Phalodi

Phalodi is a hard, honest desert town, a former salt-trading and caravan centre on the arid road between Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, its old quarter dotted with the sandstone havelis of merchants who once grew rich on the trade. It carries a couple of superlatives: the 'salt city' nickname from the salt pans of the surrounding Rin, and, less enviably, the record for the highest temperature ever reliably measured in India, 51°C, in 2016, a reminder of how extreme the Thar can get.

The real reason to come sits about five kilometres away, at the village of Khichan. Every winter, from roughly late August, tens of thousands of demoiselle cranes, known locally as kurja, migrate from Central Asia to feed here, drawn by decades of village grain-feeding and the wetland's protected, Ramsar-listed status. The morning and evening fly-ins, when the sky fills with cranes over the dunes, are among the great wildlife spectacles of India.

MyTripMyTravel runs Phalodi and Khichan as a specialised, seasonal excursion off the desert circuit. The honesty matters: the cranes are migratory, so the spectacle is a winter event, densest from about November to February. Our planners time the visit to the fly-ins, arrange quiet viewing that does not disturb the birds, and pair it with Phalodi's havelis and the wider Jodhpur to Bikaner to Jaisalmer desert arc.