Destinations

Eight cities stacked on one plain, and all of them still open for business.

A planned pink city with a fort on every ridge and a bazaar behind every gate.

One building most people travel a continent for — and three more that deserve the same trip.

A city that built a skyline, a shoreline and a shopping habit in fifty years.

Gilded temples, a river of ferries, and the best street food on earth.

Seven islands, twenty million people, and no time to explain.

A hundred kilometres of coast with a Portuguese hangover.

A city-state that works, and knows it.

Five lakes, a working palace and the only Rajasthani city that feels soft.

The oldest continuously lived-in city on the Ganga, and it hides nothing.

A gold-covered shrine that feeds 100,000 people a day, free, every day.

The ruins of an empire scattered across 26 square kilometres of boulders.

A blue old town under the least-ruined fort in India.

Six hundred years of trading, and every trader left something behind.

The only Indian metro that would rather argue about a book than about money.

A high desert at 3,500 m where the air is thin and the light is unreal.

Three medieval royal cities in one valley, under the Himalaya.

Tea to the horizon in every direction.

A night on a houseboat, and nothing to do but watch the water.

A royal city that switches on 97,000 light bulbs every Sunday night.

Qutb Shahi tombs on one side, glass towers on the other, biryani in the middle.

The end of the Kullu valley and the start of the high road north.

A living fort of yellow sandstone in the middle of the Thar.

A temple with fourteen towers and a city arranged in squares around it.