Golden Triangle with Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary – 6 Days

A representative of Payless Tours India meets you in the arrivals hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport, holding a board with your name, and your driver takes you to your Delhi hotel to rest and freshen up. Once you have settled in, the afternoon is planned around the green spaces where Delhi's city birds gather. The first stop is Lodhi Garden, a 90-acre park laid out in 1936 around the fifteenth-century tombs of the Sayyid and Lodi sultans. Rose-ringed parakeets nest in the crumbling domes of Mohammad Shah's tomb, Indian grey hornbills feed in the fig trees, and the pond near the Bara Gumbad often holds pond herons and white-throated kingfishers.

Your guide then takes you a short drive east to Humayun's Tomb, completed around 1570 and commissioned by the emperor's senior widow, Bega Begum. It was the first great garden tomb on the subcontinent, and its double dome, raised platform and four-part charbagh layout fed directly into the design of the Taj Mahal decades later. Next door lies Sunder Nursery, a Mughal-era plant nursery restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and reopened to the public in 2018. Its lakes and native plantings now draw more than 80 bird species, and a slow walk here gives you a chance to test your binoculars before reaching Keoladeo.

Late in the afternoon you drive along Kartavya Path past India Gate, the 42-metre memorial arch to Indian soldiers of the First World War, and look up towards Rashtrapati Bhavan on Raisina Hill. As evening traffic builds, your driver returns you to the hotel. For dinner, the restaurants of Khan Market are close to most central hotels and serve everything from North Indian kebabs to wood-fired pizza. Ask your guide about the next morning's start time, since leaving Delhi by eight o'clock keeps you ahead of expressway traffic and puts you in Agra before lunch. Try to sleep early, because jet lag tends to wake visitors well before dawn anyway. Overnight stay in Delhi.

After breakfast you leave Delhi on the Yamuna Expressway, a six-lane toll road that cuts the drive to Agra down to three and a half to four hours. Keep the window side free, because the flat fields of western Uttar Pradesh are good country for spotting cattle egrets following tractors, black-shouldered kites hovering above the crops and, with luck, a pair of sarus cranes standing in a flooded paddy. Your driver can pull into one of the expressway food courts for tea halfway. You reach Agra around midday, check in at your hotel and take some time for lunch before meeting your Agra guide in the early afternoon.

The first visit is Agra Fort, the crescent-shaped citadel of red sandstone that Emperor Akbar began in 1565 on the west bank of the Yamuna. Its walls run for about two and a half kilometres, and inside you walk through the Jahangiri Mahal, the white marble Khas Mahal and the Diwan-i-Khas, where the emperors received ambassadors. Your guide will stop at the Musamman Burj, the octagonal tower where Shah Jahan lived out his final years under house arrest, gazing down the river towards the tomb of his wife. Watch the ledges of the fort too, since Egyptian vultures and house swifts often nest in the old masonry.

Across the river, you call at Itimad-ud-Daulah, a small tomb built between 1622 and 1628 by Empress Nur Jahan for her father. It was the first Mughal building faced entirely in white marble with pietra dura inlay, which is why locals call it the Baby Taj. From here it is a ten-minute drive to Mehtab Bagh, a riverside garden directly opposite the Taj Mahal. In winter the Yamuna sandbanks below the garden hold black-winged stilts, river lapwings and sometimes ruddy shelducks, while the Taj turns orange in the setting sun. Dinner is at your hotel, and it is worth sleeping early before the drive to the bird sanctuary. Overnight stay in Agra.

Your guide collects you from the hotel in the dark, and you walk the last few hundred metres to the eastern gate of the Taj Mahal, where the queue is shortest at opening time. As the light comes up, the marble moves through grey, rose and pale gold, and the first black kites start circling above the four minarets. Your guide explains how Shah Jahan began the mausoleum in 1632 after Mumtaz Mahal died in childbirth, and how the calligraphy on the main arch grows larger towards the top so that it looks even from the ground. The Taj Mahal is closed every Friday, so the dates of this tour are set around that.

After breakfast and check-out, you drive west for about an hour and a half to Bharatpur, crossing into Rajasthan on the way. The town grew around Lohagarh, the mud-walled Iron Fort that held out against a British siege in 1805, and your driver can pause outside its moat. Most guests head straight to their lodge near the park entrance, where the naturalist joins you over lunch. He will explain how Maharaja Suraj Mal built the Ajan Bund dam in the eighteenth century, flooding a natural depression, and how later rulers turned it into a private shooting reserve for royal guests and British viceroys.

The first visit inside Keoladeo National Park begins around three o'clock. The park allows no private cars, so you travel by cycle-rickshaw, each driven by a puller licensed and numbered by the forest department, many of whom can name birds by call alone. The main track runs along raised dykes between shallow marshes, and in winter you will see darters drying their wings, groups of spot-billed pelicans and noisy colonies of painted storks and Asian openbills in the babul trees. Your naturalist sets up a scope whenever something special appears. You leave the park at dusk, when jackals start calling across the water. Overnight stay in Bharatpur.

This is the morning birders plan the whole golden triangle with Bharatpur tour around. You enter the park as the gate opens, usually around half past six in winter, with tea in a flask and mist still hanging over the water. The cold hours bring the wildfowl close: bar-headed geese and greylag geese grazing at the edges, northern pintails, shovelers and gadwalls dabbling in the shallows, and Eurasian spoonbills sweeping their bills from side to side. Birds of prey are another reason to come early, as greater spotted eagles and the occasional imperial eagle perch on dead trees waiting for the sun to warm the air.

Deeper inside, near the small Keoladeo temple to Lord Shiva that gives the park its name, your naturalist will tell you about the Siberian cranes. For centuries a western population of these white cranes flew around 6,000 km from Russia, over Afghanistan and Pakistan, to winter in these marshes. Hunting along that flight path and drought at Bharatpur cut their numbers sharply through the 1980s and 1990s, and the last pair was recorded here in the winter of 2001–02. The ornithologist Salim Ali campaigned to protect the wetland, which became a national park in 1982. You may also see rock pythons sunning outside their burrows at Python Point.

You return to the lodge for a late breakfast and check-out around ten o'clock, then drive to Jaipur through Deeg and Dausa, a trip of three and a half to four hours on good roads. Rajasthan's countryside changes as you go, with mustard fields in winter, camel carts on the shoulder and low Aravalli hills rising to the west. Your driver can stop at a roadside dhaba for dal, roti and sweet lassi along the way. You reach Jaipur in the afternoon and check in at your hotel. The evening is free; many guests rest after the early start, or take a short walk to nearby shops. Overnight stay in Jaipur.

After breakfast you meet your Jaipur guide and drive eleven kilometres north to Amber Fort, the hilltop seat of the Kachwaha Rajputs before they moved down to the plains in 1727. From the road you can see the fort's walls running along the ridges like a smaller version of the Great Wall. Inside, your guide leads you through the Diwan-i-Am, the Ganesh Pol gateway with its painted frescoes, and the Sheesh Mahal, lined with convex mirror pieces. Look down at Maota Lake as you leave, as its edges often hold little cormorants, grey herons and a few wintering ducks below the fort's terraces.

Back in the walled Pink City, you climb inside the Hawa Mahal rather than only photographing it from the street. Built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, the five-storey screen is only one room deep in places, and from its upper windows you look straight down on the traffic of Siredeori Bazaar. A short walk brings you to the City Palace, still the home of the former royal family. Your guide will show you the Mubarak Mahal textile gallery, the armoury, and the four painted gates of Pritam Niwas Chowk, each named after a season. Lunch is at your choice of restaurant in the old city.

In the late afternoon you drive ten kilometres east to Galta Ji, a group of eighteenth-century temples built into a narrow gorge where natural springs fill a series of stone tanks. Pilgrims bathe here throughout the year, and the site is home to a large troop of rhesus macaques, so your guide will suggest you keep food out of sight. A short climb to the Surya Mandir at the top of the ridge gives a wide view across Jaipur as the sun drops. Along the path, keep an eye out for Indian peafowl, rock pigeons and laughing doves. Return to your hotel for a farewell dinner. Overnight stay in Jaipur.

After breakfast and check-out, your driver takes you back to Delhi, a drive of five to six hours with a tea stop on the way. You are dropped at Indira Gandhi International Airport or at a Delhi hotel, timed to your onward flight. If you send us your flight number in advance, we will plan the start of the drive with enough margin for traffic.