Imagine a stretch of road flanked on both sides by the waters of the Arabian Sea and saline mudflats that look like frozen ice at first glance...
Driving on the ‘Road to heaven’ is a sensory overload. This appropriately named stretch of asphalt road sprawling over 32 km, connects Khavda to Dholavira in Kutch, at the western tip of Gujarat, not far from the border with Pakistan. The first glimpse of the luminous white desert is awe-inspiring.
Not many sights can compare with this otherworldly barren expanse of nothingness. If you are visiting in December, an added bonus is spotting pink and white flamingos. Tourist guide Iqbal Kumbhar explains that the Great Rann of Kutch spread over an area of about 7,500 sqkm is a geographical oddity, a bowl-shaped depression which was once a shallow arm of the Arabian Sea, until a tectonic shift closed the connection, making it a salt desert.
It morphs dramatically from a shimmering inland sea in the monsoons, to an arid salt desert in the winter, where locals live in traditional cylindrical mud huts with conical roofs called bhungas that can survive earthquakes and provide relief from extreme cold and heat. Not many travellers to Kutch make it to Dholavira, one of the five largest sites of the Harappan civilisation. A visit to the excavation site is a journey back in time.
Three distinct sections of the township have been revealed—a citadel, a middle town, and a lower town. Archaeologists have also found 10 large-scale inscriptions c.