Camel Safari in the Desert!

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So we just finished the last exciting thing we had planned in India, and might I say that our trip here couldn't have ended in a better way.

To idea of not going to Jaisalmer and the thought of just staying in Rishikesh for the whole time we were in India now seems ludicrous to me. We had 4 months in India and I still didn't even come close to seeing everything that I wanted to see while we were here. The camel safari was by far the most fun I've had while being here in India, maybe because of the open desert and riding on the camel or maybe because of the group of people we were with but either way it was a blast. We got to Jaisalmer on the 25th in the afternoon and outside of the train station there was a free jeep that took us to the hotel that we wanted to stay at. We stayed inside the fort at Jaisalmer which was made all out of sandstone which was really amazing to look at. We set up our camel safari nearly first thing since we only had 3 full days in Jaisalmer and we wanted to do a 2 day camel safari. We went to a place called Ganesh Travels and set up our safari through them as it was recommended in the Lonely Planet. After doing this we went for some food and then to do a little shopping for our safari. I wanted to get a rope to use as a belt so I could actually keep my camera on me instead of having to dig into my bag every time I wanted to take a picture. I bought a piece of nilon rope for 5 rupees which is actually a bit steep and then Cami realized that she had left her sunglasses in her other bag that we left at a hotel in Delhi. You can't very well be out in the desert and not have any sunglasses so we bought some sunglasses to for 80 rupees after some bargaining. Then Cami decided that it would be a good idea to get a safari hat so we could keep the sun off our faces and out necks. We were right at the main gate of the fort trying on hats and Cami decided that they were all to big for her, but they fit me well so I bought one for 30 rupees. As we began to walk back up towards the fort a jeep comes flying by and I see a familiar face poke out and yell "hey fuckers!" It turns out it is our friend Rory who we spent nearly a month with in Rishikesh and was just returning with his girlfriend from his own safari. It was strange because we had absolutely no idea that he was going to be there. We walked back up to the fort with him and exchanged stories of what we had been doing since we split in Rishikesh, but wait, it gets weirder. As we came around a corner of one of the alleyways Rory says, "oh there's Alicia." I look up and there is Alicia (another girl who was staying with us at the ashram in Rishikesh) and she's with one of her guy friends that she met up with named Justin. She and Justin had arrived earlier that day and we find out that they also signed up for the same camel safari as Cami and I. We talked for a while and then set up a time to meet for dinner later that night which actually turned out to be quite the fiasco.

We met at 7:30 and the group consisted of Cami, Rory, Alicia, Justin, Rory's girlfriend Lavon and a girl from England that Lavon had met named Jessica. Jessica caught my eye almost immediately because she was extremely attractive, but after introduction we set off to a restaurant that Justin and Alicia had scouted a bit earlier. We arrived at the restaurant and ordered our food, but it turns out they only had 1 cook who was also the man who took our order. It took around 2 and a half hours to get our food brought to us, and it wasn't the food we all ordered. They have things called Thali's here which is basically a bit of rice and some chapati and beans and curry and dal and maybe some sweets and 4 of us ordered these, but all different types. The cook decided this was too much work for him so he just made 4 of the "basic talhi's and didn't make any of the nicer ones that the other 3 had ordered. Also Rory kept getting up and going to help the cook by making Chapati's and small things like that. This would be considered weird anywhere else, but not in India. You'd think that spending all this time sitting around waiting for our food would be really irritating but it actually didn't turn out all that bad. We had a great time talking and making jokes, and I had a great time also just looking at Jessica because it had been a while since I'd seen a really good looking girl while in India. After we finished eating it was near midnight so we all hurried back to our hotels, but didn't split up until after I'd given my e-mail address to Jessica for facebook... still waiting on that friend request. Anyways enough about my non existent love life, time to get into the good stuff, the camel safari.

We all met at a little restaurant above Ganesh Travels and ate breakfast before heading out. Alicia and Justin we had already met. Then came a mad named Connor who lived in New York but was originally from Ireland. Then a french couple who were a bit lovey dovey for me at first glance, but what can you do. A German man named Clausse who had extremely long blond hair and extremely pale skin and who took around 5 minutes to spit out a sentence in English. Oh and some Korean's came too but whose counting. Once we were all there we set out in jeeps for around an hour into the desert to get away from the city. We arrived on some spot on the side of the road near a hut and around 12 camels and a group of people returning from their safari. I don't know what I was doing for the first couple of minutes but before I knew it people were claiming camels. The group that was returning from their safari loaded up in the jeep we had come in and were off, and I was late in the claiming. By the time I got to the camels only 2 were left, and both didn't look too appealing to me. I took the bigger of the 2 because he seemed like he would be faster and he had giant tufts of hair on his upper legs which seemed like it would make him more of a badass, I was wrong. The first time getting up on the camels is definitely the worst. The camel sits until you get on it, but then it stands right up and all your told to do is hold on. First up are his hind legs which almost sends you straight over the front of the saddle and onto the camels head as your almost looking at the ground. Then his front legs straighten up and you are finally sitting flat! It's amazing how high up off the ground you are on the camel and how small people look while you are up there. We then took off into the desert and walked for around 5 minutes until we stopped for the first time which I wasn't too happy about. We stopped in a little village and basically just took a few photos of the adobe like huts and were haggled by every kid there for rupees and then left again. When we were mounting on the camel's for the second time we noticed that Alicia's camel was severely foaming at the mouth. After voicing our concern to Mr. Khan, our guide, he notified us that it was currently "love season" for the camels, and to quote him "the camels are very, very horny." When the Koreans expressed confusion, Mr. Khan went into great detail elaborating on the hornyness of the camels, using words like erection, and come etc.. until the Koreans had fully understood. I guess all that Alilcia's camel was thinking about was sex, because it literally foamed at the mouth the entire time we were on the camels. Once we were off again from the first village and I was up on my camel I decided to take my sandals off, so I did and stuffed them underneath some rope that was holding blankets to the back of my saddle. Then when I was just starting to enjoy myself I began to feel something sprinkling the back of my shirt and my new safari hat, and it stunk. I looked back and noticed that the camel was sticking it's tail underneath its ass and urinating on it and then flipping it up over its back and sprinkling me with it's own urine!! I was disgusted but couldn't really do anything about it because the caravan was moving so I just kinda leaned forward and tried to get the least amount of urine on me as possible, but was really actually quite unsuccessful. After my camel had no more urine left and I could relax again, I noticed that all the other camels tails were tied to the side so that they couldn't sprinkle their passengers with urine, all but mine. After a while my camel began to sprinkle me again with urine, but this time we were stopped and I complained to one of the guides and they came over and finally tied up my camels tail and told me the camel did it because of the "love season." This was all good, but it didn't hide the fact that I now had sprinkles of urine all over my white shirt and white safari hat and smelt like pheromones. We road for around another half and hour and then stopped for a moment which is when I looked down at the spot I had tucked my sandals, they were gone. The camel ride is a bumpy one, and my sandals had tumbled overboard during it. I notified the guide I had lost my sandals, and after I assured them it would be a tough journey without them beings there was cactus and pricklys, they sent a boy back for them. I felt bad that he had to run back without a camel to try and find my 2 dollar sandal from wal-mart, but I really did need them. We continued onwards while the boy ran back to find them, and he didn't catch up with us again until we had reached our lunch spot. I thanked him about 20 times and then we ate. The food was alright, not the best but enough to keep hunger at bay. After eating that day we continued riding for about 2 hours until we got to the sand dunes that we were staying at that night. I was a little upset because a lot of camels were allowed to go off on their own, they stayed close to the caravan but weren't tied to it. Sometimes these camels would run too, but mine was tied to the damn caravan the whole time and I was told he couldn't go on his own because he was too damn horny! The first dune was the biggest and best of the whole trip, and we actually got their just in time to catch the sun-set. The sand was just like sand on a beach and we walked around in bare feet for a long time and scouted the entire dune which was amazing. Clausse took some photos of the sunset with his nice camera and got some with me in them, so I'm excited to see them. I also took some great photos. After the sun set and I wrote "Colin was here" in giant letters on the side of one dune, we were called for dinner and ate around the camp fire. We were also supplied with giant 650 ml Kingfisher beers that were nice and cold. We sat around the fire and talked for a long time and the Indian men sang a couple of songs. When the Indians told us to sing a song I decided I was going to sing a song called Ellias by Dispatch. I had the beat in my head so I told Cami how to play it on a water jug and she did and I sang along. The song has some sort of strange African tribal language to it and everyone really seemed to enjoy it. After the singing and beer drinking was finished, around 7 of us went up onto the highest dune of them all and layed on the sand and watched the stars and looked for shooting stars. I hadn't seen the sky that clear for a long time and it was nice to look up and see all the stars, although none of us knew any of the constellations except for Orion's Belt and The Big Dipper, and the really sad part is it took us almost the entire night to find the big dipper. We went to sleep around midnight that night and luckily we brought our sleeping bags, because apparently the blankets the guides provided just wasn't enough according to Alicia, Justin and Connor.

The next morning we woke up around 7 and were served Chai immediately and then breakfast shortly after. It turns out all the Korean's were only staying that first night, and the french couple decided they didn't want to stay another day and night because the guy Matthew didn't like to ride the camel and had been walking the whole time the day before. Before I knew it the Koreans and French couple were off and luckily they took my camel with them along with all the other problem camels which I was not upset about at all. This time I got paired with the French girls old camel, and it was much more comfortable and was allowed to go off on it's own. This is where the trip got REALLY fun.

We were taught how to control our camels to do what we wanted, and taught the words to make our camels run!! The word was "Dongala," and was pretty much the only thing I said the whole rest of the trip while on camel. We would take our harness in our hand and swing it around to give the lasso effect, and scream out DONGALA, DONGALA, and our camels would TAKE OFF! Sometimes you had to slap the side of the saddle with the harness to make them think you were hitting them, and then they would run, but usually Dongala would work. That whole morning and afternoon of camel riding was spent running around the desert, and we all had a blast. Sometimes our camels didn't listen to us though and Mr. Khan would come behind our camel on his and hit our camels in the ass with a giant stick, and that would usually do the trick. We stopped at a smaller dune during the second day, and spent around 3 hours in the middle of the day sitting in the shade eating lunch and playing cards. We really got to know Alicia a lot better and her friend Justin, and Connor turned out to be a really great guy. Clausse was there, but he didn't speak the best English so that made it hard to communicate with him. That night we arrived at another sand dune and caught the sun-set again, although it wasn't as good as the night before because the dune was quite a bit smaller. Three other safari's were staying at the dune that night, but we were all spread out so we didn't really see them at all. We sat around the fire again that night and drank some beer, which was provided by some kid that literally just appeared out of nowhere with a bag of beer over his shoulder. I taught them all a drinking game called buzz, where you just count around in a circle and you aren't allowed to say any numbers that have a seven in them, can be divided by 7, or are double numbers like 11 22 33 etc.. Every time you get to one of these numbers you are supposed to say buzz and the number is skipped and the order reversed. If u mess up and say the wrong number or don't know what number to say you have to take a drink and start over again. We played this for a long time and had a great time and then went up to a dune to watch the stars for a little bit before bed. We saw some shooting stars and then it started to get really cold and we headed to bed. Around 3 in the morning we all woke up to Alicia telling us that she was stung by a scorpion on her right big toe. We all freaked out and grabbed our flashlights and shined them on her sleeping area, and sure enough there was a tiny scorpion crawling around her feet. We all jumped up and I ran to wake up Mr. Khan because we had no idea what to do. Mr. Khan came running and told us to all stay calm and immediately killed the scorpion with 2 sticks. Then he went and got some sugar and ground it up and held it on Alicia's toe for the next 30 minutes, which supposedly sucks out the poison. Alicia said it was extremely painful and I felt really bad for her, and amazed at how unlucky it was that she had been stung. Mr Khan said that he hadn't seen a scorpion in 5 months since they didn't really come out when it was cold, and of course Alicia somehow got stung. She finally decided to try and go to sleep and somehow she managed. She remained extremely calm throughout the whole thing and I have to give her props for doing so. The next morning she said the pain was a bit less, but still hurt pretty bad. We loaded up everything and headed back on the last camel ride before the end of our trip. This was really fun since our camels ran literally almost the whole way back. It was great because we came in right after another group came in and we are all screaming dangala and whipping our camels saddles and acting like camel cowboys! I don't think they got to do what we were doing, and they all seemed to really want to be in our place. It was really fun to end our safari in a bang like that. I said goodbye to my camel and so did everyone else and we took a few group photos before we got back in the jeep. Overall it was such a fun trip and such a great experience. Even though I smelt like camel urine the whole time and Alicia got stung by a scorpion we all still had a blast. We went back into town on the jeeps and all took the best showers of our lives before heading on our different ways. Cami and I are now back in Delhi and we met back up with Rory and Lavon and Cody from our ashram was also here, so we all went to a Bollywood film last night for one last Horah! Cami and I leave India in 2 days and then it's off to Paris for the next 2 months. As long as I can manage to keep my cool here in Delhi, which I have deemed the shittiest place in India, my impression of India will be great.

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