Private, on your own dates · India
An 11-day Rajasthan route that skips the famous three for painted merchant towns, Bishnoi craft villages, a leopard hill and the stepwells of Bundi.
Almost every first trip to Rajasthan visits the same three cities, and they deserve it. This route goes beyond them on purpose. It runs through painted merchant towns nobody has heard of, villages where the potter and the block printer and the weaver are three houses on the same lane, a granite hill where leopards come down at dusk, and a small walled town whose stepwells are as fine as anything in the state and whose visitor book you can read in a morning.
It starts in Shekhawati, the semi-desert belt north of Jaipur where nineteenth-century trading families built havelis and covered every surface of them — inside, outside, courtyards, ceilings — in painted frescoes of gods, trains, gramophones and biplanes, as the world arrived by rumour. The families left for Bombay and Calcutta and the paintings stayed. Bikaner follows, with a fort that was never taken and a camel breeding station on its edge, and then the rat temple at Deshnoke, which is exactly as advertised and rather beautiful.
The middle of the route is the part that changes people's minds about Rajasthan. Around Rohet the Bishnoi villages have protected trees and blackbuck for five hundred years as a matter of religious law — the reason the desert here still has wildlife in it at all — and the working day is visible from the road: opium ceremonies conducted for guests as they always were for neighbours, hand block printers dyeing in the open, potters throwing on a stick-turned wheel, durrie weavers on pit looms. At Narlai a village of four thousand people sits under a granite monolith with 700 steps up it, and the surrounding hills are leopard country.
Udaipur comes in at the point when you want a city again, and is used here for its craft rather than its palaces — a miniature painter's studio, the temple carvings at Delwara, the Mewar family shrine at Eklingji. The route finishes at Bundi, tucked into a gorge under a fort that Kipling admired, with painted palace chambers, a seventeenth-century stepwell in the middle of the bazaar and none of the coach traffic that goes with the icons. Travel is by private vehicle with the same driver throughout, staying in converted forts and family-run houses rather than chain hotels.
Hotels are named on your confirmation — all are of the stated category.
You leave from a different place than you arrive — book an open-jaw flight, not a return.
The representative waits in the arrivals concourse with a name board for the transfer to the hotel.
India
Oct–Mar is the golden season across most of India. Monsoon (Jun–Sep) transforms Kerala and the Northeast.
Because they are covered thoroughly by our Royal Rajasthan route, and doing both would mean seeing everything at half depth. This one is designed as the second trip to Rajasthan, or as the first for travellers who would rather meet the state through its villages and craft towns than its headline forts.
Heritage properties throughout: a converted haveli in Mandawa, a fifteenth-century family fort at Khimsar, a garh held by one family since 1622 at Rohet, and the old Jodhpur royal hunting lodge at Narlai. They are characterful rather than uniform, and no two nights are alike.
No. The Bishnoi households are working homes and workshops that receive visitors as part of a long-standing arrangement with the Rohet property. Nothing is performed, the craftspeople are doing what they would be doing anyway, and the guide explains the etiquette before you arrive.
Possibly. The hills hold a stable population and the property runs the safari most evenings, but they are wild, shy and nocturnal by preference. The drive through the granite outcrops at dusk with peacocks calling is worth doing whether or not a leopard appears.
Not at all. Anyone uneasy about it can wait in the outer courtyard, which is common and causes no awkwardness. Those who do go in walk barefoot among several thousand rats that are fed and revered as reincarnated members of the Karni Mata clan.
Seven of the eleven days include a road stage. Delhi to Mandawa and Udaipur to Bundi are the longest at around five and a half hours each, and most of the others fall between two and four. The distances are the necessary consequence of going where the coaches do not.
October to March. The desert stages around Bikaner and Khimsar are very hot from April onwards, and the Shekhawati fresco towns have almost no shade. Winter mornings are cold in the open jeeps at Rohet and Narlai, so bring a layer.
No. The route begins in Delhi and ends in Jaipur, so you will need an open-jaw international booking or a short domestic connection from Jaipur. Jaipur has good onward links to Delhi and Mumbai.
Tell Tulli what you'd change — hotels, dates, an extra city — and she'll price it with our team and come back to you.