Local guides in Agra

Almost everyone gets Agra wrong in the same way: they see the Taj at midday on a day trip from Delhi and leave. It opens at sunrise, it is closed on Fridays, and the marble genuinely changes colour through the morning — that is not a tourist-board line, it is why people who stay the night talk about it differently.

Agra Fort is the better building and gets a fraction of the visitors. Shah Jahan spent his last years imprisoned in it looking at the Taj, which is the sort of thing that lands differently standing in the room.

Fatehpur Sikri is forty kilometres out and is an entire abandoned Mughal capital. Half a day, and almost nobody on a package sees it.