The Rani ki Vav tour from Ahmedabad begins with hotel pickup at 7:30 am in a private air conditioned vehicle.

The first stop is the Modhera Sun Temple, built in 1026 AD by Bhimadeva I of the Solanki dynasty on the banks of the Pushpavati river. The temple sits on the Tropic of Cancer at exactly 23.5 degrees latitude, a placement that was entirely deliberate — the architects designed the sanctuary so that the first rays of the sun on the summer solstice fall directly through the entrance and illuminate the main shrine at the precise moment of sunrise. On the two equinoxes the sun lights the entire temple from front to back without casting a shadow on any part of the structure. The temple platform is carved with scenes from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Kamasutra, and the exterior walls are covered in sculptural panels of extraordinary refinement. Suryakund, the step well adjacent to the temple, has 108 miniature temple shrines built into its stepped sides — one of the most unusual architectural features in Gujarat.

Rani ki Vav Stepwell at Patan is the centrepiece of the Rani ki Vav tour from Ahmedabad. Built on the banks of the Saraswati river in the 11th century, this seven storey stepwell descends 23 metres into the earth and was designed not as a functional water source alone but as an inverted temple, its walls and columns covered in over 500 sculptures from the Hindu pantheon centred on the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu. The engineering and the craftsmanship are both extraordinary — the stepwell remained in use for over two centuries before the Saraswati river shifted course and silted it up, and when excavations revealed it in the 20th century the sculptures were found in almost perfect condition. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2014. Your guide explains the social history of stepwells in medieval Gujarat, the unique role they played as gathering places for women in a society where public spaces were largely male, and what the iconographic programme of Rani ki Vav was designed to express about the relationship between water, fertility and divine order.

The Patola silk weaving visit in Patan is the final stop on the tour, a complete contrast to the architectural grandeur of the morning. Patola weaving is double Ikat, the most technically complex weaving tradition in the world, in which both the warp and the weft threads are individually tied and dyed before a single thread is placed on the loom, so that the pattern emerges from the intersection of pre-dyed threads rather than from the weaving itself. A single saree made by four weavers takes 100 days to complete. The families who carry this tradition have been weaving in Patan for generations and your guide introduces you to the weavers and explains the extraordinary precision required to keep the pattern aligned across thousands of individual threads.

Hotel drop in Ahmedabad by 5:30 pm.

This private Rani ki Vav tour from Ahmedabad is fully inclusive. We take care of hotel pickup and drop in a private air conditioned vehicle, your expert guide throughout the day, all entry fees and an Indian vegetarian lunch.