Discover Rathore Traditions and Wilderness at The Mountbatten Lodge

The evening closes with dinner back at The Mountbatten Lodge, a relaxed, unhurried meal that rounds out a full first day. After lunch beneath the banyan, an afternoon by the pool, and sundowners over the Aravalli Hills, this dinner offers a natural moment to settle in fully, no more driving, no more schedule, just good food and quiet conversation before turning in.

It's designed as a gentle wind-down rather than an event in itself, a chance to rest properly ahead of the horse safari beginning the following morning. There's a deliberate calm to this final hour of the day, the Lodge at its most restful, lights low, the evening air cooling after the heat of the afternoon. Guests leave the table ready for an early start, the first day's adventures behind them and several more, on horseback, waiting just ahead.

Breakfast done, head just nine kilometres from the Lodge to the Ranakpur Jain Temple, one of India's most remarkable architectural treasures. It rises out of the Aravalli range in white marble, every surface carved with a patience that's hard to comprehend, pillars, ceilings and doorways, each one different from the last.

Morning light moves through the stone and softens it, and walking slowly feels right here, rushing does not. This is one of Rajasthan's most significant cultural and spiritual landmarks, and standing inside it, surrounded by centuries of careful hands, the reason becomes clear at once. Peaceful, precise, and entirely its own.

This corner of the Aravallis holds one of the densest leopard populations anywhere — cats that live in the granite hills, dozing in caves and crevices by day and moving at dusk. What makes it unusual is who they share it with. The Rabari, the herders in white and red, treat the leopard as sacred, tied to Shiva, and when one takes a goat they don’t hunt it down; there are no fences here, and barely a poaching case in decades.

You transfer to a four-wheel-drive at last light and go out with a tracker who knows the ground and the individual cats. You are here to find one and watch it, nothing more — then on to camp.

The musicians who play at the camp tonight come from a tradition Marwar has kept for centuries: hereditary performer communities — the Manganiyar and Langa among them — born into music, taught by their fathers, who for generations sang at the courts and camps of this desert for whoever kept them. The songs are memory as much as melody, carried down without ever being written.

You sit out under a sky with almost no light to compete with, the fire going, a barbecue coming off the coals, and the voices lifting into it. Depending on the season, the night might move indoors to a family castle nearby. Either way, you’re hearing songs older than the arrangement that brought them to you.

You’ll pass a Persian wheel still turning in a field — an ox walking a slow circle, a chain of clay pots rising full and tipping their water into a channel. The name misleads: its Sanskrit one is araghatta, pot-wheel, and it was likely an Indian invention long before it reached Persia. Farmers here have watered ground this way for centuries.

The three-hour ride also takes you past Garasia hamlets, a hill people who, by their own telling, are part Bhil and part Rajput — descended from warriors who fled into these same Aravallis after defeat and stayed. Your guide rides alongside and reads the country as you go. The horses carry you on, toward leopard ground.

Rana Kumbha’s masons built this wall between 1443 and 1458, and it runs thirty-six kilometres over thirteen Aravalli peaks — the second-longest unbroken wall on Earth after the Great Wall of China, wide enough along the top for eight horses to ride abreast. You reach it the fitting way, on horseback, after a four-hour ride through the Kumbhalgarh sanctuary that guards its lower slopes.

Inside the walls, more than three hundred temples; below, the country the fort was built to hold. This is where Maharana Pratap, who spent his life resisting the Mughals, was born. You ride up to a fort raised to keep a kingdom in — arriving, as its garrison once did, by horse.