Burnt Beak in the Desert

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Up early again due to the heat. Had some Indian brekkie and then took a wander to do this. Met the Camel Man 'Dalip' and arranged the afternoon's trip. We went with him to Deshnok to see the Karni Mata - aka The Rat Temple. It was an experience to say the least! Apparently it's good luck if one touches you, thank heaven we were unlucky... So say there's about 4000 of the varmints. We took a load of photo's as you can imagine but unfortunately don't have the skills to upload them. I guess we'll sort it out when we get back.

From Deshnok we picked up the camels. We had one each with another one pulling a cart full of supplies and men. Wandered into the desert for about 2 hours atop our camels. We'd both never ridden one before and our inner thighs could tell. We stopped for fire wood and walked to our dune digs (like John Wayne). Saw a few animals on the way, some err, antelope and err camels... Then the men prepared some food and set up a tent in case we got scared in the night.

Around this time we noticed one of our beaks was particularly red, burnt in fact. Leighton's snout must have been protruding from his Lawrence of Arabia style head wear (a dirty tea towel courtesy of the men). He was quite put out as it kind of proves who's got the biggest...

So... we had some freshly cooked food (not really that nice actually and you had to keep telling yourself the grains in it were rock salt not sand). We'd managed to persuade Dalip when organising the trip to bring some Kingfisher, so we had those over looking the desert (chilled too). Would have been nice to have seen the sunset but we were stuffing our faces at the time and missed it!. The sun went down real quick and we were getting settled for a worried nights sleep around 8:30. Decided we would be men too and slept in the open, with sand being blown into our faces and everything.

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Photos

Karni Mata 'Rat' Temple
That's as close as Im getting!

Into the desert
Camels replenish as Laurence of Arabia looks on.