A great wilderness of salt dominates much of the western Indian state of Gujurat. In summer, the white plains are so immense, it can be hard to see the horizon and distinguish sky from land.
Indeed, if you drive across the 30km causeway running north-south across the saltflats, connecting the villages of Khavda and Dholavira, an optical illusion gives the impression that you're driving into the clouds. No wonder it's known as the Road to Heaven. Add in the locals' stories of seeing ghostly lights at night here and you soon feel you're in an unearthly place.
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This salty desert is the Great Rann of Kutch and, when combined with the Little Rann of Kutch just to the south east, extends for 26,000km2 across Gujurat and into the Pakistani province of Sindh, making it one of the world's largest salt deserts. 'Rann' is a Gujurat word for 'desert' while Kutch means 'between water and land/wet and dry'. And this gives a clue to the region's changing character over the course of a year as well as its origins.
The Rann of Kutch is dry only in summer, when temperatures can reach a ferocious 50°C. As the monsoon rains fall in autumn, much of the region floods and becomes a vast shallow lake and seasonal grassland. Temperatures plummet and much life throngs to the area, especially wading birds such as greater and lesser flamingos, storks, cranes and black-winged stilts. When the dry season returns, the water evaporates, exposing the salty plains once more and creating what looks like a moonscape or even a frozen waste with salty ice floes.
The salt is a big clue to the desert's origins. Thousands of years ago, the Rann was a huge shallow inlet of the Arabian sea. But tectonic shifts closed the connection to the sea, creating a vast brackish lake. There are records that this was navigable by boat until the fifth century AD but it has silted up since, creating a huge saltmarsh.
It's thought that the earthquake of 1819 further closed off the Rann from the sea by throwing up what is known as Allah Bund (the dam of God) – a vast chunk of land at the old mouth of the inlet. And though season rainfall and rivers bring freshwater into the region, the underlying salt dominates.
While summer temperatures average 44°C making life extremely uncomfortable, there are many villages on the fringes of the Rann. Communities such as the Agariyas farm the salt – known as 'white gold' – and the Rann produces about 7000 tonnes a day, amounting to between 70-80 per cent of all India's salt needs.
There are also nomadic pastoral groups, such as the Maldharis, and farming communities such as the villagers in Dholavira on the fertile 'island' of Khadir Bet. Little Rann of Kutch has many more such grassy island hills (called 'bets') and even rare inland mangroves.
Little Rann is also one of the last bastions of one of India's rarest native mammals: the wild ass (Equus hemionus khur). This is a subspecies of the Asiatic wild ass, known as the onager, and has a sandy coloured coat. Active at dawn and dusk to avoid the heat, it is one of the world's fastest land mammals, reaching speeds of up to 80kmph. It needs to be swift to try to outrun Indian wolves and striped hyenas.
And what of those strange lights witnessed by so many local people as well as Indian soldiers and even some visiting ornithologists? Known as 'chir batti' (ghost lights), these bright balls of light appear in the evening, can move very fast and are said to change colour and dance in the air.
Locals believe the light interacts with them, playing hide and seek or leading them from paths into the dangerous wilderness – exhibiting very similar properties to will-o-the-wisps found in European folklore. Scientists believe that these lights, which always seem to occur over wetland, are the product of the oxidisation of marshland gases such as methane, a process that produces light.
Despite its seemingly indomitable wildness and hostility, the Rann of Kutch is not immune to the pressures of human development and climate change. The Khavda Renewable Energy Park, opened in 2024 and one of the world's largest, has eaten into the wilderness while commercial salt panning, shrimp farming and poaching are also taking their toll.
Meanwhile climate change is making the monsoon rains more erratic and intensifying the summer heatwaves. The delicate desert ecosystem that has been shaped by natural forces over millennia is facing pressures that could see rapid and unprecedented change in the upcoming decades.
