Delhi: Mathura and Vrindavan Day Trip with Lunch

Krishna's birthplace and boyhood country

Mathura is 180 km south of Delhi and Vrindavan another 11 km on. Together they are among the most visited pilgrimage towns in India, and they are a completely different experience from Delhi's monuments — these are working religious towns, not sites.

Mathura

Hindus hold that Krishna was born here, in a prison cell where his parents were held by King Kansa. The cell is beneath the Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi temple complex.

Security there is the strictest you will meet in India: no phones, no cameras, no bags, sometimes no belts. Leave everything in the car — there is no cloakroom worth trusting and arguing at the gate achieves nothing.

Dwarkadhish Temple, built in 1814, is Mathura's principal working temple, with painted ceilings and swinging deities in festival season.

Vishram Ghat on the Yamuna is where Krishna is said to have rested after killing Kansa. Turtles in the water, and an aarti at dusk.

Vrindavan

Where Krishna is said to have grown up, and a town of several thousand temples.

Banke Bihari is the one that matters most to devotees — 1860s, packed, and with a curtain drawn across the deity every few minutes by tradition, so that nobody holds his gaze too long.

Prem Mandir, finished in 2012 in Italian marble and lit in shifting colour after dark. ISKCON's Krishna Balaram temple, which is where most foreign visitors end up and where the kirtan runs all day.

Practical

Both towns are strictly vegetarian and alcohol-free. Shoes come off at every temple and the stone gets hot from April onward — carry socks.

The monkeys in Vrindavan take spectacles and phones, genuinely and often. Hold them.

Widows have come to Vrindavan to live out their lives for centuries and you will see them. It is a real place, not a set.

Three options

Transport only; transport with lunch; or car, lunch and a guide. Take the guide — the iconography needs explaining.