The Wobble

8.30 starts are not my friend, as a result it took me a little while to get into the whole camel safari swing of things. To be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect from the whole expedition as it wasn’t one of my must do things on my trip around the world, figured if the people I was hanging out with were on for it that I wouldn’t say no to it. You do hear some unpleasant reports back though from most people about pains in bottoms and the sheer bad smells that the grumpy camels emit constantly. We didn’t get to the camels till about 11, for the first couple of hours we took a jeep ride around to a few temples in the immediate jaisalmer area. To be honest they were nothing special at all, I was more preoccupied with how I was going to cope with the big hairy ships of the desert instead.
There were just 3 of us in the group – the other guy Ivan, was also a melbournite so that gave himself and shari something to instantly relate to each other. As they nattered away about all things australian I took it handy in the back seat trying to catch up on some zzzs between occasional glances out the window over the thar desert.
We started the camel trek itself at 11 or just after, my camel was called raja. Our guides were two local village men. The main guy Badir seemed like any other indian guy to start with but as the trek progressed we really became great friends. The lad looked like he was in his late thirties at least so you can imagine my shock to discover that he was just a month older than me. Now I know I am not a cub anymore but jays twas a wee bit of a shock. After the briefest of ‘How to make yer camel stop and go’ tutorials we were set and off we went. It is now that I debunk or at least make some attempt to explain why I didn’t have the same problems that other people had on their trips, I reckon I didn’t get saddle sore because of all the times I had to peddle my way through jobstown on the way to work and maybe I could tolerate the smell a wee bit better than most having shared a house with barry for 5 or so years – not saying thats definitely the truth but it would go someway to explaining it.
We stopped for lunch at about 1.30 and sat under the shade of a lone tree in the middle of the desert, it was a fantastic setting. The meal badir prepared for us with such meagre resources was pretty phenomenal. It was so so so spicey though, the most I have encountered in the entire country by far. I went through at least 3 bananas, not chewing them but using them as a makeshift lip balm. I thought I was gonna die, but what a way it would’ve been to go – ‘Phil was happy when he died, His belly was full’!!!
After lunch we made our way to the sand dunes. Now they are not really something I thought about as tourist attraction, I mean how different cuold they be to the sanddunes you find off the west coast of ireland – how wrong can you be? It was beautiful – the only thing I kept on thinking to myself (and outloud I admit) was that it looked like a scene from the side of a Hazelbrook farm box of icecream, a land made completely of butterscotch icecream!! We were let off to explore the sanddunes just intime for another spellbinding sunset. Being in the desert the pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as other places so it gave it a much more natural effect. We had some dinner later before sleeping under the stars.
I have to say that I was in my element, we booked for just 1 night and ended up staying for 3 days out on the safari. It was such a relief to get away from the honk honk honkness of the indian towns and roads – some of the lorry horns are ridiculously loud and they play some of the most bizaare jingles. I saw a car the other day reversing that was smaller than a micra, it had its own personalised reversing music – Silent Night!! This country is NUTS!!!
So another day on the camels, Camels are great creatures. Riding them is like playing wolfenstein or one of those 1st player shooters where you can see the gun aiming out the front of you, they just bob along occasionally stopping for the odd mouthful of bushweed. They pee incessantly aswell, whatever about racehorses, camels really do take the biscuit (note the way that I refused to use the word piss, I thought that might be a bit too obvious or even crude, don’t want to offend anyone on this family blog 🙂 ). We stopped into the camel guides village where we go such an amount of attention from his family and neighbours, all the kids were pleading for pictures, school pens, ruppees or just plain chocolate. They settled for a half an hour of mainly shari playing with them – a couple of the younger lads hung around me asking for photos or were bemused by my terrible attempts at magic tricks.
We headed on that evening to the more tourist oriented sam sands. A spectacular set of sanddunes for another night under the stars. With the best of intentions to head for Bikaner the following morning we requested an earlier than normal return to jaisalmer but when we got to the hotel there was nothing that could have moved me enough to get to the bus on time. So another night in the cool little town. We decided to alter our itinerary slightly aswell, rather than head north to bikaner we decided to head east to pushkar and so booked an overnight bus to get us there. Like everthing else it was not a normal bus trip, nothing is normal here but you are going to have to wait for the next entry to read all about it – and 2 more entries before I get to the major major drama….

later,Phil

Jaisalmer for those that don’t know lies plump in the the thar desert which spans the border between india and pakistan. For an indian town it is quite small with a population of about 20,000 people. It is a major tourist destination in rajasthan with people making it a must go place to visit if you want to take a camel safari into the desert. With all the tourists heading there it fuels a pretty insistent tout scene. The first guy we met bought us chai at the bus stop in jodhpur – never one to turn down a freebe it was fairly obvious straight up that he was just a tout and not a new found best friend. We drank the chai and got on the bus. Just before we reached our destination another guy boards the bus – another tout, he makes a beeline straight to the two of us sitting quitely minding our own business at the back of the bus. He handed us a brochure which was literally identical to the one the first guy gave us – word for word. It even marked the hotel in the same part of the city – major scam alert. I really despise touts, horrible horrible people who would sell their granny if they thought they could get a cent for her but sometimes they are an element of travelling that you just have to put up with because they are pretty much everywhere.
Apart from the touts though it was a rather entertaining bus journey. This young fella – said he was 20 but he could’ve been any age, wearing a fake leather coat sat down beside us, bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t speak english that well and then spent the next hour at least talking away to us with pretty decent english, he just wouldn’t shut up though. He was a network engineer with the local telecoms company on his way out to a town short of our destination to sort out a problem. At the first chance we got we had to seperate ourselves from him because the barrage coming from his mouth was incessant!! Luckily enough at one of the stops along the way two old men sat between us and him. After another hour or so a guy sitting infront of us started to either make a phone call or tried to receive one. AT least 20 if not thirty times he goes ‘hello’, ‘hello’, ‘hello’ – our telecoms engineer friend leans over to get my attention ‘Hey pheeel, pheeel, NETWORK PROBLEMS!!!!, at which point he folds over laughing. The guy infront wasn’t too impressed but sure what can ya do?
As we stepped off the bus we could already see the touts jostling for position, rising dust of the ground as they clamoured to be the first person to welcome us to their town. There were 3 guys from one hotel, 2 from another and a couple of rickshaw drivers. I litterally had to treat them like children to get them to settle down, I told them to shut the ‘hell’ up (you know right well I didn’t say hell!!), that the next person to speak lost the game and that we were not visiting their hotel. I figured the fairest thing to do at this stage was to take a rickshaw to both hotels to see if they were decent and then pick the best one. To rub in my sense of authority I even got the two main protagonists to hug which made for a pretty bizaare yet funny scene. We ended up staying at the first place we looked at, it had tv in the room so that was enough for me 🙂

Some R and R was called for so after a pot of chai and some rest on the bed we decided that we would go have a look at what jaisalmer the town was like. It reminded me alot of the old part of san sebastian, the streets were really narrow lined on either side by sharply rising sandstone buildings, it was still unmistakeably india. Every shop owner pleaded with us to go into their shops and see what they had to sell, promising us indian price, the streets were full of cows and cow muck while the darker dead ends invariably smelt of urine – never spent much time lurking around those ones… Going around the shops with Shari was great fun, she was a proper little shopaholic with a rather crazy obsession with bangles – build that freakin bridge girl!!! We barely passed a shop without going into it and seeing what we could bargain for, most of the time we did it just for our own entertainment but without ever ridiculing the guys in the store, that would be just disrespectful and completely unnecesary. I have lost count the number of times we have left shops with hugs, handshakes or massive smiles.
After our little wander around the fort some chai was called for – you never have to go far without seeing a congregation (mostly men) hanging out somewhere. You can be sure that they are either drinking chai or just plain hot milk. Down we sat and became as is now standard the focus of everyones attention, shari got trigger happy with her camera and took some really nice photos of the whole scene. There is even a video of me interviewing some indian air force dudes who had come into town from their base for the lovely chai – not sure if that footage will ever see the light of day, jeremy paxman can rest easy in his bed!!
It was at this stage that our (and everyone elses) attention was grabbed suddenly by this super loud soundsystem that was banging out some god awful hindi music to the delight of a fairly sizable mob. Didn’t have a clue what was going on but curiosity certainly drew us towards the lights – as we got closer we could see that it was a group of completely unhibited men from teenage years to 50s 60s dancing around like buffoons while their wives daughters etc stood around with stone like expressions, it seems only the men are allowed to have fun in this town. Before I know it I get swallowed up into the middle of the frenzy – I managed to offload most of the stuff I was carrying in the tackle to shari before joining in the mayhem. These people were proper crazy, none of your half measures here. It was shortlived though, I could feel one guy get a little too close, fecker had his hand in his pocket and was giving the security chain that attaches my wallet to my trousers a stern testing. I managed to wiggle myself free with my dignity (well almost) and my wallet intact – slightly rattled I searched out shari with the hope of us heading back to the hotel for some much required kippage. At this very moment I became aware of this crazy manic man of about 50 years of age – he was dressed like a homeless but had perfect english. He was folded over laughing, tears rolling down over his grey stubble having witnessed the events for the last 10 minutes. His laugh was incredible, so loud, so forceful it contorted his body time and again. Shari has this on her camera, it is so funny and bizaare (get it up on youtube already girl, have to share it with the people). I mentioned the need to get some beer to bring back to the hotel, yer man overheard and says ‘Yes, let us have a drink’, he followed us up to the beer shop quoting lines from John Keats ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ – a really bizaare individual. We bailed on him pretty sharpish and headed off (in the wrong direction).
What really did us in was we forgot the exact name of the hotel – it was called samrat, but we were asking people where sangram hotel was – wouldn’t you know there was an actual place called sangram so everytime we asked we were pointed further and further away. On this little adventure we stumbled across a different hotel that was decked out hundreds of chairs, lots of food and drink but just a handful of people there it seemed to consume all the goodness – we asked two elderly gentlemen what was going on here – in broken english they explained to us that it was a local wedding and that they were waiting for the rest of the wedding party to arrive back before they tucked into the grub. The seemed pretty impatient, but it definitely did explain the scene we had witnessed about an hour previously.
Before we gave up on finding the hotel by ourselves we came across the wedding party once more, this time the energy had gone. It was much later and the mobile disco more resembled a funeral procession rather than a wedding party.

Our second day in Jaisalmer was a lazy one – we booked ourselves onto a camel safari the following day with the guys from the hotel. They were a proper sleazy bunch, the head honcho fancying himself as a proper ladies man (could do with losing a few stone and maybe gaining some hair) – on one occasion he walks up the steps of the hotel, unbuttoning his shirt before doing 3 pressups against the wall infront of a few german girls who were staying there. It was proper david brent stuff and very very amusing. After breakfast we wandered around the town, while waiting for shari to finish up some email stuff I sat outside on the street. The nearest shop owner called me over but I politely declined. Not taking the hint he comes over to me and halfheartedly tries to get me to go into his shop to buy some stuff. I explained to him that if I bought something in every shop I walked past, given the intended length of my journey I don’t think that I would get very far… So he quickly conceeded and wouldn’t just plain bugger off. He had a more pressing issue which he needed my help with – he began to tell me about this american girl that had been in the town a few days previously – who had left her email and worst off all the feeling of unrequited love in the pit of this lads stomach. What he wanted from me funnily enough was for me to compose him a poem that he could write to this girl to convince her to come back to jaisalmer and shack up with him on a more permenant basis. It was pretty funny, its definitely a new one on me that I would be considered an authority on this subject. Time and again I tried to tell him this but he wouldn’t take no, twas only the arrival of some other tourists that took an interest in his shop that relieved me of his presence. Maybe a sale holds more sway here than a womans heart. Oh well….
Lunch was also quite an event, we decided to go with the recommendation from the guidebook for a place called Vyas which promised some homecooked goodness. Too good an offer to pass down, what we didn’t realise though was how literal the description was. We stuggled up some seriously leg crunching stairs to be met by a young boy called raju – he was about 10 years old. We asked him if we could head on upstairs to watch the sunset over the golden fort while we ate our dinner at which point the boys grandmother though at this stage she was nothing more than a coarse disembodied voice from around the kitchen corner informed us that ‘sunset not possible today’ – gonna be a long one so!! We were directed towards the residential families own dining table which had a full view of proceedings, twas alittle awkward at first but we soon grew to like the place. We ordered some rajasthani thali and some kashmiri biryani – which for those who don’t know is steamed rice mixed with lots and lots of fruit. Tastes really really nice.. The food was good but watching the grandmother and the grandson interact was the real treat – when she finally did appear she seemed to have some problem with her back that rendered her almost right angled to the ground in a simian like pose. He rough voice really betrayed her really lovely nature. The Power went out halfway through but they were well prepared for such an event, out with some typical campsite equipment – a gas stove pretty much and with the help of some torches they completed the meal for us.
The rest of the day we just lazed around, taking in the really beautiful town, its views and the funny people that worked in each of the shops. We left the following morning for our 1 night, 2 day safari in the desert…