India

Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, in that order for me. Those three cities form the tourist circuit known as the golden triangle, and the Taj Mahal, in Agra, sits at its centre. I landed at New Delhi airport before taking to the road. The exit sets the tone straight away: it was 1:30 am, the air still stood at 38°C, and daytime temperatures hover around 47°C. The rest of my stops across the region sit in my travels in Asia and the Middle East. You close the loop in a few days of driving, provided you accept the road as it is. The huge neighbour to the north fills my Chinese travel stories.

Because everything arrives at once. Walking out of New Delhi airport at half past one in the morning, all my senses were overwhelmed with smells, colours and sounds, and the heat was still crushing. On the road near Agra I watched a shepherd push his goats along, a sacred cow standing its ground, a donkey, then a troop of monkeys crossing without warning. Marble and dust, silence and horns: that double register runs right through the marble and the dust of Agra. The same journey holds the Taj Mahal, thirty-five kinds of precious stone set into its walls, and a driving style I compared to a Bollywood version of Fast and Furious 6. The city-state at the other end of the continent is in my Singapore city stops.

For his queen, who died in childbirth while giving birth to his fourteenth child, or his ninth depending on the source. The mourning shows in the garden, where the central canal is lined with cypress trees, the tree that stands for death, a detail I look at closely during my morning at the Taj Mahal. The decoration gives up nothing: up to thirty-five types of precious stone were used in the inlays, and a single flower can hold more than sixty separate pieces. What I had not anticipated was people’s curiosity, and the countless photographs I had to pose for, smiling throughout. The walking pace of the Himalaya waits in my Nepal trekking stories.

Ten minutes flat. That is how long a young woman from the hotel needed to dress me before the visit to the Taj Mahal. The traditional Indian sari I wore for the Taj Mahal measures 5.50 metres in length by 1.10 metres in width, which leaves plenty of fabric to tangle yourself in when you have never tried before. I went to meet the monument wrapped in that orange sari, and I worked out quickly that a foreign visitor dressed this way does not go unnoticed. Ten minutes for five and a half metres of cloth. Other fabrics and other colours were waiting further east, among the lanterns of the Mid Autumn Festival.

The City Palace, the Palace of Winds and Jantar Mantar. Jaipur was founded in 1727 on a grid plan that splits the town into nine squares. The City Palace, also called Chandra Mahal, occupies the central square across seven storeys. The Hawa Mahal, raised in 1799 by Sawai Prapap Singh, lines up five floors, sixty-one airy loggias and nine hundred and fifty-three niches. At the Diwan-i-Khas, two silver jars recall the journey Madho Singh II made to London in 1901: they are said to weigh 2500 kilos and hold 8000 litres. Further north the road gives way to footpaths, as my routes through Nepal show. The city carries the name of its founder Jai Singh II, a keen astronomer and mathematician. From there you climb back out towards the whole continent, country by country.

Like a Bollywood version of Fast and Furious 6: that was my feeling within the first few kilometres, and it is the very subject of my Indian roads in Fast and Furious. One morning I put a few questions to a local man. To overtake a cart, an auto-rickshaw, a lorry, a motorbike, a camel or an elephant, custom says you sound the horn to signal your intention. Horn first, then overtake. The road belongs to everyone: near Agra I saw a shepherd driving his flock of goats, a sacred cow, a donkey, then a band of monkeys crossing over. On another kind of ground the tracks are walked rather than driven, as in the trek to the land of dzos.

Sikandra, the Red Fort and Fatehpur Sikri. Sikandra, home to the mausoleum of Sikandar Lodi, lies 8 kilometres north of Agra; the monument stands 22 metres high, begun under emperor Akbar between 1556 and 1605 and finished by his son Jahangir in 1613. Gazelles and peacocks live in the park around it. The Red Fort of Agra, built from 1565 to 1574 by Akbar, raises crenellated red sandstone walls 20 metres high, and a maharaja, Amar Singh, was executed there in 1644: those two stops fill my day from Sikandra to Agra fort. Fatehpur Sikri, the imperial city, was abandoned fourteen years after it was completed. The forts of the Gulf are in my escapes across the Sultanate of Oman.