Travel Guide · India
Rajasthan Itinerary 10 Days
Including Agra & the Taj Mahal
Ten days is genuinely enough to see the best of Rajasthan and the Taj Mahal — but only if you plan the routing carefully. Get it right and you’ll come home thinking India is the most extraordinary place you’ve ever been. Get it wrong and you’ll spend half your holiday sitting in a car wondering where the time went.
We’ve been running India programmes from Jaipur for fifteen years. This itinerary is the one we’d give a close friend visiting for the first time. It covers Agra and the Taj Mahal, the three great Rajasthan cities — Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur — and enough breathing room to actually feel each place rather than just photograph it and move on.
No backtracking. No exhausting transfers on day seven. No pretending you can fit six cities into ten days and actually enjoy any of them.
Before you start: the routing logic
The mistake most first-time India travellers make is adding too many destinations. Rajasthan is bigger than it looks on a map. The distance from Jaipur to Jaisalmer alone is 575 kilometres. Add Agra and you’re covering serious ground.
This itinerary uses a logical geographic flow: Delhi → Agra → Jaipur → Jodhpur → Udaipur. You move in one direction — south-west through Rajasthan — with no doubling back. The transfers are manageable and you spend enough time in each city to actually know you were there.
What we’ve deliberately left out: Jaisalmer. Yes, it’s spectacular. But adding it to a 10-day programme means rushing everything else or spending entire days just getting there and back. If Jaisalmer is calling you, plan 14 days. For 10 days, this routing is the right one.
Day 1
If you’re arriving from Europe, you’ll likely land in the morning after an overnight flight. The honest advice here is simple: don’t try to do too much on arrival day.
Check in, rest if you need it, and spend the afternoon in a single neighbourhood. Old Delhi — the lanes around Chandni Chowk, a rickshaw through the spice market, the Red Fort viewed from outside — gives you an immediate sense of what India actually feels like at street level. Chaotic and brilliant and overwhelming all at once.
Delhi traffic is genuinely unpredictable. If you’re planning to drive to Agra the next morning, confirm your departure time the night before and build in a buffer.
Day 2
Leave early — by 6am if you can — so you arrive at the Taj Mahal around 9:30am, after the first rush but before the midday heat sets in.
Here’s something nobody tells you before you go: the Taj Mahal is better than you expect, and it’s better in person than in any photograph. Most famous landmarks disappoint slightly in reality. The Taj does the opposite. The scale, the quality of the marble, the way it changes colour in the light — give yourself time to just sit with it. Plan for 2.5 to 3 hours.
Agra Fort in the afternoon is much less visited than the Taj, genuinely impressive, and gives you a completely different perspective on Mughal architecture.
If budget allows, stay on the Yamuna riverbank with a Taj Mahal view. Waking up and seeing it from your room at sunrise — before the crowds, with morning mist still on the river — is something you’ll remember for years.
Sunrise vs daytime at the Taj Mahal
Sunrise entry (gates open around 6am) gives the softest light and fewest crowds — worth the early alarm. If that’s not realistic after a long flight, mid-morning (9–11am) is the next best window. Avoid midday to 3pm in any season.
Day 3
There’s one stop that earns its place on this route every single time: Fatehpur Sikri. A 16th-century Mughal city built, used as the imperial capital for 14 years, and then abandoned — apparently because of water shortages — and largely empty ever since.
The result is one of the best-preserved Mughal complexes in India, almost entirely free of the crowds that make Agra exhausting. You can walk through the Diwan-i-Khas, the Panch Mahal, the Jama Masjid at your own pace. It takes about 2 hours and it is, genuinely, one of India’s most underrated experiences.
Arrive in Jaipur by early evening. Your first impression of the city at dusk — the warm sandstone buildings, the general chaos of the old city, the smell of spices and incense — sets you up perfectly for the two days ahead.
Days 4 & 5 — Jaipur: the Pink City
Jaipur gets two full days and earns both of them.
Day 4
Amber Fort is best at 8:30am. Arrive then and the light is golden, the crowds are thin, and your guide can actually be heard. By 10:30 the fort fills up rapidly. This is one of those cases where the early alarm is absolutely worth it. Give it 2.5 hours minimum.
The famous Hawa Mahal — the pink honeycomb facade on every Rajasthan postcard — is best photographed from the street. Spend 20 minutes outside and move on. The City Palace is more rewarding: the royal artefacts, costumes and inner courtyards are genuinely interesting.
End the afternoon in Johari Bazaar, Jaipur’s jewellery market. Even if you’re not buying, walking through it — the gem merchants, the goldsmiths, the extraordinary variety of coloured stones laid out on velvet — is an experience in itself.
Day 5
Skip the second round of monuments. Day 5 is where the programme gets interesting.
A block-printing workshop in Sanganer (35 minutes from the city) is hands-on, genuinely informative and gives you something you made yourself to bring home. Most people love it far more than they expect to.
In the afternoon, a cooking class with a local Jaipur family is the other option worth considering. Dal baati churma — Rajasthan’s most famous dish — cooked in someone’s home kitchen and eaten on the floor with the family is the kind of afternoon that stays with you long after the monuments have blurred together.
Chokhi Dhani in the evening — a recreated Rajasthani village experience outside the city — is slightly touristy but genuinely fun, especially travelling with children.
Day 6
The drive from Jaipur to Jodhpur is 340 kilometres. There’s one stop we recommend: Pushkar. A small pilgrimage town 15 kilometres off the main road, built around a sacred lake. Quiet, slightly otherworldly, unlike anywhere else in Rajasthan.
The Brahma Temple — one of the very few temples in India dedicated to Brahma — is the main attraction. But honestly the town itself is the draw: the ghats around the lake at dusk, the flower sellers, the general sense of peace. Either as a 2-hour stop or a night’s stay, it works perfectly.
Arrive in Jodhpur by early evening. Find somewhere in the old city with a view of Mehrangarh Fort lit up at night. That first glimpse — the fort rising from the rock above the blue-painted city — is one of the great India moments.
Days 7 & 8 — Jodhpur: the Blue City
Day 7
We’ll say it directly: Mehrangarh Fort is the best fort in India. Better than Amber, better than Agra. The scale of it, the quality of the museum inside, the views from the battlements over the blue city below — it’s extraordinary. Give it 3 hours minimum and don’t rush the museum.
The afternoon is for the old city. The lanes around Sardar Market and the clock tower, the spice bazaar, the blue-painted houses climbing toward the fort. It’s a genuinely beautiful urban environment and worth wandering without a fixed agenda.
Dinner in a heritage haveli in the old city — arranged in advance — is exactly the kind of evening that doesn’t happen by accident. Eating in a 200-year-old inner courtyard with Rajasthani folk musicians is one of those India experiences.
Day 8
The Bishnoi community have been protecting wildlife and nature for over 500 years — their faith prohibits harming any living being. The result is that their villages are full of wildlife: blackbuck, chinkara deer, peacocks wandering freely between houses.
A half-day Bishnoi village visit — seeing how families live, watching artisans at traditional looms, encountering wildlife at close range — is one of those experiences that reframes everything else you’ve seen in Rajasthan. It’s not about monuments. It’s about people and how they actually live.
The afternoon is free in Jodhpur. The Umaid Bhawan Palace museum is beautifully curated if you want one more visit. Otherwise, simply the city.
Day 9
One stop earns its place on every programme between Jodhpur and Udaipur: the Ranakpur Jain Temple. A 15th-century marble temple with 1,444 individually carved pillars — not one identical. It sits in a forested valley, sees a fraction of the visitors the major sites get, and is genuinely one of the most architecturally remarkable buildings we’ve ever seen. Give it 90 minutes.
Arrive in Udaipur by mid-afternoon. The first thing to do is take a boat ride on Lake Pichola. The lake view of the City Palace, the ghats, the Taj Lake Palace floating in the middle of the water — this is the image most people carry home from Udaipur, and it looks exactly like the photographs, except better.
Day 10
Udaipur deserves a slow day. After nine days of moving, most travellers genuinely appreciate a morning without a monument on the schedule.
The City Palace is the main attraction and is best in the morning. The views from the upper terraces over Lake Pichola are among the finest in Rajasthan. Allow 2 hours. Then the rest of the day is yours: the miniature painting galleries (Udaipur is the heartland of this tradition and the work is extraordinary), a second boat ride on the lake, the Sahelion ki Bari gardens if you want somewhere quiet and green.
For your last evening, find a rooftop restaurant overlooking Lake Pichola. Order something local — laal maas if you eat meat, dal baati churma if you don’t — and watch the Taj Lake Palace light up across the water. It’s a good place to end.
Practical things you need to know
Best time for this trip
October to March is the ideal window. October is our favourite — post-monsoon landscapes, clear skies, lower prices, no crowds yet.
November–February is peak season: perfect weather, maximum visitors, maximum prices. March has Holi (March 3–4, 2026) — worth planning around in Jaipur.
Avoid May–June: 45°C+ in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer.
Private car vs train
A private car and driver for the full trip is the most practical option. You’re not tied to schedules and can stop at Fatehpur Sikri, Ranakpur and Pushkar without complications.
The train between Delhi and Agra (Gatimaan Express or Shatabdi) is fast, reliable and a genuine experience. If you’d rather not drive the first leg, take the train to Agra and pick up your car there.
How far in advance
For November–February travel, book your hotels at least 3–4 months ahead. The palace hotels and heritage havelis in Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur fill up early in peak season.
For October, March or April travel, 6–8 weeks is usually fine for most properties.
What to expect to spend
Comfortable mid-range: approximately €150–200 per person per day all-in (accommodation, transport, meals, entrance fees).
Luxury level (Taj, Oberoi, SUÏAN properties throughout): budget €400–600 per person per day.
There’s good value at every level. The difference is mainly in the hotels, not the destinations.
India rewards curiosity. The travellers who come home most satisfied are almost never the ones who followed the programme most rigidly — they’re the ones who stopped for tea with someone they met at a ghat, spent an extra hour in a market they hadn’t planned to enter, said yes to something unexpected.
Build a bit of looseness into this itinerary. Leave some afternoons genuinely free. The plan above works and it covers the highlights — but the moments you’ll remember most clearly in twenty years probably won’t be on the itinerary at all.
If you’d like help planning your Rajasthan programme — whether you’re a travel agency designing a circuit or a traveller putting together a private trip — get in touch with us. We’ve been doing this for fifteen years from Jaipur and we’re happy to talk through the routing, the hotels or anything else on your mind.
