Desert & Wildlife Combination: Thar Desert with Jawai Leopard Safari (7N/8D)

Description

Rajasthan's deserts are far from empty, and this eight-day journey is built for travellers who want to understand the wildlife that thrives in them. It combines the classic dune landscapes of Jaisalmer with two of India's most rewarding and least crowded wildlife experiences: the Desert  National Park, home to the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard, and the granite hills of Jawai, where leopards live in extraordinary proximity to farming and pastoral communities.

The Desert National Park covers more than 3,000 square kilometres of sand dunes, salt flats and thorny scrub near Jaisalmer. It shelters chinkara gazelle, desert fox, desert cat, spiny-tailed lizard and a remarkable raptor population including tawny and steppe eagles. Its most celebrated resident is the Great Indian Bustard, one of the world's rarest birds, with a global population now numbering only in the low hundreds. You explore the park with a specialist naturalist across a dedicated jeep excursion.

Jawai, in the Aravalli foothills between Jodhpur and Udaipur, is a different proposition entirely. Here leopards den in ancient granite caves above villages where Rabari herders have coexisted with them for generations without a recorded fatal conflict. Sighting rates are consistently high, and morning and evening jeep safaris are conducted across open terrain that makes for exceptional photography. Crocodiles, striped hyena, sloth bear and over 100 bird species share the landscape around Jawai Bandh reservoir.

Between these two wilderness areas the tour retains the cultural texture that makes Rajasthan so rewarding. You visit the Bishnoi villages outside Jodhpur, whose community has practised environmental protection as religious duty since the fifteenth century, walk the blue lanes beneath Mehrangarh Fort, and spend a night in the Jaisalmer dunes. It is a genuinely balanced desert wildlife itinerary rather than a safari programme with sightseeing attached.