From Delhi: Private Taj Mahal & Agra Tour by Choice of Car

You pick the car, which matters on a twelve-hour day

Sedan, SUV, luxury sedan (Mercedes or BMW) or luxury SUV (Vellfire or Vianna). For two people a sedan is fine; for four with luggage it is not, and for anyone over about six foot the SUV is the difference between a long day and an uncomfortable one.

Pickup from anywhere in Delhi NCR — hotel, airport, Noida, Gurugram, Ghaziabad or Faridabad.

The drive

The Yamuna Expressway, a six-lane toll road opened in 2012 and the reason a Taj day trip from Delhi is possible at all. Three to three and a half hours with a break.

Taj Mahal

Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died bearing their fourteenth child. Twenty thousand workers, twenty-two years, and white marble hauled 400 km from Makrana in Rajasthan.

Your guide covers the calligraphy cut in progressively larger letters so that from the ground every line reads the same height; the pietra dura inlay, where one flower can hold sixty separate stones; the four minarets, tilted fractionally outward so that an earthquake would drop them away from the tomb; and the illusion at the gateway, where the building appears to shrink as you walk toward it.

And the one deliberate break in the symmetry: Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, placed off the central axis beside his wife's by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort

Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565 with Shah Jahan's marble palaces inside — the Diwan-i-Am, the Khas Mahal, the Sheesh Mahal — and the Musamman Burj, the octagonal tower where Aurangzeb imprisoned his father for the last eight years of his life, the Taj visible along the river.

Lunch

At a five-star hotel on every option.

Practical

Around seven hours in Agra plus the road. The Taj is closed on Fridays.

The last stretch to the monument is on foot or by electric vehicle — private cars stop outside the pollution exclusion zone, whatever you are driving.