Kanyakumari to Kashmir: The Grand Trunk

Fly into Thiruvananthapuram and drive ninety kilometres south, about two and a half hours, to the point where the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean meet. Evening at the shore for sunset, with the Vivekananda Rock Memorial and the forty-one-metre Thiruvalluvar statue standing offshore on their two rocks, and the lighthouse turning behind you.

Up in the dark for sunrise over the Bay of Bengal from the same shore that took the sun last night, which is the whole trick of this place. Breakfast, then 250 kilometres north through Nagercoil and Tirunelveli, about five hours across the dry southern plain. Reach Madurai for the evening palliyarai ceremony, when Sundareswarar is carried in a palanquin to Meenakshi's chamber and the temple shuts for the night.

The temple at first opening, when the corridors are cool and the fourteen gopurams are catching flat light, the tallest of them fifty-two metres of painted stucco. The Thousand Pillar Hall, the golden lotus tank, then Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal of 1636, whose surviving quarter is still a colonnade of twenty-metre columns. Afternoon at the Gandhi Memorial Museum, which holds the dhoti he was wearing when he was shot.

A morning flight north with a connection at Bengaluru, then 160 kilometres by road from Hubballi, about three hours, and the landscape does something strange on the way: the fields give out and a plain of granite boulders begins, piled as if they had been tipped there. Arrive at Hampi in time for the evening lamps at Virupaksha, which has been in continuous worship since the seventh century.

A full day among the ruins of Vijayanagara, a city of half a million people that Portuguese traders thought the equal of Rome, taken in 1565 after the battle of Talikota and abandoned rather than rebuilt. The Vitthala complex with its stone chariot and its ringing granite columns, the royal enclosure, the Lotus Mahal and the elephant stables, and Matanga Hill at sunset over the whole boulder plain.

Back to Hubballi and an hour and twenty minutes in the air to Hyderabad, a city that was the richest princely state in India and still eats like it. Evening at Charminar, built in 1591 at the crossing of the old city's four roads, and then the bangle sellers of Laad Bazaar around it, followed by the courtyards of the Chowmahalla Palace and a first plate of Hyderabadi biryani.

Golconda Fort in the morning, where a hand clapped at the Fateh Darwaza gate can be heard a kilometre away at the summit pavilion, an acoustic warning system the Qutb Shahis built into the geometry. Then the necropolis below it, seven generations of that dynasty under grey granite domes in a walled garden. Afternoon at the Salar Jung Museum, one man's collection of forty-three thousand objects.

The one long transfer of the journey: a morning flight to Delhi and a connection down to Khajuraho, which puts you in a village of temples by mid-afternoon instead of two days on the Nagpur road. Evening at the Western Group, the largest and best preserved of the three, with the light going gold on a thousand years of sandstone, and the sound-and-light show afterwards if you want it.

Twenty-five temples survive of the eighty-five the Chandelas built between 950 and 1050, and they are worth a whole day. Kandariya Mahadeva first, thirty-one metres of shikhara rising in 84 subsidiary spires and carrying some 870 figures; then Lakshmana and Vishvanatha, the Jain Parshvanatha in the Eastern Group, and Duladeo out to the south. Afternoon at Raneh Falls, a hundred-foot canyon of pink and grey granite.

One hundred and seventy-five kilometres west through Chhatarpur, about four hours, to Orchha on the Betwa, a Bundela capital of 1531 that was simply left when the court moved and so is a sixteenth-century town rather than a sixteenth-century monument. Jahangir Mahal and the Raja Mahal murals in the afternoon, the fourteen chhatris along the river at sunset, and the evening aarti at Ram Raja, the only place in India where Rama is worshipped as a king.

Two hundred and forty kilometres north, about six hours, with the long stop at Gwalior: the fort on its sandstone plateau that Babur called the pearl among the fortresses of Hind, Man Singh Palace with its blue and yellow tilework, and the eleventh-century Sas-Bahu temples on the eastern rim. On to Agra in the evening, and a first look at the Taj across the river from Mehtab Bagh if the light holds.

At the east gate before sunrise for two unhurried hours, while the marble moves from grey to rose to white and the pietra dura inlay begins to catch. Breakfast, then Agra Fort and the Musamman Burj where Shah Jahan spent his last eight years looking downriver at what he had built. Late afternoon at Itmad-ud-Daulah, the tomb Nur Jahan finished in 1628 and the first Mughal building faced entirely in marble.

Two hundred and thirty-three kilometres on the Yamuna Expressway, about three and a half hours, arriving in Delhi for lunch. Afternoon at Humayun's Tomb, the 1570 garden tomb that set the pattern the Taj would perfect eighty years later, and which reads very differently when you have just come from Agra. On Thursdays, qawwali at Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah after sunset.

Delhi is at least seven cities stacked on one plain and this is the day to feel that. Morning at Qutb Minar and the Mehrauli Archaeological Park, the oldest layer; then Shahjahanabad, with Jama Masjid's courtyard and a cycle-rickshaw through Chandni Chowk for parathas and jalebi. Late afternoon along Kartavya Path and India Gate, the last capital of all, built by the Raj and inherited by the republic.

North-west up the line of the Grand Trunk Road itself, by air in an hour and ten minutes rather than the six hours it takes on the ground. Late afternoon out at the Attari-Wagah crossing for the retreat ceremony, where the two border forces have been raising their knees to their foreheads at each other since 1959. Back into the city after dark for the Golden Temple lit and doubled in its tank.

Before dawn for the palki sahib, when the Guru Granth Sahib is carried from the Akal Takht into the sanctum and the day's first kirtan begins. Breakfast in the Guru ka Langar, whose kitchen feeds around a hundred thousand people a day for nothing and runs on volunteers rolling roti by hand. Afternoon at Jallianwala Bagh and the Partition Museum, which are the reason the rest of this needs no explanation.

The last flight of the journey, north over the Pir Panjal and into the Kashmir valley, about four hours door to door with the Delhi connection. Onto a cedar houseboat on Dal or Nigeen, most of them built in the first decades of the twentieth century when the maharaja would not sell land to the British. A shikara out through the floating gardens in the last light, and wazwan on board.

Out at first light for the floating vegetable market, which trades boat to boat and is over by seven. Then the Mughal gardens on the eastern shore, Nishat of 1633 and Shalimar of 1619, terraced up the hill under chinars that Jahangir's gardeners planted, and an hour in the old city among the papier-mache and sozni workshops. Airport in the afternoon, three and a half thousand kilometres from where you started.