Flying Through The Sands

This story – Flying Through The Sands – appeared in the May 2018 issue of Smart Photography – India’s leading photography magazine.

Flying Through The Sands

I took the in-room guide from Nakul to read about Osian. It was described as Khajuraho of Rajasthan. Poorly shot images failed to hide the beauty of these carved sandstone temples. And suddenly, another listed attraction caught my eye. Khichan. I had heard of the place. I knew what made it a tourist attraction. And I was pleasantly surprised it was just a day trip away from our hotel in Khimsar!

We had just checked in to the luxuriously appointed WelcomHotel Khimsar Fort & Dunes and were sipping tea in our room, musing about next day’s plan. Stumbling upon those innocuous entries in the in-room guide, coupled with my infectious enthusiasm, the group warmed up to my proposed plan of visiting Osian and Khichan the next day.

But Nakul, a fellow Taurean, is not easily persuaded. My friend for the last 35 years, he needs to feel convinced from within before he accedes to any proposal. As a yoga teacher, his body is quite flexible, but as a person, he can be extremely rigid!

‘We need to check with the locals about this trip,’ he said.

So, the tentative plan, drawn between sips of tea, now just needed some local affirmation.

After tea, as we stepped out of our room, the hotel’s GM greeted us on the well-manicured poolside lawns. During our short interaction, he approved of our trip plan and added ‘You must try and be back to view the sunset from our well-maintained sand dunes’! ‘Well-maintained sand dunes, for Chrissake! I smirked, but I refrained from commenting. I did not want the plan jeopardised.

Khichan, here we come

With three things on the agenda, and ‘Google Maps’ as our beacon, we drove down the narrow but well-tarred rural Rajasthan road. The distance from Khimsar to Khichan is around 120 km. The traffic was sparse and we were mostly making good speed, slowed only by camel carts and tractors once in a way. The desert vista hardly looked like one – there was greenery all around. The Israeli magic of drip irrigation!

As we turned into a narrow lane that led to a vacant area doubling up as parking, a young man in local attire stepped out of the ‘parking booth’, charged us Rs.30 per person and raised the barrier pole to allow our vehicle to pass.

Armed with cameras, water bottles, and confused looks, we walked back to the booth. Noticing our expression, the young man helpfully waved us towards some steps leading to a gap in a wall.

The Khichan Attraction

As we climbed and entered the gap, the sight left us spellbound. We found ourselves on a small hillock that curved the way golfers would call ‘dog-leg right’. On both sides of this mound, there lay a grey-ish amoeboid water body. The banks farther away from us were carpeted with thousands of birds constantly buzzing around in a slow Brownian motion! This was it. This is what we had come to see. The cloud-grey and slate-grey mass of Demoiselles Cranes that descend in hordes on this little dot on the map called Khichan.

It all started with a humble pigeon-feeding initiative by a local villager in the 1970s. That year, around 100 cranes landed here. That number grew to about 150 next year. And over the years, this number has ballooned to over 20,000 cranes every year!

The daily routine followed here is a feeding of the cranes around 7.30am that goes on for about 90 minutes, followed by the second feeding around 11.30am that goes on for another 60. After these feedings, if not disturbed, these cranes rest around these water bodies for the rest of the day (and night). An estimate of the feed was done in 2008 and it was found that about 3,000 kg of bird feed was provided to the cranes every day!

A Tragedy

It was a sunny day and predictably the birds were lazing around the water body. Fascinated by the sight, I walked about clicking photographs. All of a sudden, there was some alarm and these birds took flight. We were told some tourist had instigated the commotion by bribing some local boys to sprinkle feed near the cranes and that caused them to take off in panic.

While this sight was awesome, over the next few minutes a couple of these elegant birds had died as they collided midair. A needle-sharp beak hitting another bird mid-flight is akin to driving a stiletto through butter! A normally harmless man-animal interaction had suddenly turned into a man-animal conflict! Saddened by this occurrence, we soon left, but not before I had resolved that I would write about it to request the travel enthusiasts for a responsible conduct during their visit here.

Khajuraho of Rajasthan

After an hour’s drive, we reached Osian. This small town houses a buzzing modern concrete-and-glass Jain temple. Seeing that, we were disappointed as we were seeking the ancient temples. But some enquiries later, we figured we were on the right track.

The ancient temples lay just behind this modern Jain temple. Most of them were in ruins, but that did nothing to hide their ancient glory. At its peak, during the 8th to 11th centuries, there were around a hundred temples in this little town. As we walked around, we could spot about a score of them in the vicinity. While these temples were not as large as the ones in Khajuraho, their stone carving work was equally exquisite.

Exploring these magnificent ruins, we figured though they were called ancient Jain temples, they were actually temples of Hindu deities built a millennium ago by the prosperous Jains living in Osian. Walking about the Pipladevi Temple, Shiv Temple, and the Vishnu Temple, we were all admiration for this gem that lay hidden in the deep interiors of the arid region of Rajasthan.

For more images of Rajasthan, visit my Instagram Roundup – Rural Rajasthan Rhapsody

Well-maintained Sand Dunes

After roaming around this time-warped town for a while, we hurried back. We still had to catch the sunset on the well-maintained dunes the hotel GM had talked about. We were curious to know what he meant, you see.

Despite some minor hiccups (we lost the way to the Dunes!), we managed to reach the ‘Dunes’ part of the property 10 minutes before the sunset. Once there, we realised ‘well-maintained dunes’ actually meant weeding the dunes and keeping them as pristine as they should be in a desert! Viewing the crimson ball sink beneath the horizon here after an eventful day of driving around rural Rajasthan was bliss.

As we sat there sipping our tea, Nakul summed up the day in just two words – ‘Nice Day!’

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