Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh is where most people's India begins, and it rewards patience — go slowly or the scale of it will flatten you. The Taj deserves the cliché and rewards the early alarm. Be at the gate before it opens, walk past the bench everyone photographs, and give the building twenty minutes before the buses arrive. It is shut on Fridays. Then cross to Agra Fort and find the octagonal tower where Shah Jahan spent his last years looking downriver at it. Fatehpur Sikri, an hour out, is the more interesting place and half as busy — a complete imperial capital abandoned within fifteen years of being finished, most likely for want of water. Varanasi is the reason to keep going east. Take a boat at first light, when the ghats are washing and burning and nobody is selling you anything, and skip the evening aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat unless crowds are what you came for. Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, is ten kilometres out of the city and almost silent by comparison. Lucknow is the stop people cut and shouldn't. A slower city, better food than either Agra or Varanasi, and the Bara Imambara, whose upper floor is a deliberate maze of blind corridors.