. A boat out on Pichola at sunset, past the Jag Mandir island, is the way to end a Rajasthan trip.

A free morning before the transfer. The Monsoon Palace on the ridge to the west gives the whole lake system and the Aravallis beyond in twenty minutes of climbing, and is at its best in the early light. Otherwise the lanes below the City Palace, or the miniature painting workshops that still operate in the old city. Udaipur's airport is about half an hour east, so a midday departure is straightforward.