One Year Away

Joseph

We’ve added more photos to the India album…including one of Penny in a turban.  Enjoy!

At the western edge of India lies the Great Thar desert.  Jaisalmer is the main town here, it was founded almost 1000 years ago on an ancient trade route from Central Asia.  Its location made its inhabitants wealthy and gave it strategic importance.  To rule the area the maharajah built a fort on top of a hill and that was what we came here to visit.  My description won’t do it justice so I will post photos soon.  To me the fort looks like something out of an illustrated children’s book.

There is a also thriving camel safari industry in this town.  Tourists head out into the desert for a couple of days and then return to Jaisalmer.  The heat at this time of the year makes it almost impossible to do anything outdoors from 11 AM to 4 PM so we chose to do only a 2 day 1 night trip.  Thank god! 

We met up with an Irish guy and our two camel drivers in the morning. The camels were huge and well taken care of.  They also seemed a lot smarter than the clumsy beasts we rode in Mongolia.  We rode all morning through the barren landscape before stopping under a shade tree for lunch.  We were  happy to get off the camels, our legs and rear ends were killing us.  These camels had no stirrups so our legs got very sore from hanging and swinging around.

The heat was so bad that we stayed in the shade of the tree for almost four hours, eating and napping, before we left.  After a shorter ride we arrived at the sand dunes where we would sleep.  The desert here is not like the typical sea of dunes that most people associate with deserts.  It is mainly dry scrub land that gets some rain during the monsoon season so there are small bushes and the rare shade tree.  In some areas there are dunes and we set up our blankets on a flat stretch of sand to sleep. 

When the sun went down the dung beetles came out.  These large black insects crawled all over the sand until they found a bit of camel dung and then walked backwards while rolling it with their hind legs. Really interesting to see.  As it got dark the stars came out very brightly and the temperature dropped to a comfortable level for sleep.  At 3 AM I woke up because of the cold.  Thinking that blankets would not be necessary, Penny and I had only one small blanket to share to keep us warm.  That was when I remembered that everyone says the desert gets quite cold at night.  I guess I forgot that in the 45 C heat of the day.

The next day we rode hard and fast in the morning to get to our shady lunch stop. The camel
drivers
asked us if we wanted to ride further and we all emphatically answered, “No!”.  A jeep came and picked us up from where we were and drove us back to town.

Although it was an experience I won’t forget it’s not one I need to repeat anytime soon.  A word of advice if you are thinking of doing a camel trip – make sure of two things; 1) the temperature is reasonable and, 2) that the camels have stirrups.