We went on a two week organised tour of India over Christmas covering many of the most popular tourist destinations and travelling between them either by air-conditioned coach or plane. This was Kuoni's Taj & Rajasthan tour from their Kuoni Three brochure. We have shown the route we took on this map.

We started with a week touring the popular “Golden Triangle” of Delhi, Jaipur and Agra with 34 people in our group. This dropped to just 12 people for the second week which was an optional extension touring India’s Rajasthan region and finishing in Bombay.

We were met, on our arrival in India, with quite a reception. As we left the plane and headed towards immigration, our path was lined with flower petals and the closer we got the more flowery it became. As we descended towards passport control we saw a crowd of photographers and camera men with an aisle of women in traditional Indian costumes leading towards them. We thought we had arrived during the reception of some dignitary but we soon found out that this reception was actually for us! A banner on the wall said: “India Welcomes Two Millionth Tourist”. A flower garland was placed on each of us and, as we walked down the aisle, the women threw petals over us and painted a red mark on our foreheads. There were a couple of important looking people ahead of us welcoming each visitor but just before we got to them the cameras all went off as apparently the actual 2,000,000th tourist crossed the line and was presented with an enormous pile of gifts. When the excitement died down we were presented with some consolation gifts for being the 2,000,003rd and 2,000,004th tourists.

The tour was quite tiring. We visited an awful lot of places and did a lot of travelling around between towns often requiring early starts and some very late nights and of course with moving hotels almost every other day we seemed to be forever packing and unpacking. Our memory of the holiday was actually quite a blur until we got back and, in preparation for writing this report, we had to read our diaries and look through the mass of photographs and hours of video that we took while we were there. Anyway, here's a quick run down of where we went and the places we visited on our tour:

In Delhi we had a tour of the old and new cities and also visited the Jama Masjid Mosque, the Red Fort, the Mahatma Ghandi Museum (where he was assassinated), Humayan's Tomb (the building many people think the Taj Mahal was modelled on), Qtub Minar and the National Museum.

In Jaipur (the Pink City - so called because all of the buildings are painted pink!) we visited Hawa Mahal (The Palace of the Winds), the Amber Fort (where we had a ride on an elephant), the Royal Observatory (home of the largest and most accurate sundial in the world!) and the City Palace.

In Agra we visited the Taj Mahal (twice! - see later), the Agra Fort, Itmud Ud Daulah (also known as the Baby Taj) and the nearby deserted city of Fatehpur Sikri - an ancient capital that was abandoned when the water supply dried up.

The Palace Of The Winds (Hawa Mahal), Jaipur © Kuoni

In Jodhpur we visited the Mehrangarh Fort and Jaswant Thada Cenotaph.

In Jaisalmer we visited the Folklore Museum, the Fort (with its tightly packed city inside), the City Palace, a Jain Temple, a couple of Havelis- the ornate palaces that the wealthy traders used to live in - now just a front for selling "genuine" antiques (probably made a few weeks ago!) and Bada Bagh - the cremation grounds of Jaisalmer's past rulers.

In Udaipur we visited the City Palace, Sahelion Ki Bari gardens & Nehru Park - a lake island for which we paid the princely sum of 3 Rupees each (about 6p) for entrance including the return boat fare!

In Bombay we had a tour around the city (which was very different to Delhi - much more like a western city which is surprising considering Delhi is the capital) and also visited the Dhobi Ghats (where the city's laundry is washed by hand), the Adishwarji Jain temple, the Kamala Nehru children's park (with an excellent view of the bay), the Hanging Gardens (which is really a park built on top of a covered reservoir), a very quick whiz around the Prince Of Wales Museum & the Mahatma Ghandi Museum (which was almost identical to the one we saw in Delhi!).

We also had plenty of opportunities to wander around on our own, off the tourist trail, in most of these places (particularly in Delhi, Udaipur and Bombay) where we got a better insight into the real India and met some of the local people.