Where to Stay

Almost everything you will be offered in India falls into four categories, and choosing badly between them does more damage to a trip than choosing badly within one.

The palace. A former royal residence, now a hotel. Rajasthan has most of them. Scale, ceremony, grounds, and a certain amount of theatre. Marvellous for two or three nights and heavy for ten.

The haveli. A merchant's townhouse, usually in the old quarter and usually small. Courtyards rather than lawns. You are inside the city rather than above it, which is either the whole point or the whole problem depending on the traveller.

The camp. Canvas, but not camping. These are put up for the season beside a park or out in the desert and taken down again. Some of the best rooms in India are tents.

The lodge. Near a wildlife park and built around early mornings. Judged on its naturalists far more than its furniture.

A good two weeks usually uses three of the four. A fortnight of only one is the commonest mistake there is.

There is a real difference between a good hotel in India and an extraordinary one, and it is worth paying for. There is also a point past which the price keeps climbing and the experience does not, and nobody selling you a room is going to tell you where that point is.

What the money genuinely buys is the building, the grounds, and the staff ratio — which in practice means somebody notices what you need before you have asked. And location. The difference between a hotel inside the old city and one twenty minutes outside it is an hour of your day, every day of the stay.

What it stops buying is size. Past a point the suite is simply larger and you will live in one corner of it.

So the useful question is not which hotel is best. It is which two nights of this journey deserve the extraordinary one. Almost nobody enjoys fourteen of them in a row, and the contrast is most of the pleasure.