We rode by Jeep into India’s Thar Desert, which borders Pakistan. We’d been promised an ultra-non-touristic camel trek, which hopefully meant that we wouldn’t be seeing other people or getting caught in camel traffic jams (which have apparently become a thing amid the growing tourism to the province of Jaisalmer).
The Jeep stopped in the middle of the dessert, sand dunes all around. Our guide, Ramesh, and his helper, a 13-year-old village boy named Muden, awaited with bags of food, stacks of blankets, and three camels laying on their bellies.
After exchanging greetings, Ramesh and Muden loaded up the camels and then told us to get aboard, too. I swung my leg over the camel’s hump and scooted into the saddle. Ramesh tugged on the camel’s rein and the beast rose on its rear knees, then front knees, then rear feet, and then front feet, and I zigzagged up 10 feet into the air. It was like paying 50 cents to sit in one of those car-rides outside the grocery store.
I started on a sturdy, 16-year-old camel, while Claire rode “Johnny Walker,” our guide’s prized possession—every year Johnny wins the camel race at the local festival, said Ramesh, who rode his newest animal, a two-year-old purchased along the Pakistani border a couple weeks earlier. Apparently, Pakistani camels are taller and stronger than Indian ones. The little guy screamed like a baby Brontosaurus every time we mounted him. Jumpy, we think he was, because his snout was recently pierced to make room for a bar.
After riding the docile grownups for a while, I decided to climb on the baby for a bit (with Ramesh safely holding the reins behind me). It flew into a terrified fit each time I so much as raised my hand, craning back its long neck to snap and bark at me.
After three hours of morning riding—enough to leave my legs stiff and sore—Ramesh cooked us lunch under a shady tree. He started a fire and prepared vegetable curry and fresh chapatti (an unleavened bread of wheat flour and water). For the next three hours, Claire and I sat on a dusty blanket and studied for the GRE while Ramesh and Muden napped. They must think tourists like us are ridiculous, paying $15 a day to ride stinky camels and sit beneath desert trees. But the quiet was quite nice.
Well, the near quiet. Three drunken villagers found us beneath our tree, and one grabbed my book out of my hand. He asked how much I’d pay to get it back. Nothing, I replied, feeling like I was back in elementary school and getting picked on. He picked up a handful of sand and told us we were on his turf. He also asked me to give him some rupees (“no,” I said) or my pen (“no,” I repeated). Another villager had already asked me for my pen; there seems to be a serious pen shortage in the desert. Finally, the drunken man stumbled off and his friend apologized for his behavior.
After lunch, we rode several more hours until arriving at a set of soft dunes, where we unloaded the camels and set up camp. Ramesh cooked more chapatti and vegetable curry. Afterward, he took out three bottles of warm Bullet beer. He used a plastic bottle to pop off the cap, which shot up and knocked him in the jaw. He rubbed the mark, and Muden tenderly patted it.
Preparing for bed, Claire and I spread two dusty blankets nearby over the sand, flicked away the dung beetles swarming around our flashlight, and lay beneath the open sky. The Milky Way stretched overhead, and shooting stars rained down. In the distance, the red lights from a row of wind turbines reminded us of how close we remained to civilization.
The next morning, Ramesh’s cheek showed the perfect imprint of that bottle cap. “When I go home, my wife will ask, ‘What is this?’ And I will say, I went on a safari with a Chinese woman, and she bit my face!” (His joke was a nod to the ethnic tensions here between Indians and Chinese; tensions flared while we were there over the Indian-supported Dalai Lama’s visit to a a disputed border area in the northeast.) We loaded the camels and rode another five hours, stopping midway for another three-hour lunch break.
That night, we arrived at a more impressive stretch of sand dunes, with powdery beige grains that massaged our bare feet and extended in a long row of crests and waves. Claire tried to slide down one, like a skier, and her body sunk deep into the sand.
While Ramesh cooked dinner, Claire taught Muden to write his name in the sand. He memorized it after two tries, along with several other words, including ‘food’ and ‘water’. Ramesh had bragged about the cleverness of his young assistant and we wondered how often he attends school—or whether a future as a tour guide is better than anything a local education gets you.
We watched the sun set and slept again on the sand dunes, on dusty blankets in the open air.
We woke at 6:30 a.m. The sand was freezing as I tip-toed behind a sand dune to take a morning pee. The sensation reminded me of taking out the trash barefoot in the New England winter. Muden served us instant coffee, biscuits, burnt toast with jam, and oranges. Claire said she dreamed last night that we were traveling, and I was singing this song:
“We’re on vacation, we’re on vacation,
We’re having a ball,
Nobody smiles when we’re doing it all!”
Maybe this was the dreamworld’s way of telling me to relax a little. I usually try to pack as much as possible into any allotted vacation time. With four months to journey from Beijing to Istanbul, including one month in India, we’re seeing a lot in a relatively short period. Even on this camel trek, I’ve been eager to move on to the next sand dune, to speed up the camels, to see as much as possible in our allotted trekking time.
After breakfast the third day, I asked to ride Johnny Walker, and we trotted along. We convinced Ramesh to let the camels run, which is more of a lumbering trot than the smooth gallop of a horse. With each bump in the saddle I worried I’d pooped my pants, as both Claire and I have felt sick from successive bouts of food poisoning. After lunch, the Jeep retrieved us and carried us back to Jaisalmer.
Living with camels for three days primed us for the world’s largest camel fair, about 100 miles east in the town of Pushkar, India. Alex Avery, a Brit who traveled through Tibet last month with me and Claire, happened to be in Pushkar for the festival as well. He snapped these photos of the 20,000-strong camel melee:
