Maharajas' Express: Indian Panorama

A full Jaipur day from a stationary train: the City Palace galleries in the morning, with the textile and armoury rooms that most visitors walk past, then back aboard for lunch. The afternoon is deliberately open — spa, Jantar Mantar, or the bazaars — and the evening is the set piece, dinner at the Rambagh Palace, the Maharaja's own residence until 1957. The train departs for Sawai Madhopur once you are back.

The earliest start of the week, and the best reason for it: a dawn jeep safari into Ranthambore, once the hunting reserve of the Jaipur royal house, where the tigers are habituated enough to be seen in the open. Back aboard for a late breakfast as the train rolls on, and the afternoon belongs to Fatehpur Sikri — Akbar's perfect red sandstone capital, abandoned within twenty years of completion for want of water.

The Taj Mahal at sunrise, in the first minutes after the gates open — the marble moving from pearl-grey to warm white in about forty minutes, which is the whole argument for the early alarm. Afterwards, a champagne breakfast at Taj Khema on the hillock overlooking the monument. The afternoon is free for Agra Fort or the Baby Taj, and the train departs after dinner.

Disembark at Jhansi after an early breakfast for Orchha — a sixteenth-century Bundela fort town on the Betwa, still more village than monument, toured partly by tuk-tuk. Back aboard for lunch, then Khajuraho in the afternoon: the Western Group of temples, whose carving is the most virtuosic in medieval India and whose celebrated erotic panels are a fraction of a far larger narrative programme.

The train reaches Varanasi around midday. Lunch is off-train at a hotel on the river, then Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon and the Dhamek StupaStupaA solid domed Buddhist monument, built to house relics and walked around by worshippers as an act of devotion.Read in the glossary still marks the spot, with a stop at a silk-weaving workshop on the way back. The day ends where the city does its real work — a boat on the Ganges at dusk for the Ganga aartiAartiA Hindu act of worship in which lamps of flame are circled before a deity or a sacred river, accompanied by bells, conch and chant.Read in the glossary, the lamp ceremony that has closed the day here for centuries.

Breakfast is served as the train runs its final stretch into Delhi, and the Maharajas' Express draws into Safdarjung around half past twelve. Disembarkation is unhurried; onward transfers are arranged to your Delhi hotel or the airport. Six nights, eight cities, and the particular satisfaction of having crossed north India without once packing a suitcase.