Tripping on Salt

The white desert or salt desert is just about 4km from the place I stay. I am still in awe of it and irrespective of how many other places exist to visit I keep going back to the salt desert.

I saw the sunrise today morning at the salt desert. Later in the day I wanted to see the sunset too. You just need to get down from the main road to enter the desert and it stretches till infinity.

As the salt desert is actually a dried up salt water lake, there are small islands in the lake. You can see one small patch of land in the photo. To give you an idea, the land you see in the middle would be around 8-10km away from where the picture is taken.

I came to see the sunset and suddenly a thought came in my head to walk to the island. I started walking towards the island and walked a good 2km. The island still looked far and that’s when it struck me that it’s more than 5km away may be.

I was bothered that I will have to walk the entire distance back in the dark as the sun was about to set. I chickened out and dropped the plan of walking to the island. As I started walking back, I started hallucinating.

Here is the view I was having.

The land is flat and white all around me. The sky feels like a hemisphere covering the flat land and is in shades of orange and blue. It’s clear. The white land is reflecting the light like a tube light. The entire space is glowing white with no primary source or light.

The best way I can show it is the above picture. Imagine this view wrapped around you and you are standing in the middle of the flat surface of a hemisphere.

Any non white land like roads or hills were at least 2km away. So it felt very small and invisible. For a while lost track of where I was and what direction I was walking. I stood there, enjoyed the feeling for a while and then slowly brought my senses to the direction of the road. Once I reached closer to the road, the feeling stopped and it was back to normal.

While returning back to the homestay, I was thinking how it would be to drop a person in the middle of a desert. Scary to just think about it.