Luxury Golden Triangle Tour with 5 Star Hotels

Touchdown at Indira Gandhi International Airport is the only part of the trip you manage alone. Once you clear immigration and collect your bags, a Heritage India Private Tours representative is standing just outside the arrivals exit with a name board, ready to take the trolley. Your chauffeur pulls up at the kerb, with chilled water and fresh towels on the back seat. The ride into town lasts roughly forty minutes at quiet hours and longer at rush hour. En route you are handed a welcome folder with hotel vouchers, guide contacts and our office numbers, and we note any food allergies, mobility needs or special dates.

Rooms are pre-registered, so keys are handed over without delay, even at dawn. In the capital we normally reserve The Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, subject to availability, a tranquil address among the embassies with a rooftop pool overlooking leafy avenues. Fresh off an overnight flight, most travellers want little more than a shower, a swim and an early meal. If you arrive before noon and feel lively, a gentle stroll through Lodhi Garden, among the domed tombs of the Sayyid and Lodi sultans, is a lovely first taste of the city. Dinner can be booked at the hotel's Indian restaurant. Overnight stay in Delhi.

Your guide calls for you at nine, and the morning goes to the seventeenth-century city founded by Shah Jahan. Begin at Jama Masjid, where the prayer yard of red sandstone can fill with twenty-five thousand people at Eid; shoes come off at the gate and scarves are provided. From here a rickshaw winds along Chandni Chowk, past jewellers, sweet shops and wedding-card printers, into Khari Baoli, the wholesale spice lanes, where the pepper in the air makes almost everyone sneeze. The Red Fort does not open on Mondays, so if your tour lands on one, the guide swaps in Raj Ghat, the open-air memorial to Mahatma Gandhi.

A table is reserved for lunch at a respected Mughlai restaurant, with kebabs, dal makhani and fresh naan. After lunch you drive to Humayun's Tomb, a Persian-style garden mausoleum completed in the 1570s whose double dome and raised platform foreshadow the Taj Mahal by almost a century. Next comes the Qutub Minar, a five-storey victory tower of carved sandstone, with the fourth-century iron pillar still free of rust in the courtyard. Driving home, you pass the grand government buildings of Raisina Hill and the sixty-metre stone arch of India Gate as the evening lamps flicker on. Overnight stay in Delhi.

Checkout is unhurried, with the car ready at ten. The Yamuna Expressway is one of India's best highways, and a halfway coffee break keeps the four-hour drive easy. Lunch is ready at your Agra hotel on arrival. Our usual choice here is the ITC Mughal, subject to availability, set in thirty-five acres of lawns with the Kaya Kalp spa modelled on a Mughal hammam. Guests who would like to see the white dome from their balcony can upgrade to a hotel with Taj-view rooms for a supplement. Use the early afternoon to rest, because the light is better and the heat gentler later in the day.

At around three, your Agra guide arrives to show you Agra Fort, the vast crescent of red sandstone walls that guarded the Mughal treasury for three reigns. Inside, the Diwan-i-Am still has the raised throne alcove where the emperor listened to his subjects, and the marble Khas Mahal opens onto river views. Shah Jahan, deposed by his son Aurangzeb, spent his final eight years in the Musamman Burj, gazing downstream at the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal. Toward dusk the chauffeur drives over the river to Mehtab Bagh, where the Taj catches the last orange light with only a handful of other people around. Overnight stay in Agra.

An early alarm pays off today: the guide meets you in the lobby before first light, and the short drive to the East Gate puts you near the front of the security line. Watching the dome shift from pale grey to rose and then to brilliant white is the moment most guests remember longest. Your guide points out the Quranic verses that seem to stay the same size as they climb the arch, the inlaid flowers of jasper and lapis lazuli, and the single break in symmetry where Shah Jahan lies beside his wife. The monument is shut every Friday, so the route is fixed to keep your visit on another day. Breakfast follows back at the hotel.

By late morning you are driving west, and within an hour the walls of Fatehpur Sikri appear on a ridge. Akbar built this capital to honour a Sufi saint's blessing, yet water shortages emptied it within a generation. Wander through the Diwan-i-Khas, where a lotus-shaped column held the emperor's seat, the airy five-tiered Panch Mahal, and the immense mosque courtyard reached through the Buland Darwaza, a 54-metre victory gate. Inside the white marble shrine of Salim Chishti, people knot threads on the screens while making a wish. The drive continues into Rajasthan, reaching Jaipur by about five. Overnight stay in Jaipur.

By eight you are at Amber Fort for the start of the Jaipur city tour, while its ramparts are still in shade. It sits eleven kilometres north of town above Maota Lake, and a jeep climbs to the Jaleb Chowk courtyard where soldiers once paraded. Pass beneath the frescoed Ganesh Pol into the royal quarters, where the Jai Mandir's mirrored ceiling, worked in Belgian glass and silver foil, sparkles from even a single phone torch. Stop on the way down at the Panna Meena ka Kund, an eight-sided stepwell with criss-crossing stairs, then pause on the lakeside road to photograph Jal Mahal sitting low in the water of Man Sagar.

Lunch is followed by the City Palace, where the descendants of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II still occupy the seven-storey Chandra Mahal. In the Pritam Niwas Chowk, four doorways decorated with peacocks, roses and lotus flowers represent the seasons. Across the lane, Jantar Mantar is an open-air observatory of giant stone instruments, the Samrat Yantra sundial among them, which casts a shadow moving several millimetres every second. The day ends with photographs at Hawa Mahal, its pink sandstone screen of tiny latticed windows facing Siredeori Bazaar. Our usual choice in Jaipur is the ITC Rajputana or the Fairmont, subject to availability. Overnight stay in Jaipur.

A slow morning is built into the programme today. Around ten, the chauffeur takes you to Sanganer, a small town at the southern edge of Jaipur known for hand block-printed cotton and handmade paper. In a family-run workshop, printers press carved wooden blocks onto long tables of fabric, lining up each colour by eye with remarkable speed, and you are welcome to try one yourself. A fixed-price textile emporium nearby sells quilts, bedcovers and table linen if you are tempted, though nobody minds if you leave empty-handed. The rest of the day until four o'clock is yours, perhaps for a massage or a long session by the pool.

Late afternoon brings a drive up the winding hill road to Nahargarh Fort, the tiger fort on the ridge. Its Madhavendra Bhawan was built in the 1880s for Maharaja Madho Singh II and his nine queens, each given an identical apartment linked to the king's rooms by a private passage. From the outer rampart the whole walled city spreads below, and as the sky turns pink the lights of Jaipur come on street by street. Back at the hotel, we can arrange a private chef's table in the evening, featuring Rajput dishes such as laal maas in a fiery red chilli gravy and safed maas cooked in cashew and cream. Overnight stay in Jaipur.

The final morning starts with a leisurely breakfast and a last swim if you have time. Departure from the hotel depends on your flight; for most evening flights to Europe or North America, leaving Jaipur by eleven gives a comfortable margin. The highway to Delhi is a four-lane road, and the chauffeur knows the cleanest places to pause for chai or a light meal. For late-night flights we can reserve a hotel day room close to the airport for a rest and a change of clothes before checking in. Guests who prefer not to spend five hours on the road can take a sixty-minute domestic flight out of Jaipur instead, booked on request.

When you reach Terminal 3, the chauffeur unloads the bags and walks with you to the terminal door, which only passengers with tickets may pass. Many travellers find this farewell harder than expected, because after a week the driver often feels like a friend. A short while later, someone from our Jaipur office will phone to confirm you are checked in and to hear your first impressions of the trip, good or bad, since honest comments are what we value most. Your feedback helps us keep improving, and we would be glad to help with a return visit, perhaps to Udaipur's lakes, Ranthambore's tigers or the backwaters of Kerala.