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Three camels rest at a well in India’s Great Thar Desert.
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When talking to several camel safari operators in Jaisalmer, India, they all assured me that the trek was worth it, despite the pungent aroma of the dromedaries, as if the camel stink was something foreigners could handle only with advance notice.After spending two days perched on one, though, I can say that the stink just wasn’t a big factor on my trip. They didn’t smell like roses, but maybe I just got used to the stench of mine; I called him Paco.
I was the only tourist on my trek to suffer the trauma of having a horny adolescent camel. The other four tourists on the trek, including my traveling companion—my Financial and Menu Adviser—were able to guide their own camels with their own reins. There were five of us: Stu, the Canadian; Tim and his girlfriend Mel, a British couple; and the FMA and I. Stu was wacky. He had a digital video camera with a separate lens component that looked like military or spy hardware strapped to a headband. The recording part of the camera was positioned on his belt. With his longish red hair, he looked a bit like Richard Simmons gone Borg. While the locals we would encounter clearly enjoyed discussing him, none of this made him memorable. What really made Stu unforgettable was that he rarely walked upright. He bobbed and weaved, his thin, pale white arms with their dusting of red hair spread out for balance. He crouched low, then rose up high, like a cross between a boxing instructor and a DIY infomercial on how to shoot extreme sports. Stu was friendly, too, a nice guy with a genuine interest in what went on around him, but whack-a-mole wacky. He’ll probably win an Oscar someday. Tim and Mel, on the other hand, were the antithesis of Stu. Clean-cut Londoners, they provided a perfect balance to Stu’s optimistic bob-and-weave. Pleasant to talk to, willing to share the more embarrassing moments of their trip as eagerly as the exciting, frustrating or horrific ones, it was nice to meet others who enjoyed India, but didn’t think that it was some kind of mysterious magical wonderland. With Paco and I at the tail of the line, we trudged westward with our guides, past the brown desert scrub and toward the sand dunes north of the town of Sam. We ate during the hottest part of the day under some scrubby trees on the edges of the dunes. The guides helped us dismount, with much gronking and chortling from the camels, and then they cooked us an authentic desert meal: rice, chapatis, dhal and some kind of curried desert vegetable. The guides used very little water when cleaning the dishes. They used sand for soap, which resolved the issue of waste by absorbing anything left over. When we left, the dung beetles that infested the sands moved on the remains like large black maggots.
From the larger mammals to the occasional bird and
the ubiquitous insects, the desert boiled with a curious stew of
creatures. People, too, populated the scorched, scrubby plains and
shifting dunes. As the camels and our guides slowly plugged along into
the four o’clock sun, we came upon a lone tree with red strings tied all
over its branches: a Hindu cemetery, explained the guides.
Soon after, I saw a village spread out on the
horizon. Much closer, a group of cisterns and wells was being used by
the villagers. We dismounted to get water for the camels, so I went over
to the locals. Ignoring me as they chatted among themselves, they
pulled water up from 70 meters below the surface of the sand. When the
rope reached the top, I was surprised to see it wasn’t attached to one
of those cheap plastic buckets found all over India.
Instead, the rope was tied to the four corners of a
piece of brown leather. Pulled up like a baby’s nappy, it looked like it
held a frightfully small quantity of water for the effort required to
haul it up.
Over and over again, it was dropped then hoisted, and
its contents dumped into containers, into hands, onto heads. For a
place that measured its rain not in centimeters but in years, as in, “We
haven’t had any measurable rain in two years,” they seemed absurdly
wasteful of such a precious commodity.
After about two hours of more camel riding, we closed
in again on the dunes. The sun fell lower in the sky, and our shadows,
elongated on the sand, became a photo-op for Tim and Mel. Restricted to
the top of his camel, Stu’s bob-and-weave videography was limited to the
cadence of his carrier.
Before we knew it, we’d reached the center of the dunes. Only on the
edge of the horizon did the sine wave of sandy hills flatten to
infinity. After dismounting, the FMA and I walked away from where the
guides were unsaddling our rides, for the night.Confronted by such enormous, overwhelming repetition that somehow wasn’t repetitive, we parked our sore butts and legs on the sand and watched the sun slip below the horizon. The pollution from Pakistan floats eastward, so the sun turned an angry red and then dropped out of sight far above the horizon. While our view of the sunset was utterly undramatic, it was the same one that the large group of day-tripping tourists on a nearby dune saw. Dinner came and went, and tasted the same as lunch, even if the food was different. Indian beer wasn’t much to speak of, either, with a marginal alcohol content to match the marginal taste. Before the beer was gone we were interrupted by one of the guides. The moon was rising. We clambered up the dune to be greeted by a big fiery ball of white. The valleys and mountains on the moon’s surface were visible to the naked eye. The dunes were almost as bright in the moonlight as they were four hours earlier, in daylight. We all stood in awe. Tim even proposed to Mel, choosing what she later called “the perfect night” to ask her to marry him.
The second day brought me Paco 2.0, an older and more
mature camel than the first, which I was able to lead on my very own.
It was like graduating kindergarten. And just like back in kindergarten,
it didn’t take me long to find myself getting chastised. One guide told
me not to kick in my heels to get P2 to speed up, since that upsets
their stomachs.
Camel welfare, however, did not interfere with the
same guide repeatedly beating another camel on the neck with his fist,
when the beast misbehaved. I thought about pointing out this irony to
the guide, but decorum and a severe language barrier got the better of
me.
The village of Sam, a collection of a dozen huts and
three dozen piles of trash on the ground, was unremarkable. There were
no local crafts that were pointed out to us, no obvious reason why the
village was even there.
At the end of the trek, we visited a well where many
women were, collecting water in steel jugs that they balanced on their
heads. Our guides wouldn’t let us approach them or even ask questions
from across the well, but at four in the afternoon it was damn hot to be
carrying steel jugs anywhere.
All I could take away from the camel safari, besides
another interesting, yet not fantastic Indian adventure, was a reminder
of a Zen moral translated in 1990s parlance: It’s the experience,
stupid.
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| Tags: Tourist for you, du lich cho ban, lua chon du lich cho ban, tap chi du lich cho ban, tourist Magazine. |
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