All-Inclusive Private Taj Mahal & Agra Day Tour From Delhi

Two start times, two different days

This tour runs at either three in the morning or six, and the choice matters more than anything else about it.

The 3am start gets you to the Taj as the gates open, half an hour before sunrise. Grey marble turning pink turning white, mist on the Yamuna in winter, and a fraction of the crowd. You will be tired. It is the better tour.

The 6am start reaches the monument around half past nine, which is comfortable and normal and shares the site with everybody else's day trip.

The drive

Private air-conditioned car down the Yamuna Expressway, three to four hours with a break.

Taj Mahal

Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died bearing their fourteenth child. Twenty-two years, twenty thousand workers, marble hauled 300 km from Makrana.

Your guide covers the things you would otherwise walk past: calligraphy cut in progressively larger letters so it reads the same height from the ground; pietra dura inlay where one flower can carry sixty stones; four minarets leaning outward so an earthquake would drop them away from the tomb; and the single asymmetry in the whole building — Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, added off-axis by his son.

Breakfast

After the monument rather than before it, which on the early option is the right way round.

Agra Fort

Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565 with Shah Jahan's marble inside it, and the Musamman Burj where Aurangzeb held his father prisoner for eight years with the Taj in view along the river.

Three options

Guide only, for travellers with their own car; private car, driver and guide; or the all-inclusive version with lunch and every entrance fee — around ₹1,950 a head in tickets for a foreign adult.

Practical

About ten hours door to door from the 6am start, longer from the 3am one.

The Taj is closed on Fridays.