Jaipur is not a hard city to move around, but it is easy to move around inefficiently, and the way people lose time here is nearly always the same: treating it as one place when it is functionally two.
The eleven kilometres that shape everything
The walled city, with the City Palace, Jantar Mantar, Hawa Mahal and the bazaars, is compact enough to cross on foot. The forts are about eleven kilometres north, on a road that carries a lot of traffic.
Do those two clusters on separate days and you make the journey twice, once each way. Interleave them and you can easily make it four times, in the worst traffic of the day, for no gain. This is the single decision that determines how much of your time is spent in a vehicle.
The walled city: walk it
Jaipur’s old city was laid out in the eighteenth century as a planned grid, with wide straight main streets meeting at right angles. That is unusual, and it makes the place far easier to navigate on foot than an organically grown old town.
The main sites here are close together. Taking a vehicle between them means negotiating traffic and parking for a distance you could have covered in ten minutes, and you miss the streets themselves, which are a large part of what the walled city is for.
Wear shoes you can walk several kilometres in. The surfaces are uneven and you will cover more ground than you expect.
The fort day: car and driver
This is the day that justifies the expense. You have real distance to cover, several stops, a hill road, and a sunset appointment at Nahargarh that you do not want to be arranging transport for in fading light.
Hiring a car with a driver for the day is standard and straightforward to arrange through a hotel. The value is not comfort so much as not having to solve the transport problem four separate times while also watching the clock.
Go early. Traffic on that road builds through the late morning, and the early start also gets you into Amber before the stone heats up.
Autorickshaws and apps
For short hops, an autorickshaw is the obvious choice and is what most people use. The complication for visitors is the fare, which is negotiated before you set off and which is a skill in itself.
Ride-hailing apps operate in Jaipur and, in many cases, cover autos as well as cars. They fix the price in advance and remove the negotiation entirely. On a first visit that is usually worth more than any saving a good negotiation would have produced.
If you do negotiate, do it before getting in, and have a rough idea of the distance first.
A note on the cycle rickshaws
Cycle rickshaws still work parts of the old city and are pleasant for very short distances at low speed. They are not a way to cross the city, and pricing is entirely by negotiation.
The shape that works
- Fort day. Car and driver, out early, back after sunset.
- Old city day. An auto or a car to the City Palace in the morning, then on foot until the evening, then an auto back.
- Anything else. App, or an auto with the fare agreed first.
Planning around it
The two-day itinerary is built on this split. For how you get to Jaipur in the first place, the Delhi to Jaipur options compare the realistic routes.
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