Thar Desert
Jaisalmer
The Fort That Is Still a Town
One of the last living forts on earth — three thousand people inside the walls — rising out of the Thar in yellow sandstone.
See the journeyOne of the three ways
Vast India
Two deserts — one of golden sand, one of cold rock at fifteen thousand feet.
Most people do not come to India for emptiness. India has one and a quarter billion people and a reputation for noise, and the traveller who arrives expecting crowds is not wrong.
And then there is the other India — the Thar, where a sandstone fort rises out of nothing and three thousand people still live inside its walls; and Spiti, a cold desert between the Himalaya and Tibet where a village of a hundred souls sits at fifteen thousand feet under a sky dark enough for the Milky Way to cast a shadow.
Śūnya is the Sanskrit word for zero, and it does not mean nothing. It means emptiness and completeness held in the same word. These two deserts are the closest thing we know to standing inside it.
The journeys
