Bundi Travel Guide

Bundi is the Rajasthan town the tour buses forgot. It sits in a gap in the Aravalli ridges south of Jaipur, a compact old city of blue-washed houses and havelis climbing a slope to the Garh Palace, which is not one building but a stack of them piled up the hill by successive Hada Chauhan rulers from the 16th century, with the Taragarh fort on the summit above. Kipling stayed here in 1887 and wrote that the palace was the work of goblins rather than men. He was not far wrong; from the lake below, it looks like it grew.

It is about 470 km from Delhi, 8 to 9 hours via Jaipur and Tonk or a little less on the expressway to the Kota side, and it is what Jaipur and Udaipur would be without the crowds: a working town of perhaps 100,000 with one main bazaar, a lake in the middle, guesthouses in old havelis, and a heritage that most of Rajasthan's visitors have never heard of. The Chitrashala in the palace has the best surviving murals of the Bundi school, painted in the 18th century in greens and blues that nobody else used. Raniji ki Baori, a 46-metre stepwell built by a queen in 1699, is the most beautiful in the state. The Nagar Sagar twin kunds, the Dabhai Kund and a dozen smaller baoris make Bundi the stepwell capital of India, and the town is slowly restoring them.

Around it, the Chaurasi Khambon ki Chhatri, an 84-pillared cenotaph in the fields to the south; the Sukh Mahal on Jait Sagar where Kipling slept; the Bhimlat waterfall and the Menal temples an hour's ride into the hills; and the Ramgarh Vishdhari tiger reserve, notified in 2022, with a growing population of tigers spilled over from Ranthambore. Kota, 35 km away, has the Chambal and the Kishore Sagar palace and is otherwise a coaching town.

Bundi suits people who have done the big Rajasthan cities and want one that is still itself, photographers, stepwell enthusiasts, motorcyclists who want the Hadoti roads, and anyone who likes a town where the guesthouse owner walks you to the palace and the palace has six other people in it. It suits nobody in May, when it is 44 degrees, and nobody who needs a shopping arcade.

My take: come in December, stay in a haveli below the palace, do the Chitrashala first thing in the morning before anything else because it closes early and I learned that the hard way, climb to Taragarh for the sunset with a stick for the monkeys, sit in Raniji ki Baori at dawn, and ride out to Menal. Bundi is the best-kept secret in Rajasthan and I am ambivalent about telling you.