Deserts are not deserted
Only yesterday I was telling a friend about my adventures into the great Namibia Desert along the Skeleton Coast of Atlantic, emphasizing in particular how I am not too fond of the deserts during the day since cold places are essentially my home. I thought she was an ocean and mountain person like me, but she surprised me by confessing that she is equally enchanted with the deserts of the world since they too are boundless and immensely beautiful and redolent with life – not that she had visited any, besides Thar in India. That set me thinking and I soon realized that though not among my favorite places on Earth, I have walked through parts of several of the world’s largest (area wise) deserts and have had a firsthand encounter with their diversity, flora and fauna, spectacular beauty, with the burning sun of day and the frozen moon at night. While my mind thus wandered retracing those forgotten voyages across the arid lands, I recognized that I too was fascinated with deserts as muc...