Jaipur: Explore Royal Sites and Historic Science + Pickup

Royal buildings and one of the strangest scientific sites anywhere

The day pairs the forts and palaces with Jantar Mantar, which is the part most tours rush and which is genuinely extraordinary once someone explains it.

Panna Meena ka Kund

First, before Amber. A 16th-century stepwell with criss-crossing symmetrical staircases dropping eight storeys to the water, built so the village could reach it in any season. Several degrees cooler at the bottom, and almost always empty because the coaches skip it.

Amber Fort

The hilltop complex above Maota Lake, begun 1592 by Raja Man Singh. The painted Ganesh Pol gateway, the Sheesh Mahal with its ceiling of mirror fragments, the water-cooled Sukh Niwas, and the zenana courtyard with its twelve separate apartments.

Jal Mahal

A photo stop from the causeway. Four of five storeys underwater, no entry.

Hawa Mahal

The 953-window facade of 1799, built as a screen so the women of the court could watch the street unseen. Best from the pavement opposite.

Jantar Mantar

The reason to book this particular day.

Jai Singh II was an astronomer who happened to found cities. Between 1728 and 1734 he built nineteen masonry instruments here, and they work.

The Samrat Yantra is a 27-metre sundial whose shadow moves 6 cm a minute — you can watch time pass — and it is accurate to about two seconds. The Jai Prakash Yantra is a pair of hemispherical bowls sunk into the ground, marked to map the position of the sun. The twelve Rashivalaya instruments each align to a zodiac sign and can only be used when that sign crosses the meridian.

Jai Singh built them because he did not trust the brass instruments of the day: bigger meant finer gradations, and stone did not warp. He was right, and they are still the largest of their kind in the world.

Practical

Eight hours with hotel pickup. Entrance fees paid at each site, around ₹1,500 a head for a foreign adult.