Rajasthan For Families: What You Need To Know (And Book)

India rarely tops the list for travel with small children, and that is a mistake. Rajasthan for families is magical: from tiger safaris and palace forts to train rides and craft afternoons, this is a state built for the age when everything is still astonishing, and Red Dot makes it far easier to travel than most parents expect.

There is a short window, before a child grows out of it, when a peacock walking along a fort wall is reason enough to stop the car, and a room lined with thousands of tiny mirrors will hold them for an hour. Travelling to Rajasthan with Red Dot presents wonders for exactly that age: a tiger stepping onto the track in front of the jeep, the old city of Jaipur from the back of a pink rickshaw, a thousand birds lifting off a lake at first light. 

Most children get to know about kings and palaces in storybooks. Here they walk straight into the real ones, at the age when it still feels like magic, almost fairytale-like rather than history. They will not remember the dates or the dynasties but they will remember stamping a wooden block onto cloth, seeing kites fly, or experiencing a real bazaar overflowing with colours and textures. The days here are made for experiences – from the cooking class in a courtyard to the stepwell lit by hundreds of candles after dark.

In partnership with Red Dot Tours

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And it is far easier than most parents fear. The old idea of India as hard going with young children is well out of date. The roads and railways are excellent, and a whole generation of luxury hotels, homestays and family-run havelis are there to welcome children. 

You can explore it all at peace with Red Dot Tours, the India specialists, who handle every leg with a private driver and guide, car seats where you need them, a snack stop when a small person demands one, and someone who knows which palace has a courtyard worth running in. Much of the best of Rajasthan happens through people rather than tickets: the village cooking lesson, the phad painter, the afternoon of jewellery making, none of it bookable online. It comes through Red Dot’s people on the ground. The only real decision left is where to begin.

What to do in Rajasthan: The best family-friendly activities 

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The Sensory List

Start in Jaipur as the city wakes up, with a ride through the streets in a tuk-tuk driven by the women of the Pink City Rickshaw Company, who train and employ women from the city’s more deprived households, giving them a stable income. The route winds through the old town to a small temple, then a roadside chai stall where the glasses come out scalding and sweet, and finally the wholesale flower market, where children can stand in the middle of mountains of marigolds and have a garland threaded onto their wrist while the traders shout prices over their heads.

Another morning belongs to the bazaars on foot, watching a man hammer silver into a bangle and another bend molten lac over a flame, the whole street smelling of marigold and freshly fried sweets. Kids can spend the afternoon dressing-up in local outfits: saris, lehengas and small sherwanis with bangles and a bindi, photographs taken against a painted wall, looking like a Rajasthani prince and princess. At Dera Mandawa, the family-run haveli at the edge of the old city, children can roll out dough for a cooking class in the courtyard, or fly traditional kites from the rooftop (parents, this is your chance for a cold drink on the terrace). 

On the road east towards Ranthambore, stop at Chand Baori in Abhaneri. It is a ninth-century stepwell that drops thirteen storeys into the ground in three and a half thousand steps, all of them in perfect symmetry, an Escher drawing in pale sandstone that runs five degrees cooler at the bottom than the top. Awestruck, children usually go quiet at the lip of it – and stay quiet all the way down, soaking in the art and the architecture. 

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Closer to the Aravalli foothills, Dev Shree arranges a morning on the metre-gauge train the locals call the Monkey Train, an experience that Red Dot books end-to-end so you simply step aboard: an hour through scrub jungle and stone tunnels and across narrow bridges to Goram Ghat, where the resident monkeys often come down the moment the train slows.

For a closer look at village life, Ramathra Fort stands on a hilltop above Kalisil Lake, which still has members of the family who built it in 1645 living on the premises. They walk you down into the farming hamlet below, where the guide will fold your children into whatever game is already underway, usually a cricket match. 

Stay: Samode Haveli, Dera Mandawa, Niravi or Dera Rawatsar (Jaipur); Dev Shree (Deogarh); Ramathra Fort (Karauli)

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For Little Hands and Hearts

There is craft in every corner of Rajasthan, and Nila House in Jaipur is a great place to start. Located on one of the city’s quieter streets, it is part museum, part working dye house. It was founded by Lady Carole Bamford and designed by Bijoy Jain, and indigo runs through all of it (nila is Sanskrit for blue). The children’s session showcases the entire process: they crush the leaves between their fingers, lean over a vat that smells of earth and something faintly sour, dip in a folded square of white cloth, lift it out, and then stand holding it in the air and watchingwith awe as it turns blue before their eyes. Parents can browse the textile vault while the indigo magic does its work.

For something a little more historic, Shahpura Bagh lies three hours out of Jaipur, a forty-five-acre estate of orchards and lakes still run by the family who have held the land for generations. Phad, the Rajasthani scroll-painting tradition, was born in this town in 1629 and has been practised by the same family here for nine generations. The painter unrolls a finished scroll across the floor and takes the children into it figure by figure, a blue god here, a galloping horse there, a battle along the bottom edge, until it stops being a painting and turns into a story-telling session. It is followed by the artist teaching them to paint a small one of their own to carry home. At Dev Shree in Deogarh there is a Mewari cooking class, meeting children as they walk to school, and tea in a local home, but it is the jewellery-making that children dream about. 

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At Ramathra Fort, children are gently guided by the village women to one of their homes for a lesson at the chulha, the wood-fired clay stove that breathes smoke and glows orange in the dim kitchen. Small hands shape the dough, slap the roti from palm to palm, scoop the dal, and then everyone sits on the floor together and eats what the children have made. It’s an experience unlike any other, brought to life by the on-ground team members of Red Dot who choose every aspect with care to create an evening that families will talk about long after they are home.

Near Sariska, the village of Tehla is worth a morning’s walk to the silk-carpet weavers and the traditional shoemakers, two crafts holding on against the odds. A weaver will help children sit at the great wooden loom, showing them how it swallows the thread, before handing over the shuttle to let them get a first-hand experience of patterns and colours.

Stay: Samode Haveli or Dera Mandawa (Jaipur); Shahpura Bagh (Shahpura); Dev Shree (Deogarh); Ramathra Fort (Ramathra); Sariska Lodge or Utsav Safari Camp (Tehla)

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Go Wild On Safari

Ask a child what they remember about Rajasthan and there’s a high chance wildlife will be included. It could be the morning a tiger stepped out of the tree cover and crossed the track in front of the jeep, close enough to hear it breathe, and a small jeep-full of people forgot how to speak. The state has tigers, leopards, sloth bears, crocodiles and some of the densest birdlife in India, and the sightings are real, not promised, especially with the right person reading the jungle for you. That’s where Red Dot comes in: the naturalists they put you with grew up in these hills, know the alarm calls and the pug marks and the favourite trees, and turn a drive that could be an hour of empty scrub into the morning your children never stop talking about.

For a family set on tigers, Ranthambore is the obvious place, one of India’s great reserves. Stay at Khem Villas, the eco-lodge raised over thirty years on twenty-five acres of reclaimed land at the park’s edge by the son of the man who saved Ranthambore’s tigers in the 1970s. The grasslands hold jackals and jungle cats and the odd crocodile; children spend their mornings out on game drives and their afternoons trailing the resident cows around the property.

If you want something quieter and unique, the granite hills of Jawai are home to leopards that live not in a reserve but out in the open, alongside the Rabari herdsmen who have shared the land with them for generations. The Rabari hold the cats sacred and the leopards keep their distance, and the balance has held for as long as anyone remembers. Stay at SUJAN Jawai Camp, where children can join the Young Rangers Programme, with a junior uniform, a book of birds and mammals, an observation list to fill in and a certificate at the end. They spend their days tracking with the experts and walking with the Rabari, who know each leopard by the markings on its coat and tell them apart easily, sometimes with special names. 

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For families drawn to the desert, Kaner Retreat sits in Thar, India’s first desert botanical resort: seven acres beside a sacred grove, with each villa modelled on a different desert plant. The wildlife here is the land itself. The Raika, the camel-herding people who believe Shiva gave them the duty of guarding the animal, sit with the family for an hour on the lore of the camel and then lead everyone out for a ride as the light turns long and gold. After dark a storyteller comes out onto the dunes and joins the stars into shapes with old Rajasthani folk tales, a hunter here, a deer there, while the children lie back in the sand and find them one by one.

And for the gentlest safari, ideal for families who want to avoid longer drives, Sariska in the Aravallis is home to one of the great recent conservation stories. The reserve lost every last tiger to poaching by 2004, and four years later became the site of the world’s first tiger reintroduction. A morning out on foot with a tracker turns up leopards, mostly, and now and then a sloth bear shouldering through the scrub. This is the softest of the four, and somehow the one most likely to surprise you.

Stay: Khem Villas or Sherbagh (Ranthambore); SUJAN Jawai Camp or Bera Safari Lodge (Jawai); Kaner Retreat (Thar); Sariska Lodge or Utsav Safari Camp (Sariska)

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Once Bath Time Is Done

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Slow Days … And Stays

Some days on a Rajasthan trip aren’t about getting anywhere at all. The car stays parked, the itinerary goes quiet, and the hours stretch out the way they only seem to in childhood: a whole morning spent watching a kingfisher work a lake, an afternoon that disappears into a game no adult quite understands. Red Dot builds these days in on purpose, because they know a family holiday isn’t only about what you see. It’s about the long unhurried stretches where everyone is finally in the same place with nowhere to be, and the children have you all to themselves.

Dev Shree, in Deogarh at the heart of the Aravallis, is built to be lingered in. The seven-suite homestay is the family home of Shatrunjai Singh Chundawat and his wife Bhavna, who are in residence and run it themselves, so the place has the unhurried feel of staying with friends who happen to own a small palace. There is a pool, a long shaded verandah where the afternoon heat is kept at bay by slow ceiling fans, and a garden that children often claim as their own kingdom by the second day. Cycle rides can be arranged out into the Aravalli countryside at whatever pace suits the smallest legs, past fields and stone wells and the odd astonished goatherd.

 

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Shahpura Bagh

Some days on a Rajasthan trip aren't about getting anywhere at all. The hours stretch out the way they only seem to in childhood: a whole morning spent watching a kingfisher work a lake, an afternoon that disappears into a game no adult quite understands. 

 
 

For families who like the idea of a working estate, Shahpura Bagh sits between Jaipur and Udaipur: forty-five acres of orchards and lakes run by the Singh brothers, whose family have farmed this land for nearly four centuries. The grounds are home to more than 180 species of bird, and one of the brothers, a serious birder, can usually be coaxed out at first light with the children and a pair of binoculars – the lake still steaming – to see how many they can name before breakfast. Days pass by the shaded pool, eating fruit picked that morning; in the evening, drive out to the family’s old fort at Dhikola for tea on the ramparts as the sun drops and the whole valley turns to rose and then to ash.

For something quite unlike the rest and more designed for older families, RAAS Chhatrasagar near Nimaj has sixteen tents pitched along the top of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old dam, looking east over a lake that draws more than two hundred and fifty species of bird. The family built the dam generations ago to catch the monsoon, and the whole living landscape below grew up from that single act of water-keeping. Mornings are for bird walks and kayaking out across the still water, and after dark everyone gathers round a bonfire under a sky so thick with stars that children go quiet, while a fish breaks the surface somewhere out on the lake.

Between Jodhpur and Udaipur, Rawla Narlai is the seventeenth-century hunting lodge of the Jodhpur royal family, restored to thirty-odd rooms set around courtyards full of flowers. It sits at the foot of a huge granite monolith called Elephant Hill that older children will be itching to climb. The night to stay for is the stepwell dinner: a bullock cart carries you out of the dark village to an eleventh-century stepwell lit by eight hundred candles, where local women cook fresh bread over a chulha, Jogi musicians sing low into the night, and a lamp-lit supper comes course by course, candle flames doubling in the black water below until you can’t tell which way is up and which way is down.

Stay: Dev Shree (Deogarh); Shahpura Bagh (Shahpura); RAAS Chhatrasagar (Nimaj); Rawla Narlai (Narlai)

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The Grand Hotels

These are the names you already know, the ones that turn up on every list of where to stay in Rajasthan, and it’s worth saying plainly that they work just as well for a family as for a honeymoon. Each one is a world of its own, and a child set loose in it will find corners the brochure never mentions.

Amanbagh, which Red Dot can place you in as one of its partner properties, is the Aman in Rajasthan, two hours from Jaipur and a short drive from Sariska. The name means peaceful garden, and that is exactly what it is: pink sandstone Mughal pavilions, rose-coloured cupolas and courtyards of fruit trees, laid out on the old hunting grounds of the Maharaja of Alwar. The pool suites are built for families, with room to spread out and a little pool for the smallest swimmers. The thing to do here with children is the late-afternoon village drive the resort calls the Cow Dust Tour, a jeep heading out into the lanes at the hour the herders bring the cattle, goats and buffalo home, the whole road rising into a golden haze as the sun drops behind it.

Closer to Ranthambore, Six Senses Fort Barwara near Sawai Madhopur is a restored fourteenth-century fort; forty-eight suites set inside two palaces and two temples, all within the old walls. The Grow With Six Senses programme runs daily for children, and the one they come away talking about is the Earth Lab, where they mix and bottle their own lip balm and toothpaste from lemongrass, vanilla and lavender grown on the property, and carry the results back to the room to show off their new skills and knowledge.

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These are the names you already know, the ones that turn up on every list of where to stay in Rajasthan, and it's worth saying plainly that they work just as well for a family as for a honeymoon.

 

On the shore of Lake Pichola in Udaipur, The Oberoi Udaivilas (pictured) is the lake palace of the modern age: thirty acres of gardens, domed pavilions and a view of the City Palace from nearly every room. You arrive by boat across the lake, the white palace rising out of the water as you near it, which is a small voyage in itself for a child. Peacocks roam the gardens, the lawns are made for running flat out. In the evening, children are taken to a puppet show, where local marionetteers bring the old Rajasthani folk tales to life under the lit domes.

In Jaipur, the Taj Rambagh Palace is the former home of the Maharaja of Jaipur and one of the great heritage hotels of India. Forty-seven acres of formal gardens, marble corridors and high-ceilinged rooms built for entertaining – which in practice means endless space for children to vanish into and reappear from. The kitchen runs a Mini Bakers session where children pull on aprons and bake their own cookies alongside the palace chefs, while parents slip off for a drink at Steam, the bar built inside a lovingly restored steam-train carriage. The Maharaja’s vintage cars sit gleaming in the grounds, and it is always the cars, not the chandeliers, that children remember.

Stay: Amanbagh (Ajabgarh, near Alwar); Six Senses Fort Barwara (Sawai Madhopur); The Oberoi Udaivilas (Udaipur); Taj Rambagh Palace (Jaipur)