Golden Triangle & Rajasthan

Golden Triangle & Rajasthan

India is a country of a thousand colours, and the India Escapes Vacations 'Colors of India' tour is designed to show you as many of them as a single twelve-day journey can hold. This value-minded guided tour takes the concept of a Golden Triangle & Rajasthan itinerary — already the most popular circuit in Indian tourism — and elevates it with two of the most extraordinary and most distinctive additional experiences available anywhere in India: the ancient holy city of Varanasi on the sacred Ganges, and the UNESCO Khajuraho Temple complex with its astonishing medieval erotic carvings. The result is an itinerary of remarkable breadth and depth, covering eight destinations across twelve days in the expert care of India Escapes Tour Directors and Local Specialists, with the famous India EscapesGO mobile app providing flexibility and enrichment throughout. The journey begins in Delhi — where the old Mughal city and the planned colonial capital coexist in the kind of magnificently layered complexity that only millennia of continuous settlement can produce — before heading directly to Varanasi for the tour's most spiritually profound experiences. The holy city's dawn boat ride, watching pilgrims bathe in the sacred Ganges as priests perform their morning rituals on the ancient ghats, and the evening Ganga Aarti fire ceremony, in which seven priests simultaneously worship the river with blazing lamps and devotional chanting, are among the most uniquely Indian and most personally moving experiences available on any guided tour of the subcontinent. The addition of Khajuraho — the UNESCO temple complex whose extraordinary 10th-century erotic carvings were lost to the jungle for over five centuries before their rediscovery in 1838 — adds an artistic and historical dimension that has no equivalent anywhere in India. Back in Delhi for a full day of guided sightseeing, the tour then moves through the essential Golden Triangle: the Taj Mahal at sunset in Agra — the world's most beautiful building, visited at the time of day when the white marble goes through its most extraordinary colour transformation — the Agra Fort's Mughal imperial chambers, and the haunting Fatehpur Sikri ghost city. Two nights in Jaipur deliver the Pink City's finest: the Amber Fort with its alabaster Hall of Victory and the spectacular Chamber of Mirrors, the Jantar Mantar observatory, and the City Palace Museum's royal collections. The Rajasthan chapter then opens into something even more dramatic with Jodhpur — the Blue City, ringed by its ancient wall and dominated by the soaring ramparts of Mehrangarh Fort — before the Jain temple complex at Ranakpur delivers one of the most completely unexpected architectural experiences of the entire tour: 1,444 differently carved marble pillars in a 15th-century temple complex of extraordinary, almost overwhelming artistic ambition. Udaipur, the City of Lakes, provides the tour's most romantically beautiful finale: the City Palace above the water, the Jagdish Temple, the Crystal Gallery, and a sunset boat ride on Lake Pichola that consistently produces some of the most memorable photographs guests take home from India. Twelve days. Eight cities. A full spectrum of colour.