Tigers & Rhinos: Ranthambore to Kaziranga

South-west to Jaipur, founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II and laid out on a grid of broad streets inside its walls, the old city washed in the pink that gives it its name. The rest of the day is yours for the bazaars: block-printed cotton, blue pottery, silver, and the lac bangles made in the lanes of the old city.

South-east to Ranthambore and your hotel at the edge of the national park. In the afternoon, up to Ranthambore Fort on its rock inside the park: walls, gates, temples and stepwells left to the forest, with the Ganesh temple still drawing pilgrims, and the lakes and jungle spread out below. The road up runs through the forest, and sambar and langurs are often beside it. The fort is a World Heritage Site, one of the Hill Forts of Rajasthan.

North-east to Bharatpur, and in the afternoon Keoladeo National Park, a World Heritage Site: a freshwater marsh made by the maharajas of Bharatpur for their duck shoots, and now one of the great bird reserves of Asia. You go round it on foot or by cycle-rickshaw, and the rickshaw men are often as good at finding birds as the guides.

Painted storks, spoonbills, herons, egrets, cormorants and darters live on the marsh, sarus cranes stalk the edges, and from about October to March the migrant ducks and geese arrive from Central Asia and beyond, and the marsh is at its fullest and noisiest.

A morning train south to Jhansi, and a short drive to Orchha on the Betwa, the capital of the Bundela kings, who built its palaces and temples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See the Raja Mahal and the Jahangir Mahal on the fort island, the small Rai Praveen Mahal, built for a poet and dancer of the court, and the Ram Raja temple, where Rama is worshipped not as a god in a temple but as a king in his palace, and the state police salute him every day. Then on through the Bundelkhand country to Khajuraho for the night.

Two jeep safaris, morning and afternoon, in Bandhavgarh National Park: sal forest, bamboo and grassy meadows below a flat-topped hill crowned by an old fort. The story is that Rama gave the fort to his brother Lakshmana to keep watch over Lanka, hence its name, the brother’s fort, and below it lies a great stone figure of Vishnu reclining on the serpent Shesha.

Bandhavgarh has been famous for its tigers for decades, but no sighting is ever promised. Watch too for leopard, sloth bear, jackal, dhole, gaur, sambar, chital, nilgai, chinkara and the four-horned antelope, and for langurs and rhesus macaques in the trees. There are no safaris on Wednesday afternoons.

Morning and afternoon jeep safaris through Kanha National Park: tall sal forest broken by open meadows, the maidans, where the herds of barasingha and chital graze. Tigers live here too, though as everywhere none is ever promised.

The birds are a delight in their own right: the Indian roller, the white-breasted kingfisher and, by the streams, the stork-billed kingfisher; the racket-tailed drongo, the crested serpent eagle, hawk eagles, grey hornbills, black ibis, peafowl, parakeets and babblers. There are no safaris on Wednesday afternoons.

A morning flight to Guwahati on the Brahmaputra, and the drive east along the valley to Kaziranga National Park, through rice fields and tea gardens, with the Karbi hills to the south. Sometimes the first rhino of the journey is already in sight from the road, grazing in the grass at the edge of the park.

Kaziranga lies on the floodplain of the Brahmaputra, a country of tall elephant grass, marshes and patches of forest that floods each monsoon. It is home to about two-thirds of the world’s one-horned rhinoceroses, and to wild elephants, wild water buffalo, eastern swamp deer and tigers, and it has been a World Heritage Site since 1985.

A jeep safari in the Eastern Range at Agaratoli, the best part of the park for birds: Pallas’s fish eagle nests here, and there is a colony of spot-billed pelicans. In winter the migrant waterfowl gather on Sohola Beel, and the track runs through swamp forest of dillenia trees. Elephants, wild buffalo and swamp deer are often seen. Back to the lodge for lunch, then a last jeep safari in the Central Range as the light goes gold over the grass.