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whathoThe nine of us sit in a vaguely agitated circle in a scrubby clearing in the Great Thar Desert. Barring Jon and the two Canadian girls who are bussing it straight to Jaisalmer, we've driven all morning from Jodhpur to the outskirts of Devikot; we've duly and deeply marvelled at the sites of the astonishingly slick and pothole-free road, better than a lot of British B-roads, the decorated trucks – the overturned trucks – the women digging at the roadworks, the beginnings of the desert with its rocks and stunted trees and wild peacocks; we've kicked our feet up onto the seats in front, played word-games, shared pistachio nuts and listened to Sid telling us about his horoscope that predicted he'd have two wives, one of which might be C.; we've had Pokaran, site of the nuclear tests, pointed out to us; we've parked up in this clearing, we've lunched on blankets spread over the sand, courtesy of the group that runs the camel safari and we've wandered out into the not particularly barren desert – all hillocks and lambs and berries and groves – to get ourselves accustomed to weeing behind bushes. Now we're looking nervously back at the road, just a few yards behind us, waiting for the camels to arrive, and I haven't told my family about this part of trip.
Pam is not entirely well: the first of the group to succumb to the stomach problems that are considered inevitable. She's debating which of her massive supply of medicaments she ought to take, and settles on Immodium. I have deep sympathy for anyone needing to take Immodium prior to disappearing into the desert for three days.
The camels arrive. They remain stupidly tall.
Dan's ridden camels before. He strides out into the pack and selects his steed. The driver lowers the chosen camel – Hak – and Dan mounts the saddle in front of the hump. I try and take note of how the camel rises: the back end goes up first, about halfway, then the front, then the back again. Then Dan's swaying gently about 20ft up in the air, the camel driver behind him, and we all feel vaguely upset.
The others are prodded forward one by one. I'm one of the last to mount up, and I've been assigned to a camel in the charge of a child. Arun. He looks about twelve, a scrawnyish boy with a smaller, utterly silent brother tagging along: the sons of one of the elder camel drivers. 'This is my camel,' he says, with unshakeable pride, and I think I'd be unshakeably proud if I was a kid in charge of my very own camel. The camel, pale and bony and faintly insolent, is kneeling and ready and doesn't acknowledge my presence. I sit, which is easy enough, and find the stirrups. Arun hops on behind me and tells me to lean back. Almost as he says it, the camel's rear end goes up slightly, which is fine. Then its front end goes up, and I fall for it – I lean forward slightly to straighten myself, at which point the back end goes the rest of the way up and I pitch rapidly towards its neck. Arun catches me by the arm. 'Okay,' he says. 'No problem'. Somewhere behind me, I hear Laura mount up with a joyous shriek.
We set off along a track that runs alongside the main road. It's so absurdly high up, the back of a camel, that I spend the first minute or so just sort of thinking to myself 'well, well, here we are, possibly there may be injuries', but once that minute's passed I feel not uncomfortable. It's a very swaying sort of a motion – there's a lot more movement than there is with a horse's walk, and you have to really loosen up your hips. Seasickness of a kind is, apparently, somewhat common.
It's not long before Arun – an active sort of a lad – nudges the camel into a trot with the intention of getting us on point. 'A trot,' I say, out loud, and Arun says something that I expect means 'beg pardon?', and I say 'no, nothing'. But the trotting is fine, much better than the walking. Contradictory beasts, camels – the trot, which you must, of course, sit to, is much more comfortable than a horse's trot, much more level and easier than the walk.
Shortly, we peel off the track and thud gently into the sand, and then it becomes slightly fantastic. As we pass the line and edge away from it slightly, I can watch all the others, looking variously nervous and excited and confident but all entirely full of wonder. I catch Joe's eye as I pass and he waves and smiles. A flock of lambs comes tottering past, an ancient robe-swathed shepherd behind them. We threw him the best namastes we can manage from the backs of our swaying camels.
An hour in. Arun and I are a fair way ahead of the bulk of the pack by now: only Sid, steering his own camel, with Arun's little brother riding pillion, is keeping up with us. I'm properly relaxed, enough to look about me or stroke my (Arun's) camel's bristly shoulders or smile to myself because I'm riding a camel.
I turn to Sid. He's about twenty yards to my left and a shade behind us. 'We're winning,' I yell. Sid grins and spurs his camel on. So does Arun. We're properly running now, and I reach up to tighten the chin-strap on my sunhat.
'I hear you're studying English literature', bellows Sid.
'Yes,' I yell back, double-taking only slightly.
'I studied Eng lit at university as well,' he hollers. 'Do you like Keats?'
'Ha!' I shout, partly because I don't much like Keats but primarily because the camels are now trotting as fast as they possibly can, and I'm in the middle of the Great Thar Desert and there's a fantastic breeze in my face and I can see five wind turbines on the horizon and a mud-walled village in the distance and there's a peacock in the scrub and we're talking about English literature and it's mostly entirely outstanding. 'Not my thing,' I say. 'But how about Chaucer?'
'Oh yes!' says Sid. 'What's you favourite bit of the Canterbury Tales?' The boys are exchanging glances, and the younger one has his arms outstretched.
'Wife of Bath.'
'Pardoner's.'
And we ride on in silence for a time, occasionally laughing randomly to ourselves. I take the copy of Carry On, Jeeves out of my front pocket and read a couple of paragraphs, purely so I can say I read PG Wodehouse on the back of a trotting camel, but in truth it makes me vaguely motion sick. I look over my shoulder trying to catch sight of the others.
'Miles behind,' says Arun. 'That's my village.' He points and we wheel towards it.
The camel drops to the ground. I remember to lean backwards through the whole process, which seems to work fairly well. I root about in the rags around the saddle horn for my water bottle, and when I look up I'm surrounded by children. Arun picks a few out and introduces them as his brothers and sisters. I namaste them, photograph them and quickly find something important to do somewhere else, being somewhat unnerved by hordes of little children.
The village is the same colour as the sand. It consists of a handful of groups of round earth huts surrounded by a low earth wall and looks unsettlingly like Skara Brae in Orkney, only inhabited. Skara Brae's a museum. Some people are wandering into the huts for a gander. I want to as well, because it's fascinating, but I refrain, because it's not a museum and I think the women in there are trying to work.
'Topi,' says a little boy, pointing to my hat.
'Ji,' I say, nodding, and add 'Meri topi' in case perhaps he wanted it, because I can see Pam detaching her watch from another kid's arm, and technically I don't believe I've a right to own anything, but I don't really want to burn to a frazzle.
Some of the village children are showing off various healing sores and minor cuts. 'If they need it, we give them medicine,' says Sid. 'Antiseptics.' He points to a small girl's bare heel. 'We treated that sore last time we came through and it's much better now. These kids don't need anything at the moment. They just like the packaging.'
But it makes Mel cry all the same. Out of her earshot, I snap slightly, asking a random shrub if she'd never seen the news before. I seem to be offended at her surprise – the idea that it's different because she's here to witness it in person, as though it's not worth the angst if you're only getting a report. Probably I just feel I should've given up my topi.
After half an hour or so, we mount up again. Arun spurs the camel to its feet without warning me, but I'm ready for it this time. I see Jane's camel rise while she's leaning forward. It's vaguely terrifying and she swears very understandably: I have no idea how she manages to hang on.
Arun and I trot around the rest of the group in a full circle, which pleases me unnecessarily, then lead them out westwards. Dan, behind me, is singing scout songs. He is entirely tone deaf, and I'm fairly relieved when some of the camel drivers drown him out with Rajasthani folk songs. Arun sings along too until we're completely out of earshot.
I talk to Arun a little. I ask him how old he is, refusing, at his prompt to guess, because I'm rubbish at that. He says he's sixteen and he knows full well I don't believe him. Actually I do. He also claims to be married. I don't know about that, but I wish he'd stop asking me if I was married, and I also wish he'd let go of my elbow sometimes. I discover that he cannot write his own name but he learnt to speak and understand English from conversing with tourists. He also has a fair amount of Spanish. I tell him what I'm studying. He tells me that the camel ('my camel', he says, with emphasis) is called King Kong. He's going to race King Kong in Jaisalmer next month, and if he wins, he'll buy a second camel with the prize money. When Arun hit ten, his father asked him if he wanted to go to school or to have his own camel and learn how to run the safari – his brother's in training – and he chose the camel. Atta boy, Arun, I manage not to say out loud. Reading suddenly seems massively unimportant and I have to work fairly hard to bear in mind that, among the girls in the village, it seemed moreso. But if I was Arun, I'd have chosen the camels as well.
We're doing a sort of a lope now, which feels smoother again than trotting. We turn ninety degrees towards a line of dunes. The rest of the train is nowhere in sight and, though cantering through a hilly desert on a camel is slightly divine, the isolation is becoming mildly unsettling. Arun keeps asking me questions and I'm running out of things to say. I've taken to going 'I don't know'.
'Everything you don't know,' says Arun, which is fair enough.
We reach the top of the dunes and spot the camp: a row of five rather pretty tents with pointy roofs and some jeeps that hopefully contain all our luggage. King Kong slithers rather uncertainly down the other side. I dismount. Arun leads King Kong to a nearby grove and I totter bow-legged to my chosen tent (I should've mentioned that I lost a stirrup early on and spent the first half of the ride holding my right leg in the position it should've been resting, and now it hurts like sin). The tent is armed with a quilt and a blanket (two thereof, 'cause I'm still sharing with C.) and a very, very thin mattress. I have time to pour a jugful of tepid water over my head and unpack my rucksack before the first of the group appears at the top of the dunes.
That evening we sit around a roaring fire on blankets and chat and laugh and are generally amused to be in a desert. We eat daal and roti wheeled out of the kitchen tent. We get up briefly to have a race up the sand dunes and catch the setting sun, which is outrageously beautiful. We admire the distant camels. We seek out toiletish bushes. Sid challenges us to run down the sand dunes and turns out to know more about the tricksy ways of sand dunes than I. I fall down. He does not. I think I pull off a rather good save though, frankly, by crossing my arms and pointing my toes balletically so I pick up a ludicrous amount of speed and have a chance of retaining sufficient poise to be able to convince my fellows that I meant to roll down the dune all along and had no intention of running. It's riotous fun, if slightly bruising, and I earn a round of applause when I fetch up in a happily unbroken heap at the bottom. Dan shares with us the slang he's learned from infiltrating the camel drivers. Apparently snorting like a camel means something particularly sordid. Everyone else outlines their previous travel history. I say else because I turn out to be far and away the least travelled – this is my first long haul trip, my first solo trip of any description and the first time I've spent more than four days away from my family. Most of the others have been around the world. Sometimes twice: C's en route to Nepal after this, then China, Australia, various bits of south America before landing up in Spain again. Laura and Joe have taken several mildly adventurous holidays all over the world since he retired. Dan has things to say about Argentina.
Last thing at night, Dan and Sid are humming a very catchy tune that I recall hearing the camel drivers singing earlier in the day. It turns out to be the title tune in a film Dan saw in the south of India before he joined this tour: 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' (Tomorrow May Not Come), which – and sorry to break the flow – will because ridiculously important later in the narrative. I fancy trying to pick it out on a guitar. I don't have a guitar. But as Dan's humming, I take it as a sound reason to retire to my tent.
It's freezing now but I have to lie as long as I can with my head sticking out of the tent flap, because, around Orion, my favourite constellation, who inexplicably looks the same here in the desert as he does in the UK, there are hundreds and hundreds of stars I've never seen before.
I'm probably going to have another crack at Nanowrimo this year, so it's fairly likely January 7th won't be posted till December - apologies.
Pam is not entirely well: the first of the group to succumb to the stomach problems that are considered inevitable. She's debating which of her massive supply of medicaments she ought to take, and settles on Immodium. I have deep sympathy for anyone needing to take Immodium prior to disappearing into the desert for three days.
The camels arrive. They remain stupidly tall.
Dan's ridden camels before. He strides out into the pack and selects his steed. The driver lowers the chosen camel – Hak – and Dan mounts the saddle in front of the hump. I try and take note of how the camel rises: the back end goes up first, about halfway, then the front, then the back again. Then Dan's swaying gently about 20ft up in the air, the camel driver behind him, and we all feel vaguely upset.
The others are prodded forward one by one. I'm one of the last to mount up, and I've been assigned to a camel in the charge of a child. Arun. He looks about twelve, a scrawnyish boy with a smaller, utterly silent brother tagging along: the sons of one of the elder camel drivers. 'This is my camel,' he says, with unshakeable pride, and I think I'd be unshakeably proud if I was a kid in charge of my very own camel. The camel, pale and bony and faintly insolent, is kneeling and ready and doesn't acknowledge my presence. I sit, which is easy enough, and find the stirrups. Arun hops on behind me and tells me to lean back. Almost as he says it, the camel's rear end goes up slightly, which is fine. Then its front end goes up, and I fall for it – I lean forward slightly to straighten myself, at which point the back end goes the rest of the way up and I pitch rapidly towards its neck. Arun catches me by the arm. 'Okay,' he says. 'No problem'. Somewhere behind me, I hear Laura mount up with a joyous shriek.
We set off along a track that runs alongside the main road. It's so absurdly high up, the back of a camel, that I spend the first minute or so just sort of thinking to myself 'well, well, here we are, possibly there may be injuries', but once that minute's passed I feel not uncomfortable. It's a very swaying sort of a motion – there's a lot more movement than there is with a horse's walk, and you have to really loosen up your hips. Seasickness of a kind is, apparently, somewhat common.
It's not long before Arun – an active sort of a lad – nudges the camel into a trot with the intention of getting us on point. 'A trot,' I say, out loud, and Arun says something that I expect means 'beg pardon?', and I say 'no, nothing'. But the trotting is fine, much better than the walking. Contradictory beasts, camels – the trot, which you must, of course, sit to, is much more comfortable than a horse's trot, much more level and easier than the walk.
Shortly, we peel off the track and thud gently into the sand, and then it becomes slightly fantastic. As we pass the line and edge away from it slightly, I can watch all the others, looking variously nervous and excited and confident but all entirely full of wonder. I catch Joe's eye as I pass and he waves and smiles. A flock of lambs comes tottering past, an ancient robe-swathed shepherd behind them. We threw him the best namastes we can manage from the backs of our swaying camels.
An hour in. Arun and I are a fair way ahead of the bulk of the pack by now: only Sid, steering his own camel, with Arun's little brother riding pillion, is keeping up with us. I'm properly relaxed, enough to look about me or stroke my (Arun's) camel's bristly shoulders or smile to myself because I'm riding a camel.
I turn to Sid. He's about twenty yards to my left and a shade behind us. 'We're winning,' I yell. Sid grins and spurs his camel on. So does Arun. We're properly running now, and I reach up to tighten the chin-strap on my sunhat.
'I hear you're studying English literature', bellows Sid.
'Yes,' I yell back, double-taking only slightly.
'I studied Eng lit at university as well,' he hollers. 'Do you like Keats?'
'Ha!' I shout, partly because I don't much like Keats but primarily because the camels are now trotting as fast as they possibly can, and I'm in the middle of the Great Thar Desert and there's a fantastic breeze in my face and I can see five wind turbines on the horizon and a mud-walled village in the distance and there's a peacock in the scrub and we're talking about English literature and it's mostly entirely outstanding. 'Not my thing,' I say. 'But how about Chaucer?'
'Oh yes!' says Sid. 'What's you favourite bit of the Canterbury Tales?' The boys are exchanging glances, and the younger one has his arms outstretched.
'Wife of Bath.'
'Pardoner's.'
And we ride on in silence for a time, occasionally laughing randomly to ourselves. I take the copy of Carry On, Jeeves out of my front pocket and read a couple of paragraphs, purely so I can say I read PG Wodehouse on the back of a trotting camel, but in truth it makes me vaguely motion sick. I look over my shoulder trying to catch sight of the others.
'Miles behind,' says Arun. 'That's my village.' He points and we wheel towards it.
The camel drops to the ground. I remember to lean backwards through the whole process, which seems to work fairly well. I root about in the rags around the saddle horn for my water bottle, and when I look up I'm surrounded by children. Arun picks a few out and introduces them as his brothers and sisters. I namaste them, photograph them and quickly find something important to do somewhere else, being somewhat unnerved by hordes of little children.
The village is the same colour as the sand. It consists of a handful of groups of round earth huts surrounded by a low earth wall and looks unsettlingly like Skara Brae in Orkney, only inhabited. Skara Brae's a museum. Some people are wandering into the huts for a gander. I want to as well, because it's fascinating, but I refrain, because it's not a museum and I think the women in there are trying to work.
'Topi,' says a little boy, pointing to my hat.
'Ji,' I say, nodding, and add 'Meri topi' in case perhaps he wanted it, because I can see Pam detaching her watch from another kid's arm, and technically I don't believe I've a right to own anything, but I don't really want to burn to a frazzle.
Some of the village children are showing off various healing sores and minor cuts. 'If they need it, we give them medicine,' says Sid. 'Antiseptics.' He points to a small girl's bare heel. 'We treated that sore last time we came through and it's much better now. These kids don't need anything at the moment. They just like the packaging.'
But it makes Mel cry all the same. Out of her earshot, I snap slightly, asking a random shrub if she'd never seen the news before. I seem to be offended at her surprise – the idea that it's different because she's here to witness it in person, as though it's not worth the angst if you're only getting a report. Probably I just feel I should've given up my topi.
After half an hour or so, we mount up again. Arun spurs the camel to its feet without warning me, but I'm ready for it this time. I see Jane's camel rise while she's leaning forward. It's vaguely terrifying and she swears very understandably: I have no idea how she manages to hang on.
Arun and I trot around the rest of the group in a full circle, which pleases me unnecessarily, then lead them out westwards. Dan, behind me, is singing scout songs. He is entirely tone deaf, and I'm fairly relieved when some of the camel drivers drown him out with Rajasthani folk songs. Arun sings along too until we're completely out of earshot.
I talk to Arun a little. I ask him how old he is, refusing, at his prompt to guess, because I'm rubbish at that. He says he's sixteen and he knows full well I don't believe him. Actually I do. He also claims to be married. I don't know about that, but I wish he'd stop asking me if I was married, and I also wish he'd let go of my elbow sometimes. I discover that he cannot write his own name but he learnt to speak and understand English from conversing with tourists. He also has a fair amount of Spanish. I tell him what I'm studying. He tells me that the camel ('my camel', he says, with emphasis) is called King Kong. He's going to race King Kong in Jaisalmer next month, and if he wins, he'll buy a second camel with the prize money. When Arun hit ten, his father asked him if he wanted to go to school or to have his own camel and learn how to run the safari – his brother's in training – and he chose the camel. Atta boy, Arun, I manage not to say out loud. Reading suddenly seems massively unimportant and I have to work fairly hard to bear in mind that, among the girls in the village, it seemed moreso. But if I was Arun, I'd have chosen the camels as well.
We're doing a sort of a lope now, which feels smoother again than trotting. We turn ninety degrees towards a line of dunes. The rest of the train is nowhere in sight and, though cantering through a hilly desert on a camel is slightly divine, the isolation is becoming mildly unsettling. Arun keeps asking me questions and I'm running out of things to say. I've taken to going 'I don't know'.
'Everything you don't know,' says Arun, which is fair enough.
We reach the top of the dunes and spot the camp: a row of five rather pretty tents with pointy roofs and some jeeps that hopefully contain all our luggage. King Kong slithers rather uncertainly down the other side. I dismount. Arun leads King Kong to a nearby grove and I totter bow-legged to my chosen tent (I should've mentioned that I lost a stirrup early on and spent the first half of the ride holding my right leg in the position it should've been resting, and now it hurts like sin). The tent is armed with a quilt and a blanket (two thereof, 'cause I'm still sharing with C.) and a very, very thin mattress. I have time to pour a jugful of tepid water over my head and unpack my rucksack before the first of the group appears at the top of the dunes.
That evening we sit around a roaring fire on blankets and chat and laugh and are generally amused to be in a desert. We eat daal and roti wheeled out of the kitchen tent. We get up briefly to have a race up the sand dunes and catch the setting sun, which is outrageously beautiful. We admire the distant camels. We seek out toiletish bushes. Sid challenges us to run down the sand dunes and turns out to know more about the tricksy ways of sand dunes than I. I fall down. He does not. I think I pull off a rather good save though, frankly, by crossing my arms and pointing my toes balletically so I pick up a ludicrous amount of speed and have a chance of retaining sufficient poise to be able to convince my fellows that I meant to roll down the dune all along and had no intention of running. It's riotous fun, if slightly bruising, and I earn a round of applause when I fetch up in a happily unbroken heap at the bottom. Dan shares with us the slang he's learned from infiltrating the camel drivers. Apparently snorting like a camel means something particularly sordid. Everyone else outlines their previous travel history. I say else because I turn out to be far and away the least travelled – this is my first long haul trip, my first solo trip of any description and the first time I've spent more than four days away from my family. Most of the others have been around the world. Sometimes twice: C's en route to Nepal after this, then China, Australia, various bits of south America before landing up in Spain again. Laura and Joe have taken several mildly adventurous holidays all over the world since he retired. Dan has things to say about Argentina.
Last thing at night, Dan and Sid are humming a very catchy tune that I recall hearing the camel drivers singing earlier in the day. It turns out to be the title tune in a film Dan saw in the south of India before he joined this tour: 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' (Tomorrow May Not Come), which – and sorry to break the flow – will because ridiculously important later in the narrative. I fancy trying to pick it out on a guitar. I don't have a guitar. But as Dan's humming, I take it as a sound reason to retire to my tent.
It's freezing now but I have to lie as long as I can with my head sticking out of the tent flap, because, around Orion, my favourite constellation, who inexplicably looks the same here in the desert as he does in the UK, there are hundreds and hundreds of stars I've never seen before.
I'm probably going to have another crack at Nanowrimo this year, so it's fairly likely January 7th won't be posted till December - apologies.
