Camel riding in the desert

Camal riding in the desert, originally uploaded by goingglobal.

Jaismalner is one of the best locations in Rajastan to go on camel safari, as its in the heart of the desert. So me and my Argentinian friend Tito decided to embark on a two-day one-night safari to see the desert and experience camel riding first hand.

Now I have riden a camel before for a think a few minutes in Australia but nothing really prepared me for this experience. Riding a camel is really rather difficult as controlling it or should I say 'driving' is almost impossible. You have reins which you pull to turn the camels head in the direction you want to go but whether the camel decides to follow you is another matter. This is especially the case if the camel smells a nearby female camel in which it goes off in a totally different direction in pursuit of the lady!

Camels also smell a hell of a lot. Seriously when I came home I smelt myself and all I could smell was camel! Imagine how horses smell and multipy that by a factor of ten! They also have this habit of burping and farting rather a lot which makes camel riding in a line a rather amusing experience.

What is surprising is how tall camels are. When you are riding a camel your quite a few feet of the ground. Aside from the height camels carry an amazingly large amount of luggage on them very easily.

One of the camels which usually took the lead had its tung hanging out with saliva dripping down the side. I wondered what was wrong with it so when I asked the camel man. 'Ah that camel is horny, permanently horny! Yeah it turns out that when camels get 'excited' they dribble lots and hang their tung out as a way to attract the female camels.

Our party was an interesting collection of people. Numbering 9 we had English, Argentinian, German, Dutch, Polish and Korean which made conversations interesting.

We spent the night sleeping on a sand dune overlooking the desert. During the day the temperatures get very high but at night they really plumet substancially.

On both days we visited local villages. All the villages were either Hindu or Muslim and were never mixed. At first it was difficult to tell the difference but after a while it became obvious that in the Muslim villages the women were veiled whereas they tended not to be in the Hindu ones. As it was also the Hindu festival of Holi whenever we entered a Hindu village we got peltered with paint and dyes by the children!

All in all a very interesting experience, especially as it only cost me $18 for the two days!