Travel in Manvar

Manvar is a desert camp in the Thar, west of Jodhpur on the road towards Jaisalmer. One tour in our India catalogue stops there: On the trails of the Maharajas, 15 days, from EUR 1,840. One route out of fifteen. If you came to this page planning a desert holiday, that number is the first thing to know.

What you get is two nights and one full day. Day 11 is a driving day. You leave the yellow palace at Deogarh, in the Aravalli hills, and arrive at the camp; the itinerary schedules nothing else, so the afternoon and evening are the camp and the desert around it. Day 12 is the desert day, and everything Manvar does happens inside it: a jeep safari across the landscape and the animals living wild in it, a camel ride, and in the evening a cultural programme of regional music and dance at the camp. The itinerary gives no times for any of it and names no second location. On day 13 you drive on to Jodhpur, for Mehrangarh Fort on its 130-metre hill, the white marble Jaswant Thada, and the bazaar around the clock tower.

What Manvar is not is Jaisalmer. The golden fort, the carved havelis, the sunset camel ride into the dunes: none of it is on this trip. Jaisalmer belongs to two other routes. Rajasthan – The Land of Kings, 14 days from EUR 1,800, gives it two nights and a camel ride into the dunes at sunset on day 10. North India – landscapes and culture, 21 days from EUR 2,300, spends days 8 to 10 there. Neither of those goes to Manvar. You get one or the other, not both. If the image in your head is a sandstone fort above a desert city, book one of those and skip this page.

The camp itself is not named. This tour lists no hotels at all: no property names and no room categories, for Manvar or for any of its other stops. Ask for the night-by-night accommodation list on your quote and read it before you pay a deposit. Rooms across the India programme are Standard, Deluxe, Superior and Executive. There is no five-star tier, and a desert camp is a camp.

Meals are the other thing to settle in advance. Breakfast is included and it is the only meal in the price. At a camp in the Thar you are not going to walk out to a restaurant, so lunch and dinner get bought there. Ask us to price them into the quote rather than finding out on day 11.

The rest of the trip is what most people book it for. Delhi on arrival, then Agra on day 2 for the Taj Mahal, which is closed on Fridays, and Agra Fort. The Chand Baori stepwell at Abhaneri and a Bollywood film at the Raj Mandir cinema on day 3. Amber Fort, Jantar Mantar, the City Palace and the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur on day 4. Ranthambhore on day 6 for two tiger safaris, and read this line carefully: the trip is private, but those two safaris are not. They are shared, in a jeep with up to six people or an open canter bus with up to twenty, depending on availability. The Manvar jeep safari is described as neither shared nor private, so ask. Then Bundi and its stepwells, two nights in Udaipur, the Adinath temple at Ranakpur and the narrow-gauge train from Phulad to Kamli Ghat before the desert. On day 14 you fly from Jodhpur back to Delhi; that domestic flight is written into the itinerary, so it is included. International flights are not.

Every trip we sell is private and guided. A German-speaking guide, 24-hour contact and a bottle of water on arrival are included. There are no fixed departure dates, so you choose the month. Nothing in the catalogue limits this route to a season, but the itinerary describes the Thar in its own words as merciless heat by day and freezing cold at night, and that matters more at Manvar than anywhere else on the route.