Aravalli to Thar, by Bicycle

India Gate and Humayun's Tomb in the imperial south, then Old Delhi by rickshaw and on foot — the spice market at Khari BaoliStepwellA well reached by a long descending staircase, so that water can still be drawn as the water table falls.Read in the glossary, Chandni Chowk, and Paranthe Wali Gali, where the lane is two arms wide and lunch is eaten standing up.

The flight to Udaipur, met on arrival and driven in. The afternoon is free. In the evening you meet your guide for the ride briefing — the route, the road rules, the support vehicle, and a bike fitted to you rather than handed to you.

Out at eight, before the city is properly awake, and into the country around Udaipur — an easy 40km to find your legs and your gears. Back by early afternoon for the City Palace, and a boat on Pichola as the light goes. Udaipur is a jumble of sight and sound and smell and there is no useful way to hurry it.

An early start and a short shuttle, then the climb. This is the finest ride of the fortnight: up into the Aravallis, through rolling hills and dhonk scrub whose leaves put colour across otherwise pale brown country. Kumbhalgarh is a fifteenth-century fort town, and in the evening you climb the fort itself — a wall 36km long, the second longest continuous wall anywhere, with 365 temples inside it.

Dense forest and undulating road along the flank of the Aravallis, ending at Ranakpur. Rest and eat first, then give the temple proper time: marble worked by local craftsmen into 1,444 pillars, no two of them the same, and a single rock carved with 108 snakes whose tails cannot be told apart from one another. It is the sort of building that rearranges what you thought stone could do.

Rural riding through hamlets where the farming year is visibly under way and the women's clothes are the brightest thing in the landscape. As you approach the Jawai hills the country turns — granite domes, thorn scrub, open wilderness. Lunch at a camp set in it. In the evening, the safari: leopards live here wild and unfenced, alongside the herding communities, and neither side seems much troubled by the other.

A ride out into the country around Jawai and time with the Rabari — the herding community whose people have lived alongside these leopards for generations and who will tell you, without drama, that in living memory there has been no serious trouble between them. A jeep safari again, because two attempts is how you actually see a leopard.

The longest day, and the easiest — largely flat, through scrub and then across carpets of mustard in flower. Lunch at Rawla Narlai, a heritage house at the foot of its granite hill, then on to Jojawar and another. Two of the best rural properties in Rajasthan in a single day, one for lunch and one for the night.

An hour and a half on the British-era line from Kamli GhatGhatA flight of steps leading down to a river or tank, used for bathing, worship and cremation.Read in the glossary to Phulad — a slow metre-gauge train through tunnels and ravine country, and one of the few railway journeys worth taking for its own sake. Bikes meet you at Phulad and you descend to Jojawar on a narrow back road that is quiet enough for blackbuck and nilgai, and, with luck, the chinkara — shy, and the most graceful thing on four legs in this country.

Easy road, open country, and camels, blackbuck and deer at the edges of it — a day where the riding asks little enough that you can look around while you do it. Sardar Samand was the MaharajaMaharajaA ruling Indian prince — literally 'great king'; a maharani is his queen, or a princess ruling in her own right.Read in the glossary of Jodhpur's shooting lodge and sits alone above its lake. The rest of the day is yours, and the terrace is the place to spend it.

Villages and open country most of the morning, until the Jodhpur highway — which is where the riding stops. Bikes go onto the support vehicle for the last 10km, because a dual carriageway into a city of a million people is not a thing to cycle for the sake of saying you did. Dinner on a rooftop with Mehrangarh lit above the old town.

Mehrangarh in the morning — not a ruin but a working fort museum, and the best-kept in Rajasthan. Then the old town on foot, and by tuktuk through the blue lanes, where the colour is indigo lime-wash and everyone will give you a different reason for it. Farewell dinner on the rooftop.

Transfer to Jodhpur airport and the flight to Delhi for onward connections.