Rajasthan Desert Safari Tour with Thar Camp

A representative of Payless Tours India waits in the arrivals hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport with a name board, whatever hour your flight lands. After a short welcome and a check of your travel papers, your driver takes you to your hotel in central Delhi, a ride of forty minutes to an hour depending on traffic. The air-conditioned car that meets you is the one that will carry you across Rajasthan for most of the next twelve days, so your driver will load the bags, share his mobile number and explain how the daily timings work. Hotel rooms are normally ready from the early afternoon, and an earlier check-in can be requested if you land at dawn.

If you arrive before about two o'clock, your guide can take you to Humayun's Tomb in Nizamuddin for the late afternoon. The tomb was commissioned in the 1560s by Bega Begum, the widow of the second Mughal emperor, and it was the first large garden tomb on the subcontinent. Before reaching the main building you pass through the octagonal enclosure of Isa Khan, an Afghan noble whose tomb is older than Humayun's and shows the earlier Lodi style. Your guide will point out the double dome, the red sandstone inlaid with white marble, and the water channels that divide the garden into four parts in the Persian manner.

Back at the hotel, your driver or a member of our Delhi team runs through the route ahead in a short briefing. The desert is a different climate from Delhi: winter nights in the camp can fall to around five degrees Celsius, while the afternoons on the dunes are bright and dry. A warm layer, a scarf to keep sand off the face, sunglasses, sunscreen and comfortable closed shoes are the most useful items to pack. It also helps to carry some small notes in Indian rupees for tea stops, temple donations and tips. The evening is free for dinner at the hotel or at a restaurant nearby.

Overnight stay in Delhi.

The morning is spent in Old Delhi, the walled capital that Emperor Shah Jahan called Shahjahanabad in the seventeenth century. Your guide begins outside the Red Fort, whose sandstone walls run for more than two kilometres along the old riverbank; the fort is closed on Mondays, so on that day it is seen from outside only. A short walk brings you to Jama Masjid, completed in 1656, which is still the largest mosque in India and whose courtyard holds around 25,000 worshippers at Friday prayers. Visitors are lent a robe at the gate, and those with energy can climb the southern minaret for a view across the rooftops of the old city.

From the mosque steps you take a cycle rickshaw into the lanes of Chandni Chowk, where the rickshaw is often the only vehicle narrow enough to get through. The ride passes the silver and wedding-trim shops of Kinari Bazaar, the old havelis of Dharampura, and finally Khari Baoli, one of the largest wholesale spice markets in Asia, where porters carry sacks of chillies, turmeric and dried fruit on their heads. Your guide can take you up to the roof of an old trading building for a view over the market. Lunch can be taken at Paranthe Wali Gali, a lane of small shops that have served fried stuffed breads since the late nineteenth century.

After lunch you return to the hotel, which you check out of at the standard noon time, and your bags stay safely in the car. A quiet stop at Raj Ghat, the black marble platform marking the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated in 1948, fills the late afternoon. In the evening your driver drops you at the railway station, and a member of our team helps you find your coach and berth on the overnight express to Bikaner. You travel in an air-conditioned two-tier sleeper, with sheets, a blanket and a pillow supplied by Indian Railways. While you sleep, your driver sets off by road so that he can meet you on the platform the next morning.

Overnight on the train.

The train pulls into Bikaner in the early morning, after a run of nine to ten hours across the flat farmland of Haryana and northern Rajasthan. Your driver meets you on the platform and takes you to your hotel, where an early check-in is arranged so that you can shower and have breakfast before the day begins. Bikaner was founded in 1488 by Rao Bika, a son of Rao Jodha of Jodhpur, who left his father's kingdom to build his own state on the edge of the desert. The city grew rich on the caravan route between Central Asia and the ports of Gujarat, and its merchants spent that money on red sandstone houses.

Your local guide then leads you round Junagarh Fort, built between 1589 and 1594 by Raja Rai Singh, a general who served in Emperor Akbar's army. Unlike most Rajasthan forts it stands on flat ground, protected by a moat and thick walls rather than a hill. Inside are more than thirty palaces and pavilions added by later rulers. The Anup Mahal is covered in red and gold lacquer work, while the Badal Mahal has blue clouds painted on its walls, a joke for a desert court that rarely saw rain. In one hall stands a de Havilland biplane given to Maharaja Ganga Singh after the First World War.

After lunch you drive about ten kilometres to the camel research farm run by the national agricultural research council, which opens to visitors in the afternoon. The farm breeds and studies the main camel types of western India, including the heavy Bikaneri, the lean, fast Jaisalmeri and the Kachchhi from Gujarat. Around four o'clock the herds walk back in from grazing, and you can watch calves being fed and see the breeding stud. The small parlour sells camel-milk tea, coffee and ice cream, which is slightly salty and surprisingly light. On the way back your guide takes you through the old city to see the carved Rampuria havelis in the evening light.

Overnight stay in Bikaner.

After breakfast you check out and drive about thirty kilometres south to the small town of Deshnoke, home of the Karni Mata Temple. Karni Mata was a female mystic of the Charan community who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is worshipped across Bikaner and Jodhpur as a form of the goddess Durga. The rulers of Bikaner regarded her as their family deity, and the temple's present form, with its marble front and heavy silver doors, was paid for by Maharaja Ganga Singh in the early twentieth century. Your driver will park close to the gate, and your guide will explain the story before you go inside.

The temple is famous for its rats, known locally as kabbas, of which some twenty thousand live in the courtyards and shrine. Devotees believe they are the reborn members of Karni Mata's own clan, so they are fed with milk, grain and sweets and are never harmed. Shoes must be left at the gate, as in every Hindu temple, so many visitors bring a pair of thick socks to wear inside. Spotting one of the few white rats is considered a sign of good fortune, and pilgrims wait patiently near the inner sanctum hoping for a glimpse. Photography is allowed for a small camera fee, and the visit takes around forty-five minutes.

From Deshnoke the road heads south-west towards Jaisalmer, a drive of five and a half to six hours through Phalodi and Pokaran. The farms thin out and are replaced by scrub, khejri trees and the first low dunes beside the highway. Between September and March, a short detour to the village of Khichan near Phalodi lets you see the thousands of demoiselle cranes that winter there and are fed grain by the villagers each day. Lunch is usually taken at a roadside restaurant in Pokaran. You should reach Jaisalmer in the late afternoon, when the walls of the fort turn the colour of honey above the town.

Overnight stay in Jaisalmer.

Jaisalmer Fort was founded in 1156 by Rawal Jaisal, a Bhati Rajput chief, on a ridge of yellow sandstone called Trikuta hill. It is one of the very few forts in India where people still live inside the walls, and several thousand residents run homes, guesthouses, shops and temples within its 99 bastions. Your guide meets you after breakfast and leads you up through the four gates, Akhai Pol, Suraj Pol, Ganesh Pol and Hawa Pol, before reaching the main square. Here the seven-storey Raj Mahal, the old royal palace, now houses a museum with royal costumes, coins and a view over the whole town from its upper rooms.

A few lanes away stand the seven Jain temples, built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and dedicated to Tirthankaras including Parshvanath and Rishabhdev. The carving here is so fine that the pillars and ceilings look almost like lace, and the yellow stone turns warm as the sun climbs. The temples are usually open to visitors only until around noon, and leather items such as belts and wallets have to be left outside. As you walk back down, your guide will explain the water problems the fort now faces, because the old drains were never designed for the volume of water that modern hotels and homes use.

After lunch you visit the merchant houses of the lower town. Patwon ki Haveli is a cluster of five houses built from 1805 by Guman Chand Patwa, a trader in brocade and opium, for his five sons; the work is said to have taken around fifty years. Salim Singh ki Haveli belonged to a powerful prime minister and has a curved, peacock-shaped upper storey, while Nathmal ki Haveli was carved by two brothers who each worked on one half, which explains why the two sides do not quite match. In the evening you walk to Gadisar Lake, a fourteenth-century reservoir, to watch the sunset behind its stone gateway.

Overnight stay in Jaisalmer.

Before checking out, you drive six kilometres north of the town to Bada Bagh, a hillside of royal cenotaphs where the rulers of Jaisalmer were remembered after cremation. Each chhatri is a domed pavilion of yellow sandstone with a carved ceiling and a memorial stone showing the ruler on horseback. The garden and dam below were begun in the sixteenth century by Maharawal Jait Singh, and the oldest memorials date from that period. Today a line of wind turbines stands on the ridge behind them, a contrast that photographers either love or try hard to keep out of the frame. Morning light is best, as the stone glows and the site is quiet.

You then return through Jaisalmer and take the road west towards Sam, stopping at Kuldhara, a village of roofless stone houses that once belonged to the Paliwal Brahmins. The Paliwals were skilled farmers who managed to grow crops in this dry land by trapping rainwater, and they lived in a group of around eighty villages. According to local tradition, they all left in a single night in the early nineteenth century to escape the demands of a cruel minister. Your guide will tell the story and also explain the more practical reasons, such as falling water levels and heavy taxes. The lanes, temple and house plans are still easy to read on the ground.

You reach the camp near the Sam Sand Dunes in the early afternoon and are welcomed with a cold drink. Your tent has a proper bed, furniture and an attached bathroom with running water. In the late afternoon a camel handler leads you out into the dunes for your first camel safari, timed so that you reach the higher sand ridges for sunset. Back at camp, local Manganiyar and Langa musicians play kamaicha and dholak around the fire, and a Kalbeliya dancer performs the spinning snake-charmer dance of her community. Dinner follows, with Rajasthani dishes such as ker sangri, dal baati and bajra roti cooked over wood.

Overnight stay at the desert camp.

Wake up early and walk the short distance from your tent onto the dunes for sunrise. The sand is cold underfoot at this hour and still carries the night's tracks of beetles, foxes and desert lizards, which a member of the camp staff can help you identify. As the light comes up, the dunes change from grey to pale gold, and the camp below is quiet except for the clink of the tea kettle. Return for a full breakfast at the dining tent. The rest of the morning is unhurried; you can read in the shade, take photographs of the camels being fed, or simply sit on the sand.

Later in the morning a camp guide walks you to a small hamlet nearby, where families of herders live in round mud huts with thatched roofs, surrounded by fences of thorn branches. Water is stored in clay pots and underground tanks, and the women will show you how bread is cooked over cow-dung fires. The area borders the Desert National Park, one of the last homes of the great Indian bustard, a large ground bird now critically endangered; sightings are rare, but chinkara gazelles are seen quite often. Lunch can be ordered at the camp. A jeep ride over the higher dunes can also be booked locally for those who would like one.

In the late afternoon you set out on a second, longer camel safari, this time away from the busier parts of Sam towards quieter dunes where only the wind and the camel bells break the silence. Your handler makes tea on a small fire at the halfway point while you watch the sun drop behind the ridge, and the ride back takes place in the soft blue of dusk. Once again the evening ends with music around the fire, followed by dinner. Away from city lights, the stars over the Thar are clear on most winter nights, and the camp can usually point out the Milky Way and the main constellations.

Overnight stay at the desert camp.

After breakfast you leave the dunes and drive back through Jaisalmer, then south on the highway to Barmer, a journey of around four hours. This part of the Thar sees very few foreign visitors, and the landscape changes from sand ridges to flat, gravelly plains broken by khejri trees, herds of goats and the occasional chinkara. Close to Barmer you will notice pumping rigs and pipelines, because the district sits above one of India's largest onshore oil fields, first struck in the early 2000s. Your driver will stop for tea at a roadside dhaba where truckers and herders take their break, and you should arrive in Barmer in time for lunch.

In the afternoon a local guide takes you to the craft villages around the town. In Meghwal households, women work on fine embroidery stitched in tiny counted triangles, a style learnt from their mothers and used for dowry cloths and wall hangings. Other families make rallis, patchwork quilts built from layers of old cotton cut into geometric shapes. You will also visit an Ajrakh printing workshop, where cloth is printed with carved wooden blocks, coated with a mud paste to resist dye, and dipped in indigo and madder several times over a week. Buying directly here means the money goes straight to the makers or their cooperative.

Before dusk you drive up to Barmer's small hill fort, built in the sixteenth century by Rawat Bhima, where steps lead to a temple of the goddess Jogmaya at the top. The view over the town and the empty plain beyond shows how isolated this corner of Rajasthan has always been, with Pakistan only a short distance away to the west. In the evening you can stroll through the main market, where shops sell embroidered bags, leather slippers and the heavy silver jewellery worn by the desert women. Hotels in Barmer are simpler than elsewhere on this route, but clean and comfortable, and we choose the best available property in town.

Overnight stay in Barmer.

An early start takes you about thirty-five kilometres north-west of Barmer to the ruined temples of Kiradu, close to the village of Hathma. Five temples survive here from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when this was an important town under the Paramara and later Chalukya rulers. The largest, dedicated to Someshvara, a form of Shiva, is covered with carved friezes of elephants, horses, battle scenes and stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Very few people visit, so you may well have the site to yourself apart from the caretaker. Your guide will explain why the town was abandoned and how the carvings compare with the better-known temples of Ranakpur and Mount Abu.

Return to Barmer to collect your luggage, then begin the drive north-east to Jodhpur, which takes three and a half to four hours. The road passes through Balotra, a town of textile dyeing and printing units where long lengths of cloth are often seen drying in the sun, and then past the old salt pans of Pachpadra, where salt has been harvested from brine wells for centuries. As you get closer to Jodhpur, the landscape becomes rockier, and the farms around the villages grow millet and mustard. Lunch is taken on the way at a highway restaurant, and you should reach Jodhpur by mid-afternoon to check in at your hotel.

Later in the afternoon your driver drops you near the Clock Tower in the old city, built in the early twentieth century by Maharaja Sardar Singh, which stands in the middle of Sardar Market. Stalls around it sell spices, bangles, tie-dyed fabric and the local makhaniya lassi, a thick, sweet yoghurt drink flavoured with saffron. A short walk away lies Toorji ka Jhalra, an eighteenth-century stepwell built by a queen of Jodhpur, which was cleaned and restored a few years ago. Its carved steps descend to green water, and the cafés around it are a good place to sit as the evening comes on.

Overnight stay in Jodhpur.

Mehrangarh Fort sits on a rocky hill about 120 metres above the city and was founded in 1459 by Rao Jodha, the ruler who gave Jodhpur its name. Your guide meets you at the hotel after breakfast and takes you up to the first gate, from where a lift or a steep ramp leads to the upper palaces. At Jai Pol the walls still show cannonball marks from the wars with Jaipur and Bikaner, and at Loha Pol you will see the small handprints left by the queens of Maharaja Man Singh before they committed sati in 1843. The fort museum displays royal palanquins, elephant howdahs, miniature paintings and a fine collection of weapons.

From the ramparts the old Brahmin quarter of Brahmpuri spreads out below, its houses painted the blue that gives Jodhpur its nickname. Your guide will explain the different ideas about why: some say the colour marked Brahmin homes, others that it keeps rooms cool or repels insects. Next you visit Jaswant Thada, a white marble memorial built in 1899 for Maharaja Jaswant Singh II. The marble is cut so thin in places that light passes through it, and the small garden and lake around it are calm after the crowds at the fort. Lunch can be taken in the old city before you check out of your hotel.

In the afternoon you drive sixty-five kilometres north to Osian, a small temple town on the old caravan road, about an hour and a half away. You check in at a desert camp or resort on the edge of the village, where the sand dunes start almost at the gate. These dunes are smaller than those at Sam, but they are far less visited, and in the late afternoon you can walk up onto them to watch the sunset over the village and its temple towers. Camel rides can be arranged locally if you would like one more ride on the sand. Dinner is served at the property at your own cost.

Overnight stay in Osian.

Osian was once a wealthy trading town called Upkeshpur, and between the eighth and eleventh centuries its merchants paid for more than a hundred temples, of which around eighteen survive. After an early breakfast you visit the oldest group, built under the Pratihara dynasty, including the Harihara temples, whose images combine Vishnu and Shiva in a single figure, and a small temple to the sun god Surya. The Mahavira Jain temple, founded in the late eighth century, is still in active worship and has a carved entrance porch and painted ceilings. Early morning is the best time, when priests are performing the first rituals and the stone is cool.

Next you climb the steps to the Sachiya Mata Temple on a low hill above the village, passing under a series of carved arches. The main shrine dates from around the twelfth century and is dedicated to a goddess worshipped by the Oswal Jain community, who take their name from Osian. From the top you can see the dunes on one side and the flat farmland on the other, which explains why the town flourished as a resting point for caravans moving between Jodhpur and the north-west. Your guide will show you how the architecture changes between the earlier and later temples, and how both Hindu and Jain styles grew up side by side.

Late in the morning you start the long drive east to Jaipur, which takes six and a half to seven hours with stops. The route passes through Merta City, the town linked with Meera Bai, the sixteenth-century princess-poet who gave up palace life to sing devotional songs to Krishna, and a short stop at the temple associated with her can be made if time allows. Lunch is taken on the way at a highway restaurant. You reach Jaipur in the evening and check in at your hotel for the last two nights of the tour. This Rajasthan desert safari tour now leaves the sand behind for the forts and bazaars of the Pink City.

Overnight stay in Jaipur.

Begin early with the drive to Amber Fort, eleven kilometres north of Jaipur, which was the seat of the Kachhwaha rulers until the new city was built in 1727. Your guide leads you through the Ganesh Pol, a gateway painted with delicate floral designs that dates from the early seventeenth century, and into the private apartments of the Maharaja. The Sukh Niwas was cooled by water flowing through channels in the walls and floor, an early form of air conditioning. High above Amber, the walls of Jaigarh Fort are visible on the ridge; it houses the Jaivana, one of the largest cannons on wheels ever made.

A few minutes' walk below Amber lies Panna Meena ka Kund, a seventeenth-century stepwell whose criss-cross flights of steps make a striking geometric pattern from above. Climbing the steps is no longer permitted, but the view from the edge is clear. On the drive back, you stop beside Man Sagar Lake to see Jal Mahal standing in the water. In the old city your guide takes you to the City Palace, where the Mubarak Mahal displays royal costumes and shawls, and then to Jantar Mantar, where the Samrat Yantra, a giant sundial almost 27 metres high, still measures time by the movement of its shadow.

The afternoon is yours to enjoy at your own pace. Many travellers like to view Hawa Mahal, the five-storey screen of small windows facing Siredeori Bazaar, from one of the rooftop cafés opposite, where you can see the whole front at eye level. Bapu Bazaar is good for block-printed cotton, quilts and leather slippers, while Johari Bazaar is the jewellery street. As dusk falls, Albert Hall Museum is lit up in the gardens of Ram Niwas Bagh, and your driver can stop there on the way to a farewell dinner at a Rajasthani restaurant of your choice, ending your time in Rajasthan with one last thali.

Overnight stay in Jaipur.

After breakfast you check out and your driver takes you back to Delhi, a drive of five to six hours with a tea stop on the way. You will be dropped at your Delhi hotel or directly at Indira Gandhi International Airport in good time for your onward flight. Please share your flight details when booking so that the departure time from Jaipur can be set correctly, and thank you for travelling with Payless Tours India.