Rajasthan Heritage Circuit — Jaipur, Pushkar, Bundi & Udaipur

Met at Jaipur airport or station and into the grid laid out in 1727 and painted pink in 1876. The afternoon takes the City Palace, part of which the royal family still occupies, and the Jantar Mantar beside it — nineteen masonry instruments of the 1730s, the great sundial still keeping time to a couple of seconds. Both close at five. Hawa Mahal is a short walk on and is left for the morning light it was built for. The evening is Bapu and Johari bazaars as the lamps come on.

Amber at its eight o'clock opening — the Kachhwaha capital before Jaipur, begun in 1592, climbing its hillside in courtyards of sandstone and marble with the Sheesh Mahal's mirror work at the top, and quiet for the first hour only. Jaigarh above it holds the Jaivana cannon of 1720. Down past Jal Mahal in the Man Sagar lake and the royal cenotaphs at Gaitore. Hawa Mahal from the street on the way back, then the afternoon in the bazaars by trade, and the Nahargarh ridge for the sunset over the city.

A short road day, about three hours south-west, into Pushkar by lunch. The town is a lake ringed by fifty-two bathing ghats and several hundred temples, of which the Brahma temple is the one that matters — there are only a handful anywhere. Shoes come off at the water and cameras stay away from the ghats; a priest will offer a puja, and the price is agreed before, not after. The afternoon is the lanes and the camel-leather shops, and the evening is the aarti at the ghats as the lamps go onto the water, which is why this is a night and not a lunch stop. The dargah of Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, fourteen kilometres away, is added on request.

The ropeway to the Savitri temple on its hill runs from first light, and the view down onto the lake and the town while the ghats are still in shadow is the best hour in Pushkar. Then south-east about three hours, through Deoli, into the Hadoti country and Bundi by early afternoon — a town of blue-washed houses below the Garh Palace, which climbs the hill in tiers to Taragarh fort above. The palace's Chitrashala holds the finest painted rooms in Rajasthan, Krishna and hunting scenes in blues and greens that almost nobody comes to see, and Raniji ki Baori below the town is a fifty-metre stepwell of 1699 with carved arches all the way down. Kipling wrote part of Kim from the Sukh Mahal on the lake here, and the town is still that quiet.

Bundi's morning is the bazaar below the palace and the Nagar Sagar twin stepwells, then about three hours south to Chittorgarh, the largest fort in India by area — a plateau of some seven hundred acres above the plain, holding the Vijay Stambh of 1448, Rana Kumbha's palace, Padmini's palace on its pool and the ruins of the three sieges in which the fort was taken and its defenders chose death over surrender. Two hours on the plateau with the car, which the road inside allows. Then two hours more into Udaipur by early evening, and down to the ghats for the change of scale.

The City Palace in the morning — the largest palace complex in Rajasthan, grown by successive Mewar rulers from 1559 into a facade nearly a quarter of a kilometre long above Pichola, with the Jagdish temple of 1651 at its gate. Saheliyon ki Bari and Bagore ki Haveli on the ghats in the afternoon, and a boat out on Pichola at sunset, past the Lake Palace and around Jag Mandir, which is the way every Rajasthan route should end. The dance performance in Bagore ki Haveli's courtyard starts at seven.

A free morning. The Monsoon Palace on its ridge west of the lakes is the early option — twenty minutes up, the whole lake system below — and the miniature-painting workshops in the old lanes the gentler one. Udaipur's airport is about half an hour east of the city, so a midday flight is comfortable and an afternoon one leaves time for the Fateh Sagar lakeside.