Ten days in Rajasthan: a desert that never stopped showing off
Jaipur for three nights, Pushkar for one, Jodhpur for two and Udaipur for three. Two road transfers and one long, slow train.
- Length
- 10 days, 9 nights
- Where you stay
- Jaipur, Pushkar, Jodhpur, Udaipur
- Places
- 24 across 10 days
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Rajasthan spent eight centuries as a scatter of kingdoms that fought each other, bargained with the Mughals and never quite lost their thrones. What that left behind is a state of walled cities and hill forts, most of them still standing, several of them still owned by the families who built them.
The four here sit in a rough line running southwest from Jaipur, each about three hours from the last. They are genuinely different from one another: a planned grid city, a pilgrim town of fifty-two ghats, a fort town under a cliff, and a lake city that turns pink at sunset and knows it.
This is the driest and hottest corner of India, and the calendar matters more than in most places. Between November and February it is close to perfect. From April the middle of the day belongs to nobody.
Highlights
- Amber Fort at opening, then the whole pink grid of Jaipur from the hill above it
- An hour on the Pushkar ghats before dark, when the aartis start on both banks
- Mehrangarh, 150 metres up a cliff, with the blue city directly below the ramparts
- An art deco maharaja's palace finished in 1944, half museum and half family home
- A boat on Lake Pichola at sunset, and three nights that need no car at all
Where to stay
Jaipur, three nights
Jaipur was laid out in 1727 by an astronomer king who wanted a capital on a grid, which is why it is the only old Indian city where you can navigate by the map in your head. Nine rectangular blocks, straight bazaars between gates, and a wall around the lot.
Stay inside or just outside the pink walls rather than out towards the airport. The old city holds the palace, the observatory and most of the shopping, and the hill forts are twenty minutes north by car.
Pushkar, one night
About 134 km from Jaipur.
Pushkar is a small holy town wrapped around a lake, and one night is exactly right for it. Fifty-two sets of steps run down to the water, the temples are close enough together to walk between in minutes, and the whole town is vegetarian with no alcohol and no eggs sold anywhere in it.
It is also, for a few days each November, the site of an enormous camel and livestock fair that fills the dunes on the edge of town with traders. If your dates happen to land on it, add a night. If they do not, one evening at the ghats is the point of coming.
Jodhpur, two nights
About 154 km from Pushkar.
Jodhpur is a fort with a city under it. Mehrangarh occupies the whole top of a rock in the middle of town, and the old quarter spills down the slope below in a mass of flat roofs washed pale blue. The blue is limewash, and the reason for it depends entirely on who you ask.
Two nights covers the fort, the palace on the far ridge and the market lanes. Stay in the old city under the walls if you can: the view up at the fort, floodlit, from a rooftop at dinner is half of why people remember Jodhpur.
Udaipur, three nights
By train from Jodhpur, Jodhpur railway station to Udaipur City railway station, about 201 km.
Udaipur was founded when the Mewar rulers gave up their old fortress capital and built a new one around a set of artificial lakes. It is the softest city in Rajasthan and the only one on this route where the pleasure is largely in doing nothing.
Everything worth seeing sits within a kilometre of the water on the old city side, so three nights here means three nights without a car. Take a room facing the lake and pay the difference; it is the one place on the trip where the view from the window is the product.
Day by day
Day 1 in Jaipur
Arrival, a palace in a lake and a museum lit up at night
Jaipur's airport takes flights from most Indian cities and a handful from the Gulf, and the drive into town takes about half an hour. Whatever time you land, keep the first evening loose.
Two things in Jaipur are better after dark than in daylight, and both are outdoors. A sandstone palace stands in a lake north of the city with four of its five storeys underwater, and the Indo-Saracenic museum in the gardens south of the walls is floodlit every night in a way that makes the daytime version look ordinary.
- 17:30
Jal Mahal
NatureYou cannot go in. Stand on the causeway on the city side an hour before sunset, with the Aravalli hills behind it, and let the reflection do the work.
- 19:30
Albert Hall Museum
CultureOpened as a public museum in 1887 and still one of the best collections in the state. Come for the building rather than the cases: after dark it is lit from below and the pigeons circle it in the floodlights.
- 21:00
Dinner on a rooftop
EatHalf the restaurants in the old city are on roofs, and several look straight at the hill forts. Rajasthani food is heavy, hot and built for a desert with no fresh vegetables. Order dal baati churma once.
With more time: If the flight lands in the morning instead, the bazaars inside the pink walls fill the afternoon on their own. They are sorted by trade: bangles in one street, block-printed cotton in the next, silver in a third.
Day 2 in Jaipur
Amber Fort, a stepwell and the hill above the city
The whole day belongs to the ridge north of town. Leave by eight, because Amber Fort is the one place in Jaipur that genuinely fills with coaches and the difference between opening and eleven o'clock is enormous.
Walk up the cobbled ramp rather than taking the elephant ride. It is a quarter of an hour with the valley opening up behind you, and the elephants have a poor time of it.
The rest of the day is a slow drift back along the ridge: a stepwell five minutes from the fort gate that almost nobody stops at, and then the small fort on the hill directly above the old city, which has the best view in Jaipur and somewhere to sit and drink while you use it.
- 08:30
Amber Fort
HistoricThe Kachwaha royal seat from around 1600 until Jaipur was built, and one of six Rajasthan hill forts on the UNESCO list. The mirrored hall gets the queue; the terraces above the third courtyard, looking down the valley, are better.
- 12:00
Panna Meena Ka Kund Stepwell
VisitEight sides of crisscrossing staircases, dry now and usually almost empty. Climbing down into it is no longer permitted, which spoils nothing about the geometry.
- 13:00
Lunch in Amber village
EatCourtyard cafes in restored havelis below the fort, one street off the tour-bus road. Quieter than anything at the gate and roughly a third of the price.
- 17:00
Nahargarh Fort
OtherBuilt in 1734 in a mix of Rajput and European styles, on the hilltop that looks straight down onto the walled city. Come for the last two hours of daylight and stay for the lights coming on below.
With more time: The third fort on the ridge is a short drive on and holds what was for a long time the largest wheeled cannon in the world, plus a water system that supplied Amber for centuries. Add it before lunch if the fort went quickly.
Day 3 in Jaipur
The City Palace, the observatory and the Hawa Mahal
Everything today is inside the walls and within a few hundred metres of everything else, which after a day of driving is the point.
The palace comes first, then the observatory next door, which is far stranger than it sounds: fourteen huge masonry instruments built in the 1720s to measure time, track stars and predict eclipses, several still accurate to a couple of seconds.
Finish at the Hawa Mahal, and see it from the street rather than the inside. Its facade faces east, so full sun on it means morning; an empty pavement in front of it means very early morning.
- 09:30
City Palace
CultureA seventh of the walled city, arranged as courtyards inside courtyards, with the royal family still in residence in one wing. The textiles and the armoury deserve more time than the queue for the painted doors suggests.
- 12:00
Jantar Mantar
OtherThe largest of the five observatories Jai Singh built and a UNESCO site in its own right. Take a guide here if you take one anywhere; without someone to explain what each instrument measures it is a yard full of ramps.
- 13:30
Lunch off Tripolia Bazaar
EatThe bazaar streets behind the palace serve fixed-price thalis all afternoon. Sit upstairs where there is a fan.
- 15:00
Hawa Mahal
HistoricFive storeys, over 950 windows and roughly one room deep. It went up in 1799 so that the women of the court could watch the street without being seen from it. Go in for the honeycomb view out, or cross the road for the photograph everybody takes.
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With more time: East of the city, a temple complex sits in a gorge around a chain of spring-fed tanks and is overrun with monkeys who will take food straight out of your hand. Late afternoon, and leave anything loose in the car.
Day 4 in Pushkar
West to Pushkar, and the ghats at dusk
Three hours of highway southwest, and then a hairpin road over a ridge that drops you into a town of about twenty thousand people arranged entirely around a lake.
Pushkar is a pilgrimage site first and a traveller town second, and the two versions of it sit on top of each other without much friction. The lake is the reason for both.
Do the temples in the afternoon while it is quiet and save the water for the last hour of light. Shoes come off well before the steps, and photographing people bathing is not on.
- 09:00
Drive from Jaipur to Pushkar
TravelAbout three hours on good road, most of it dual carriageway. Leave after breakfast and you are checked in by early afternoon.
- 15:00
Brahma Temple
ReligiousOne of very few temples anywhere dedicated to Brahma, which is the whole reason Pushkar exists. Bags and phones go into a locker across the street before you climb the steps.
- 16:30
Varaha Temple
VisitThe oldest temple in town, dedicated to Vishnu in his boar incarnation. Poorly kept and worth ten minutes anyway, for the age of the thing and how little fuss is made of it.
- 17:30
Pushkar Lake
NatureFifty-two ghats around a lake that pilgrims have been bathing in for centuries. Take a place on the steps for the last hour of daylight and stay put.
With more time: The dunes on the western edge of town are a twenty minute walk and the standard sunset spot if the lake is crowded. In November they hold the camel fair, and the whole calm description above stops applying.
Day 5 in Jodhpur
To Jodhpur, the clock tower market and the cenotaphs
Another three to four hours west, and the landscape gets properly dry: thorn scrub, dust, and villages the colour of the ground. Jodhpur appears as a cliff with a fort on it long before you reach the outskirts.
Save the fort for a full morning tomorrow. This afternoon belongs to the streets underneath it, which is where Jodhpur is at its best anyway.
The market around the clock tower sells spices, textiles and everything else, at a volume that takes some getting used to. Then walk out to the marble cenotaphs on the ridge for sunset, where the fort is directly opposite and the crowds are somewhere else.
- 09:00
Drive from Pushkar to Jodhpur
TravelThree to four hours through increasingly empty country. Stop at a highway dhaba rather than anywhere that has a car park designed for coaches.
- 16:00
Ghanta Ghar
ArchitectureThe 1910 clock tower at the centre of the old market, lit in colours after dark. The lanes radiating off it are the real attraction: spice stalls, bangles, and shops selling nothing but rope.
- 18:00
Jaswant Thada
OtherWhite marble royal cenotaphs on the ridge below the fort, next to a small desert lake full of birds. The view back at Mehrangarh from here is the one worth having, and it costs almost nothing to get in.
With more time: The Bishnoi villages half an hour south run half-day jeep trips built around a community that has protected local wildlife for five centuries. Book through your guesthouse rather than at a desk on the street, and ask what you are actually being taken to see.
Day 6 in Jodhpur
Mehrangarh, the old Marwar capital and the last great palace
Mehrangarh takes a morning and rewards it. The fort was founded in 1458, occupies the entire top of a 150 metre rock, has three kilometres of ramparts around the edge, and has never been taken by force. Standing on the eastern wall, looking straight down into the blue roofs, is the best ten minutes in Jodhpur.
The audio guide is included in the ticket and is one of the best in India. Allow three hours and do not rush the palace rooms at the top.
The afternoon runs north to the old capital the Rathores used before Jodhpur existed, and then south to the opposite extreme: an art deco palace finished in 1944, the last of its kind built in India, with the family still living in one half and a hotel in the other.
- 09:00
Mehrangarh Fort
OtherThe largest fort in Rajasthan and the one everybody else is measured against. Take the lift up and walk down through the gates, which is the direction the ramps were built for.
- 13:30
Mandore
VisitThe capital of Marwar before Rao Jodha moved it to the rock. Royal cenotaphs built like temples, standing in gardens full of langurs, and almost no visitors.
- 16:00
Umaid Bhawan Palace
OtherCompleted in 1944 and the last great palace built in India. Only the museum wing and the vintage cars are open to visitors, which is an hour, and the building from the outside is most of the point.
With more time: The lanes directly under the fort walls are where the blue houses actually are, and they are easy to miss from a car. Walk down from the fort gate rather than driving back, and expect to get lost for half an hour.
Day 7 in Udaipur
The train south, and a boat on Lake Pichola
The southbound train is the best travelling day of the trip: half a day of thorn scrub giving way to hills, with the windows down in chair car. Sit on the left after Marwar Junction.
Udaipur is a change of temperature in every sense. The station is fifteen minutes from the old city, and once you are checked in you will not need a vehicle again until you leave.
Get on the water on the first evening. The boats leave from the palace jetty, run for about an hour, and pass close enough to the island palaces to see what everyone photographs from the shore. Afterwards, the temple at the top of the old city holds its evening aarti with drums, and it is thirty seconds' walk from most of the guesthouses.
- 07:00
Train from Jodhpur to Udaipur City
TravelFive to six hours in air-conditioned chair car for the price of a sandwich. Book a week ahead: there are only a couple of services a day.
- 17:30
Pichola Lake
NatureAn artificial lake dug in 1362 with palaces, ghats and two islands added over the centuries since. Take the late boat, roughly an hour before sunset, and buy the ticket at the palace jetty rather than from anyone on the street.
- 19:30
Jagdish Temple
ReligiousA tall Indo-Aryan temple to Vishnu 150 metres north of the palace gate, carved all over with apsaras and scenes from Krishna's life. Go for the evening aarti, when it fills with drumming and nobody minds you standing at the back.
With more time: Udaipur stood in for the villain's lair in a Bond film in 1983, and a startling number of rooftop restaurants still screen it nightly. It is either unbearable or the best thing about the town, and nobody seems to land in between.
Day 8 in Udaipur
The City Palace, a haveli museum and the sunset ropeway
The palace is the largest in Rajasthan and rises thirty metres straight off the water, running nearly a quarter of a kilometre along the lake. It was begun in 1559 by the ruler who founded the city, and every generation since added to it, which is why the inside is a maze of small painted rooms rather than grand halls.
Go at opening. The route through is one-way and single file in places, and by mid-morning it moves at the speed of the slowest group in it.
Two things fill the afternoon. A mansion on the waterfront, built by a chief minister of Mewar in the 1700s and now a museum of painting and costume, and then the cable car up to the ridge on the south side for sunset over the whole lake.
- 09:30
Udaipur City Palace
HistoricGranite and marble, 244 metres long, and built up in layers by successive rulers over four centuries. Buy the ticket that includes the museum courtyards and skip the separate crystal gallery unless glassware is your thing.
- 13:00
Bagore-ki-Haveli
OtherOver a hundred rooms on the waterfront at Gangori Ghat, with Mewar miniatures, glasswork and a room of nineteenth-century costume. The evening folk dance performance in the courtyard is touristy and genuinely good.
- 17:30
Doodh Talai
OtherA rock garden on the south shore with an aerial ropeway running up to a hilltop temple. A couple of minutes up, and the view takes in both lakes, the palace and the hills behind.
With more time: The old city between the temple and the ghats is full of miniature painting studios where you can watch the work being done with a single squirrel hair brush. Prices are negotiable and quality varies enormously, so look at several before buying anything.
Day 9 in Udaipur
The second lake, a garden of fountains and the royal cremation ground
A quieter day, and none of it in the crowd. Everything is north or east of yesterday and none of it needs more than a rickshaw.
The second lake is bigger, newer and where the city itself goes in the evening, with an island park in the middle and a promenade round the eastern edge. Above it, a small garden was laid out in the eighteenth century for the attendants of a princess, all fountains, marble elephants and lotus pools.
Save the cenotaphs for last. Two kilometres east of town, more than two hundred and fifty of them stand in a field, built over about three and a half centuries for the rulers of Mewar. There is rarely anybody there.
- 10:00
Fateh Sagar Lake
NatureBuilt in 1678 and rebuilt after a flood, with three islands in it. Walk the eastern promenade in the late afternoon with everyone else, or hire a pedal boat and get out to the middle.
- 12:30
Saheliyon ki Badi
VisitThe Garden of the Maids, laid out for the forty-eight attendants who came to Udaipur with a princess. Each water channel is tuned to a different sound, which you notice about a minute after you stop talking.
- 17:00
Ahar Cenotaphs
HistoricNineteen domed chhatris for nineteen maharajas, among more than 250 cenotaphs on the same ground. Late afternoon light, long grass, and usually nobody else at all.
With more time: If you would rather spend the day out of town, Kumbhalgarh is two hours north, wrapped in a perimeter wall often called the longest in the world after the Great Wall, and the Jain temples at Ranakpur are on the same road.
Day 10 in Udaipur
Last morning in Udaipur
Udaipur's airport is half an hour east and flies to Delhi and Mumbai several times a day, which makes this an easy place to end rather than a difficult one. Trains north and east leave from the station in the middle of town.
Before any of that, walk down to the ghats. They are washed and swept before seven, the light comes across the water from the east, and for an hour the lake belongs to people doing laundry rather than people photographing it.
- 07:30
Breakfast above the lake
EatAlmost every guesthouse on the old city side has a roof terrace. Coffee, a plate of poha, and the palace turning from grey to gold while you eat it.
- 10:00
To Udaipur airport or the station
TravelHalf an hour east to the airport, fifteen minutes to Udaipur City station. Allow longer than that if you are leaving between eight and ten.
Before you go
When to go, and when not to
November to February is the season, and December and January are cold enough at night in the desert to want a jacket. October and March are both fine, hotter but perfectly walkable.
April to June is brutal. Jodhpur and Jaisalmer routinely pass 45 degrees, the forts have no shade, and everything worth doing happens before nine or after six. The monsoon reaches Rajasthan late and lightly, and August greens the hills around Udaipur in a way nobody expects of a desert.
Getting between the four
Jaipur to Pushkar and Pushkar to Jodhpur are both road journeys of three to four hours on decent highway. Hire a car with a driver for the pair of them, which in Rajasthan costs less than most people expect and removes the one genuinely tiring part of the trip. Buses run the same routes for a tenth of the price and twice the time.
Jodhpur to Udaipur is the leg to take by train. It runs five to six hours through the Aravalli hills, costs almost nothing in air-conditioned chair car, and ends at a station fifteen minutes from the lake.
Money, tickets and touts
Foreign-visitor tickets at the big monuments run ten to twenty times the Indian price, and camera fees are charged separately at several of them. Carry cash for temple shoe stands, ghat donations and rickshaws; cards work almost everywhere else.
At Pushkar in particular, expect to be handed a flower at the ghats and then asked for a substantial donation as a receipt. It is a well-run routine. A polite no before you take the flower is the only version that works.
Where this could go next
Two obvious extensions. Jaisalmer, a golden sandstone fort town on the Pakistan border, sits five hours west of Jodhpur and adds three days including a night in the dunes.
In the other direction, Udaipur is under three hours from the Ranakpur Jain temples and about five from Ahmedabad, which puts Gujarat within reach if you have a fortnight rather than ten days.
Rajasthan does not make you work for it. The forts are on hills so you can see them, the cities are colour-coded, and the best hours of the trip are the ones spent sitting still on a roof or a set of steps while something enormous is floodlit in front of you.
Ten days is enough to do all four properly and still waste an afternoon in each. Waste them.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is ten days enough for Rajasthan?
- For these four cities, comfortably. For the whole state, no: adding Jaisalmer and the desert properly needs thirteen or fourteen days, and Bikaner, Bundi and Ranthambhore push it past a fortnight.
- Should I hire a car and driver or take trains?
- Both, on different legs. Road is the sensible way to reach Pushkar, which has no station of its own, and on to Jodhpur. Jodhpur to Udaipur is much more pleasant by train.
- Which city should I skip if I only have a week?
- Pushkar, and reluctantly. Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur are the three that carry a trip, and dropping the one-night stop turns this into a straightforward seven day route.
- How hot does it actually get?
- Jodhpur and the west regularly pass 45 degrees in May and June, with no humidity and no shade at the forts. November to February is the opposite problem: pleasant days and desert nights that drop close to freezing.
- Is Rajasthan a good first trip to India?
- It is one of the two or three best. The distances are short, the sights are outdoors and spread out, the hotel standard is high for the price, and almost everything on this route is used to visitors.
- What about the Pushkar camel fair?
- It runs for about a week each November around the full moon and it is genuinely worth reorganising a trip for. Book accommodation months ahead and expect prices to multiply.
- Can I change this plan?
- Yes. Copy it and move the nights where you want them. The one thing worth keeping is the order: heading southwest means the cities get slower as you go, which is the right way round.