After bidding Agra farewell, we embarked on the “long road to Ranthambore”. If six hours of bumping along dusty roads on a bus doesn’t give you a hefty serving of perspective then nothing will. Travelling in India is oftentimes a strange experience, it’s not always easy to embrace the holiday feeling when your purported “luxury travel” experience is so far removed from the day-to-day of small roadside villages, the lives that are glimpsed through a window briefly.Our first stop was the abandoned city of Fatepur Sikri, the once-capital of the Mughal Empire was a thriving fortress until it was abandoned in 1610. It’s still pretty much in-tact and provided ample stretching of legs before continuing our journey. “I am all fort-ed out” I told my mother – forgetting the above regarding perspective and being bloody well lucky enough to be galavanting around a new country just for the fun of it.

We stopped again for lunch at Laxmi Villas Palace, the opulence again strangely jarring against the villages we had driven through earlier in the day.

We arrived at the Sawai Madhopur Lodge in time for dinner. This was my favourite of all the places we stayed. HRH Queen Elizabeth herself once stayed here (albeit in the 1970s), continuing our Royal theme from New Delhi. The low-rise lodge felt at once like Out of Africa and a sixth form common room (not that my sixth form common room had tiger taxidermy, mind). The staff were so lovely, the bar stocked my new favourite “Blue Riband” gin and the paneer curry at dinner was delish.

Bright and early the next morning, we headed on our first game drive. The lodge had laid out a spread of tea, coffee and cakes with breakfast promised on our return. Warning – the drive is a little bumpy and there are no bathrooms on safari, so partake at your own risk! Mornings are chilly so wear the warmest item you have packed, preferably supplemented with a sarong-as-headscarf to avoid the dust.

We sadly did not see any tigers but I loved the peace and quiet of the national park and watching the sky get lighter and feeling a new day unfolding. Arriving back in time for a very late breakfast, the rest of the time in Ranthambore was spent relaxing at the lodge in anticipation of another day of moving on, this time to Jaipur…