Editor's Letter: The 72-Hour Itinerary

Three days is not a compromise. It is a shape, and this issue is about learning to use it well.

Most of us do not travel the way travel magazines imagine. We do not have three weeks and a vague plan. We have a long weekend, a festival holiday that falls on a Friday, a work trip with a spare Saturday tacked on. We have, very often, about seventy-two hours. For years the advice for that window has been either to cram or to apologise: see everything on a list, or accept that you have barely scratched the surface. This issue argues for a third way.

Why seventy-two hours

Three days is long enough to arrive tired, find your feet, and leave rested. It is long enough for one wrong turn, one long lunch and one morning where you do nothing at all. It is short enough that you cannot pretend a place is infinite, and that turns out to be a gift. When time is limited you have to choose, and choosing is where a trip becomes yours rather than a brochure’s.

So this month we asked our writers to do something harder than listing sights. We asked them to build a sequence: what to see first, what to save, what to drop when a train runs late, and when, exactly, to leave.

A diesel-hauled passenger train passing a gantry of semaphore signals at Jalandhar, Punjab — Photo: MaltaGC (Nigel Tout) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Three cities, three different rules

In Pondicherry the rule is simple: walk. The town is small enough that a car mostly gets in the way, and the best of it, the colour-washed lanes of the French Quarter, the Tamil streets beyond the canal, the Promenade before the heat sets in, reveals itself at walking pace. The itinerary we built leans on early mornings and lazy afternoons, the way the town itself does.

In Udaipur the rule is to resist the package. The lakes are lovely, and yes, you will want to be on the water at some point. But the city rewards people who step off the obvious circuit: the ghats in the early hours, the lanes behind the City Palace, the evening light from the hills. Our piece shows how to fit the famous sights around those quieter hours instead of the other way round.

In Mysuru the rule is counter-intuitive: palaces last. Almost everyone heads straight for the Amba Vilas Palace and then wonders what to do with the rest of the trip. We suggest spending your first two days in the market, on Chamundi Hill and out at Srirangapatna, and letting the palace close the trip, when you understand the city that built it.

The craft behind the plan

Alongside the three city guides, this issue opens up our method. One piece explains how these itineraries are built, from the first rough list to the final, edited day plan. Another is devoted entirely to the question nobody asks until it is too late: what hour should you leave each place? There is a practical page on the trains that make short trips possible, and a frank one on what to cut when you arrive half a day late, which, if Indian travel teaches anything, you sometimes will.

Empty blue seats beside shuttered windows inside an Indian passenger train coach — Photo: Adityamadhav83 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

We also hear from a reader who took one of our itineraries and followed it, mostly. Their notes on where the plan worked and where real life intervened are the most useful thing in the issue, and we are grateful they let us print them.

Leave room

If there is one idea I would like you to take from these pages, it is this: a good short itinerary is mostly empty space. The plan is the frame; the trip is what happens inside it. Keep the first hour after arrival free. Keep one meal unplanned. Keep a fourth morning in your back pocket if you can, and we have a piece on exactly that.

And when you get home, look at the first photograph you took, the slightly crooked one from the station platform or the taxi window. It is usually the most honest picture of the trip. Our closing page is about that one too.

Seventy-two hours. Use them slowly.

Khushi Anand, Editor