Bhuj - White Desert - Kutch

Day 102 - 106.

Heading out west to Bhuj was like stepping back in time, the town is full of palaces, bazaars and brightly coloured traditional dress, certainly a world away from Ahmedabad & the perfect base to relax and explore Kutch. Cows, Oxs and all manner of animals live together on the streets here, (more so than your typical india) & you cannot walk 15 yards without coming face to face with either the horns of a large bull or it's excrament all over the floor 👌

After stitching up Pramod, the lonely planet recommended desert tour guide, (we think the fame has gone to his head) we hired our own scooter and set about planning our escape into the desert well and truly guide and driverless.

It was an 80km ride through baron stretches of desert to reach Salt flats. Luckily Ellie's skills at navigation were not required here, this was a one road job and she honed her camel spotting skills instead to keep the ride interesting. Saw lots of Nomads here too, living off bulls and camels alone pitched under tents in this crazy heat.

On route we detoured through tiny mud hut villages famed for their handmade embroidery, meeting locals and determined to find a few pieces ourselves for our (future) home. It is worth noting we had not seen any petrol for sale 40km into this ride, we pushed forward regardless, blissfully assuming there would be some available the further we went in...

We finally reached the tip of the white salt desert just in time for sunset. Sadly the army made us disembark from our scooter due to our close proximity with the Pakistan border, taking away my dream; albeit a very recent one, of speeding across the salt flats with the golden sunset as our backdrop.

Once across the checkpoint however they seemed fairly happy for you to stroll right over to Pakistan if you well wished so we got to walking and found an unobstructed spot. After a few attempts of taking those perfect funny desert shots everyone gets, and failing horrendously, it was time to find somewhere to sleep. Being 80km into the desert, in the dark and on low fuel we didn't fancy our chances of making it back.

We ended up haggling our way into a Luxury Mud Hut village in the desert instead, which came with a fantastic Thali, actual duvets and live desert entertainment! The only other guests were a family of 15 Indians from Bangalore, who saw the evenings entertainment was not wasted and had us up and dancing around the fire in no time. Cheesestring limbster was first to show off her moves, with me bowing to pressure and following suit shortly after, fortunately none of this was caught on camera.

Feeling refreshed the next day the ride back to Bhuj was an easy one, until we hit town of course during rush hour then I was lucky to avoid the myriad of obstacles both alive and dead that lay in our path.

After some local street Gujurati snacks (a combination of bread, sauce, chickpeas and more bread) it was time to enjoy a final sunset in Bhuj, we headed back to our favourite spot on the rooftop and danced the evening away (at least I did anyway) as the sun set on the desert for the last time.Leer más