Culture6 min
India in Three Days Is a Bad Idea. We Did It Anyway.
Sometimes three days is what exists. The honest question is what you do with them.
A client had four days in Delhi for work and one weekend attached to the end of it. She wanted to see the Taj Mahal. Every sensible piece of travel writing would tell her not to attempt the Golden Triangle in that window, and every sensible piece of travel writing would be technically right and practically useless, because the alternative on offer was not a longer trip. It was no trip.
So we built the compromise properly rather than pretending it was not one.
What we cut
Jaipur. This is the decision most people get wrong. The instinct is to keep all three cities and shorten each one, which produces seventy-two hours of car travel punctuated by monuments. We kept Delhi and Agra and dropped the third point of the triangle entirely, which bought back roughly nine hours of road.
We also cut the sunrise Taj Mahal visit that every itinerary insists on, and went at four in the afternoon instead. Fewer people, better light on the marble, and a client who had slept.
What we spent it on
One extremely good guide for the full three days rather than a different local guide in each city. Continuity matters enormously on a short trip. By the second morning he knew what she was interested in, which was textiles and, unexpectedly, drainage engineering, and he rebuilt the afternoon around both.
One long lunch in Old Delhi that was not on the schedule and ran to nearly three hours. On a three-day trip the temptation is to schedule every hour. The single best thing we did was leave one afternoon deliberately empty and let the guide fill it on the day.
The honest assessment
She did not see India. Nobody sees India in three days and it is faintly insulting to the country to suggest otherwise. What she got was a properly designed seventy-two hours that was coherent rather than frantic, and which she describes as the reason she is going back for three weeks next winter with her sister.
That is the actual argument for the short trip. Not that it substitutes for the long one, but that it is frequently the thing that makes the long one happen. We have watched this pattern enough times now to plan for it deliberately.
Written by the Red Camellia team. Every trip we write about is one we have taken ourselves.