About India Tours

If you’ve come to India to see incomparably exotic scenery, pilgrims bathing in glassy rivers, and giant temple towers writhing with sensuous statues and scampering monkeys, look no further than Hampi, the ruined capital of India’s last great Hindu empire.

On the outskirts of the city stand the imposing remains of the Qtub Shahi dynasty’s magnificent fort, whose vaults once held the famous ‘Kohinoor’ diamond.

Venture deep into the interior of southern Orissa whose forests are home to more than sixty indigenous minorities. Weekly markets provide an opportunity to see them dressed in their traditional finery.

Buried under a sand dune until its re-discovery by British archeologists in 1901, the UNESCO-listed Sun Temple at Konark ranks among the crowning glories of Hindu architecture.

Mountainous Nagaland, on the border with Myanmar (Burma), is the homeland of fourteen distinct ethnic groups whose way of life, famed above all for the now defunct tradition of “head hunting”, is fast disappearing.

Arunachal Pradesh, literally “Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountain”, is one of India’s last unspoilt regions, and the Tawang Valley in its southeastern corner a veritable Shangri La of snow peaks and picture-book Buddhist monasteries.

Vintage steam locomotives, in traditional blue and black livery, are the star attractions of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which winds 88km from the plains of Bengal to East India’s most famous hill station.

Springboard for Sikkim and the northeastern Himalaya, Darjeeling’s ramshackle skyline of tin-roofed bazaars and Raj-era hotels enjoys one of Asia’s most sublime backdrops: the eternal snows of the world’s third-highest mountain, Kanchenjunga.

A campus of giant 15th- and 16th-century churches are the only structures surviving from the metropolis of over 300,000 people that once soared above the palm canopy at ‘Old Goa’.

Unwind on Goa’s beautiful sandy beaches, to a backdrop of churning surf, palms and leaf shacks where you can order fish straight off the boats.

Hewn from solid basalt, the rock-cut archeological sites of Ellora and Ajanta in Maharashtra rank among the greatest achievements of Indian civilization, providing a vivid window on a lost world.

India’s tigers tend to grab the headlines, but numbers of the stately Asiatic lion are even more fragile. The only place to see them is a remote sanctuary on the Saurashtran peninsula of Gujarat.