Getting Around

The luxury trains are real and they are genuinely lovely, and they are also a different holiday from the one most people think they are booking. A train is a fixed route on a fixed clock with a fixed group. You see a great deal and you decide almost nothing. Some travellers love precisely that. Others work out on the third morning that they cannot stay anywhere an extra night.

Domestic flights are the unromantic answer and usually the right one for a long hop — north to south, or anything that would otherwise be a whole day in a car for no reward at the end of it.

An ordinary train is worth one leg of a trip, in a good class, on a scenic stretch, taken as an experience rather than as transport.

Most well-built journeys use all three. The mistake is choosing one of them on principle and then arranging India around it.

This is the thing most first visits get wrong at the level of the idea, and it quietly shapes everything else.

You do not hire cars here and you do not hail them. You have a car and a driver for a stretch of the journey, and they stay with you — there in the morning, waiting while you are inside the fort, already knowing where you are going next and roughly when you will want tea.

Two things follow from that. The first is that distance stops being an obstacle and becomes part of the trip. The road between two Rajasthan cities usually has more on it than either city's third-best sight, and a car that is yours can stop.

The second is that your driver is the person you will spend the most hours with over two weeks. A good one matters more than almost any other booking on the itinerary.

So ask who it is going to be. It is a fair question and a well-run journey has an answer.