Pushkar → Jaipur

On this day

What you are looking at, roughly in the order the day meets it.

• Over Nag Pahar to Ajmer — the road climbs out of Pushkar’s valley and drops toward Ajmer with views over Ana Sagar, the city’s 12th-century artificial lake.

• Ajmer Sharif — the bypass skirts Ajmer, home of the dargah of Moinuddin Chishti, the subcontinent’s most important Sufi shrine — pilgrims of every religion, Mughal emperors included, have walked to it for 800 years. Not on the itinerary, but knowing what the city is changes what the crowds and flags mean.

• Kishangarh marble yards — the highway runs straight through Asia’s biggest marble market: kilometres of stockyards with slabs racked like library books, cranes swinging blocks, everything dusted white. Kishangarh also gave its name to a famous school of miniature painting (the Bani Thani portrait).

• The marble slurry dump — the waste from all that cutting — a milk of powdered stone and water — has been pumped onto two hundred acres here since 2005, roughly seven hundred tanker-loads a day, and dried into flats and dunes of blinding white. India calls it a mini Switzerland; on winter weekends ten thousand people come to be photographed on it. The same whiteness the Taj is made of, at the far end of the process.

  Only if the driver takes the turning — it is 2.3 km off the road. Free, but a pass is issued at a gate 1 km before the yard. Open 10:00–17:00. It is an industrial waste site: the dust is respirable silica, so this is a short stop, not an afternoon.

• NH48 — the Ajmer–Jaipur stretch is Golden Quadrilateral: six lanes, toll plazas, camel carts in the slow lane next to container trucks — the two speeds of the economy sharing one road.

• Dhanteras — arrival day is the first day of Diwali week, the day for buying gold and new utensils; jewellery and kitchenware shops will be mobbed and the markets at full brightness. Jaipur is reputedly the best-lit city in India for the festival.

• City Palace, Jaipur — the Kachwaha court’s palace in the middle of the planned city; the four seasonal doorways of Pritam Niwas Chowk (the peacock gate above all) are the photograph everyone takes. Inside stand two silver urns of about 345 kilos each — the largest silver objects in the world — made in 1902 so a maharaja could carry Ganges water to London rather than touch English drinking water.

  The story: Amber Fort & the Pink City →

• Jantar Mantar — Jai Singh II’s 1720s observatory of walk-in masonry instruments; the Samrat Yantra is the world’s largest sundial, 27 m tall and accurate to about two seconds. UNESCO-listed and genuinely strange to walk through.

• Hawa Mahal — the 1799 “palace of winds”: a five-storey pink honeycomb of 953 screened windows, just one room deep, built so the women of the court could watch street processions unseen. Best from the café terraces across the street.

Where to eat

Breakfast is at the hotel. Researched picks, not a directory — the small print names who recommends each. Names link to Google Maps.

Dhanteras night — the lit bazaars are the evening plan. Book the sit-down dinners ahead; Diwali week fills them.