Rajasthan

Rajasthan is the largest state in India and the one that most reliably looks like the picture in a visitor's head before they arrive: hill forts, painted havelis, camels on a road, a palace floating on a lake. The reason it delivers is that the Rajput houses spent four hundred years building in stone and then, unusually, the buildings survived — twenty-odd major forts, six of them on the UNESCO list as a group.

In practice almost everyone travels it as a loop between four cities. Jaipur for the forts and the bazaars, Jodhpur for Mehrangarh and the blue old town, Jaisalmer for the desert and a fort people still live inside, Udaipur for the lakes. Between them sit the things that reward a detour: Kumbhalgarh's thirty-six kilometres of wall, Ranakpur's carved marble, Ranthambore's tigers, Pushkar's lake.

The distances are the planning problem. Jodhpur to Jaisalmer is five and a half hours; Jaisalmer to Udaipur is nine or ten. A week gets you three cities properly or four in a hurry; ten days gets you all four with the detours. We would rather cut a city than cut the time in each one, and we will say so when an itinerary is trying to do too much.