Khuri is a small village 40km southwest of Jaisalmer – an hour and a world away from the fort’s swarming trade. Khuri has its own desert sand dunes, and remains a peaceful place (apart from during holiday periods, as it’s popular with Indian holidaymakers), with houses of mud and straw decorated like the patterns on Persian carpets. There are plenty of camps of mud huts, and camel drivers eager to take you on the dunes, but no shop-lined streets or pancake restaurants. Once the excitement of sunset is over, you have desert solitude and the brilliant star-studded sky at night to look forward to.
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By far the best time to visit this park (Indian/foreigner Rs 25/200, video Rs 200; 6am-6pm Apr-Sep, 6.30am-5pm Oct-Mar) is October to February, when you’ll see many migratory birds. At other times, it can be dry and relatively bird-free.
Glorious Meherangarh Fort mushrooms from beneath a huge rocky cliff to dominate the once indomitable Blue City. At dusk you feel a part of a real-life movie, as the camera-shy palace peeks over awesome stone walls, and citizens mill about in the hemmed-in chaos below. Jodhpur proper stretches beyond the 16th-century border, but it’s the immediacy and grandeur of the old city, once a stop on a vital trade route, that has more and more travellers raving.
Jaisalmer is a giant sandcastle with a town attached, an emblem of honour in a land of rough and tumble. The fort is a living monument to long-lost desert might, a Golden City of dreams that exceeds expectations of the most travel-sick tourist or hardened history buff. Rising high from Trikuta hill, 99 enormous bastions hide havelis of crumbling beauty, and former Raj retainers, who now raffishly run guesthouses or flog bedazzling mirrorwork and embroidery. Like a Hansel and Gretel wonderland, the enclosed palace is carved from the same near-edible golden sandstone.
Jaipur, the City of Victory, is chaotic and congested, though it still has a habit of tickling travellers pink. Stunning hilltop forts and glorious palaces fit like footprints from a rich royal past, candyfloss-bright turbans blaze a trail through brilliant bargain-filled bazaars, and fluttering saris catch the eye like butterflies.
If you have time to visit only one part of Rajasthan, make it the east. It’s easiest to access from Delhi, and it houses a magnificent cluster of sights – from bustling Jaipur to camel-obsessed Pushkar.
The fort at Chittorgarh (known as Chittor) is the greatest in Rajasthan, and is well worth reshuffling an itinerary to explore. The town itself is unspectacular, but the 700-acre complex standing on a rocky mountain plateau feels like the ultimate spot for a History Channel re-enactment. But there are no fallen actors here, just a series of stunning palaces, gates, temples and the startling Jaya Stambha.
With narrow Brahmin-blue lanes, assorted temples, classic havelis, and a picturesque hillside lake, Bundi is the kind of effortlessly charming Indian town you wish you dreamed of – or at least stumbled upon – first. There’s an air of the wonderful here – as Kipling found when he moved here to write – which is most readily felt around the fairy-tale palace looming large and cupola-clad.
Bharatpur is home to the World Heritage–listed Keoladeo Ghana National Park, one of the world’s prime bird-breeding and feeding grounds. This peaceful sanctuary is hard-core twitcher (bird-watcher) territory, and boasts a whopping 364 species within its 29-sq-km marshlands, including many threatened aquatic birds on migratory routes from Central Asia.