The last family-run safari camps of Rajasthan

Sher Bagh is the original, twelve campaign-style tents on the edge of Ranthambhore where the family's conservation work began. There are brass bathtubs behind every tent flap and a bar hung with vintage tiger photographs. The forest beyond holds India's most celebrated tigers, with an eighth-century fort rising out of the middle of it.

Leopard country

JAWAI is the wild one. Sixteen guests at most, in tents scattered among granite hills where leopards live in plain sight of the Rabari herdsmen. No park gates, no queues of jeeps. The cats and the shepherds worked out their truce centuries ago, and guests simply arrive into the middle of the arrangement.

The desert

The Serai is the romantic. Twenty-one tents on the golden edge of the Great Thar outside Jaisalmer, with plunge pools sunk into private walled gardens and the Manganiyar bards singing by firelight, as their families have sung for the Singhs since the 1960s.

The thing they never advertise

Camps like these never discount publicly. Their rates are their reputation. What they will do, quietly, is look after the right guests in the right season. It has always worked that way in Rajasthan. The trick is knowing whose guest to be.