Jaipur in three colours.

Jaipur isn't pink. It's terracotta — a warm, dusty orange that the city was painted in 1876 to welcome the Prince of Wales and never really un-painted. Someone called it pink in a postcard, the name stuck, and now we all repeat it. The actual colour is better than the marketing.

The three colours of a Jaipur morning

Day one: terracotta. Walk the old city wall at sunrise — Hawa Mahal is empty at 6:30 and you can sit across the road with a cup of chai at Sahu Chai Wala and watch the facade catch the light. The colour shifts every six minutes.

Day two: blue. Sheesh Mahal at Amer Fort. Skip the elephant ride (please). Go up early, walk through the rooms that aren't on the audio guide, and find the small mirror-tiled room where if you light one candle, you can count two thousand reflections.

Day three: green. Rent a bike (yes, in Jaipur, hear me out), ride out to Nahargarh fort road at sunrise, sit at the step well at Panna Meena. Nobody is there before 7. Bring water.

Eat exactly this

• Rawat Mishthan Bhandar — pyaz kachori with a cup of chai. Don't ask for two. You'll want six.
• LMB in Johri Bazaar — for the thali, but mostly for the sweet shop downstairs.
• Tapri rooftop — for sunset, for the masala chai, for the breeze.
• Sanjay Omelette — at midnight, with a friend, no questions asked.

"Madam, photo Hawa Mahal ka nahi, light ka lijiye." — A retired professor we met at 6:45 a.m. who gave the best photography advice of the trip.

The bazaars, ranked

Bapu Bazaar for textiles. Johari Bazaar for jewellery you have no business buying. Tripolia for lac bangles — go to the workshops, watch them make a pair, leave with seven you didn't plan to buy. The trick everywhere is to walk one alley deeper than the tourists go. The shop with no English signboard is always the one.

What we'd skip

Elephant rides at Amer (full stop). The "City Palace" royal tour — you can see the same rooms from outside. Any restaurant with a "puppet show" — your dinner will be cold and the puppet will look sad.