Aman-i-Khás

Ten tents stand on the edge of Ranthambore National Park, each one six metres high, and when the park closes for the monsoon the camp closes with it. Aman-i-Khás, the Aman camp at Ranthambore in Rajasthan, opened in 2003 and has stayed at that size ever since.

History

Aman arrived in India with this camp, in 2003, two years before Amanbagh. Ranthambore, a former hunting reserve of the Maharajas of Jaipur, had become one of the best places in the country to see tigers, and Aman chose a site among trees near the park's edge on the Sawai Madhopur side. The design went to Jean-Michel Gathy, the Belgian architect behind a long list of Aman resorts, who took the Mughal royal tent as his model. The name, which translates roughly as a place of the Aman, borrows the Persian word for special or private that Mughal courts used.

Architecture and design

Each tent covers around 108 square metres under a canvas canopy six metres high, with a steel frame beneath. Cotton drapes divide the space into a bedroom, a bathroom with a bath and shower, and a dressing area, and the floors are stone. A daybed sits on the private terrace. The camp's common tents, dining, lounge and spa, follow the same form, and a central fire pit draws everyone together in the evenings. There is a pool. The camp is an exercise in canvas, and in taking it all down each summer and putting it back up in the autumn.

Dining

The dining tent serves a menu that changes daily, built on produce from the camp's organic garden and on Rajasthani and north Indian dishes, with Western options. Meals are also served at the fire pit and, for private dinners, at a table set out under the trees. Breakfast often waits until after the morning drive, and the kitchen packs food for the jeeps.

Wellness

The spa tent offers massages and Ayurvedic-inspired treatments, and yoga is held in the morning before the heat. The pool is the afternoon's occupation between the two drives.

Weddings and events

With ten tents, Aman-i-Khás is taken as a whole by families or small groups, and gatherings happen at the fire pit or at a long table set in the open. The camp has no meeting rooms and is not a wedding venue in the conventional sense; a private celebration of a few couples is its scale.

Location

Sawai Madhopur, the railway town on the line between Delhi and Mumbai, is about 20 minutes away and is how most guests arrive; the train from Delhi takes around four hours and from Jaipur about two. Jaipur's airport is a drive of roughly three hours. Game drives into Ranthambore run twice a day in the cooler months, the camp's season, from about October to April, in open vehicles with the camp's naturalists. Ranthambore Fort, a tenth-century hill fort inside the park with temples still in use, is reached by jeep and on foot. The lakes below the fort, Padam Talao among them, are where the tigers are most often seen.