Jaisalmer is a twelve-hour drive. Here is the test for whether it is worth it.
Jaisalmer is the golden fort in the desert, it is genuinely extraordinary, and it is a very long way from everywhere else you are going.
The test is simple: are you giving it three nights, and are you flying one leg?
Three nights, because two means you spend one of them recovering from the drive and the other one leaving. And one leg flown or taken by train, because twelve hours out and twelve hours back is a day and a half of a two-week trip spent looking at the same road twice.
If the answer to both is yes, go. The fort is inhabited, which almost no fort anywhere is, and the desert at dusk outside it is one of the few places in Rajasthan that is genuinely quiet.
If the answer is no — if it is a two-night stop squeezed between Jodhpur and Udaipur — take it out. Put those nights into Udaipur or into a village stay somewhere between the cities. You will have a better week and you will not have spent it in a car.
This is the most common itinerary we are asked to fix, and the fix is nearly always subtraction.
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