quiz night – The Thar Desert

It’s Tuesday so it’s quiz night. For various reasons – health related for some, return to South Africa for others, daughter working, my team has recently reduced to one, i.e, me! This doesn’t matter in a pub like the Dolphin! I have been adopted by other teams, Taz & Co., the Am-Drams, a scratch team of others on their tod, Snags team, the three ladies – yes, I’ve been able to participate, even on one occasion on my own! Tonight husband was not at band practice (bad back) daughter not working so the three of us were able to enjoy all the fun of the Dolphin pub quiz.

We did quite well, but not well enough, but that didn’t matter. We had a most enjoyable evening with friendly banter between us and the neighbouring teams. There are always questions we should have known the answer to, questions we had never any chance of knowing the answer to, and then the odd question which we would never have known but was intriguing all the same. I would say that I have a pretty good general knowledge in most areas. For example, although I only studied geography at school the same as everyone else did, because I was a great reader with an enquiring mind as a child. So when a question came up about deserts I would hav thought I’d have had a good chance of guessing the answer. As it happens, I was hopeless! The question was about the sesert between Pakistan and India. I know there are mountains, but deserts? I had no idea. Was Bactria in that area? I guessed Bactria and I was wrong – I don’t think it’s a desert at all.

The answer was something I had never heard of before, the Thar desert.This is what I learned from Wikipedia:

The Thar Desert, also known as the Great Indian Desert, is a large arid region in the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent covering an area of 77,000 sq miles and forms a natural boundary between India and Pakistan. It’s the world’s 20th-largest desert, and the world’s 9th-largest hot subtropical desert. About 85% is in India, and about 15% is in Pakistan. It’s about 4.56% of the total geographic area of India. More than 60% lies in the Indian state of Rajasthan and extends into Gujarat, Punjab, and Haryana. The Pakistani area stretching into Sindh and Punjab is known as the Cholistan Desert.

On looking up the Thar desert I realised there are a whole lot of deserts I had never heard of at all. These are the top ten world deserts according to area – and teh Thar doesn’t even feature!