MY HUMPS

Every time I find myself in a desert, (which isn't often), I unconsciously channel words that might once have been spoken by David Attenborough, the famous British naturalist. In my best posh accent, it spills out, "Although the desert, at first glance, seems devoid of life, scratch below the surface and you will find that it's teeming with life". The first two deserts I went to, the Gobi in Mongolia and the Great Thar Desert in India, would both fit with this statement, albeit in contrasting manners. The Gobi, at least where I saw it, was rocky with little patches of vegetation. Befitting Mongolia, the Gobi wasn't hot but it was dry. You could see the occasional lizard, some beetles and once, a rodent that looked like a kangaroo rat that hopped around us, curious but cautious. In valleys, there were pikas and marmots but these weren’t seen in the desert proper. The Great Thar desert was even more devoid of life. Here, it was the hot sands themselves that seemed to be alive, moved by the wind that made furrows and lines that looked like they could have been made by a sidewinder or through the action of the hot sun, which seemed to change the colour of the sand almost momentarily.

Camels hanging around the ger.

While many things differed between these two deserts, there was one constant; camels. Although different species, (the two humped Bactrian and the one humped Dromedary), camels are a essential part of desert life, whether or not that desert is in North Africa, in the Middle East, in India or in Central Asia. Camels are  now so much a part of the life of desert dwellers that there are almost no wild camels left. There may be a small population (1000 or so individuals) of wild camels in Mongolia; otherwise all camels are either domestic or feral populations derived from domestic stock. In many places, little of the camel is wasted. When alive, it is a valuable pack animal that also provides milk and wool. When dead, its meat gives nourishment to a family. Its bones can be used in construction of gers or the tents favoured by nomadic people across Asia and Saharan Africa. Camel milk is rich in vitamins, minerals, proteins and immunoglobins and is lower in fat and cholesterol than cows milk is. Many people say that it is has therapeutic qualities, is an aphrodisiac, a kind of natural aspirin-Viagra. Camels are the desert’s walking pharmaceutical.

As far as I can tell, camels have got a bit of bad rap. I've never seen one spit or attempt to bite anyone. They're a little smelly and aloof but some of my best friends are aloof and a little smelly. It’s not grounds for a species assassination. My first ride on a camel was for about half an hour. If camels are the ships of the desert, it must be a slow ship as they maintained a pretty slow pace. We were walked pretty much the whole time, with only a short 30-second trot to break the monotony. They do walk with a strange gait but the weirdest part was finding yourself nestled between the beast's dual humps, holding on for dear life while your guide sings My Humps to you.

Hugging the humps.

This vocal performance I found to be most disconcerting. When you find yourself on a camel, getting led around by a beautiful Mongolian girl, you wouldn't expect that the only communication that you can have with her in English is the chorus of a horrible Black Eyed Peas song. This troubled me on a number of levels. First of all, how did the abomination known as the Fergie fronted Black Eyed Peas (I admit that I still have a soft spot for the pre Fergie BEPs, yeah even the Filipino guy) make it to central Mongolia? It also disturbed me wondering whether this sweet girl would know the meaning of humps in this song, particularly as she had the Mongolian body (petite but curvy, which our Mongolian guide attributed to the high protein diet of Mongolians).

The camel ride was offered as an extra option by the family of my guide whose ger (felt tent) we had stayed in the previous night. Their ger was in the shadows of the Moltsog Els sand dunes, large sand dunes that contrasted with the rocky terrain we had seen so far in the Gobi. The family we stayed with had little material possessions to speak of, two gers (including the one that we stayed in), a motorbike and four or five camels that were kept tethered outside the tents when they weren't in use. Without trying to sound patronizing and it will, they seemed happy enough, with the tourism dollars brought in through selling camel rides and handicrafts made from camel hair and bone supplementing their income nicely.

Ready to go with our turbans.

My next camel experience was in India. We were staying in Jaisalmer, a Wild West outpost deep in the Great Thar desert. Our hotel had arranged an overnight camel safari for us. Before leaving the hotel, we had to put on an orange turban, which was admittedly cheesy but also very Lawrence of Arabia-esque and in my opinion, pretty cool. On the way to our camel rendevouz, we stopped at villages for tea and cricket.  Women stared out at us from their houses, behind brightly coloured veils. Wide eyed children ,eyes smudged and smeared with kohl to decrease the glare of the intense, desert sun, approached us. Some of the braver ones attacked us with the mantra “chocolate, pen, rupees”, which seems to be taught to all Indian children as the question that will melt the hearts of foreigners.

After a drive of about an hour and a half on one of the best motorways we came across in India (I’m guessing the road was so good because of the heavy military presence in the area), we met our camels and guides on the side of the road at a pre-determined, nondescript spot about 70 kilometres outside of Jaisalmer. The camels were saddled up, with brightly coloured blankets covering their single humps. Their coloured reins were intricately woven, the drivers in similar turbans to us (which made me feel more authentic) and in long, flowing dresses. The heat was intense, but our camels and their drivers alike seemed oblivious to it. As we rested, they wove their way up and around sand dunes, a scene that was closer to my cliché desert image in my head than the rocky terrain of the Gobi had been. 

The colour of the sand was amazing and constantly changing.

The one humped dromedaries could maintain a quicker speed than their two humped Mongolian cousins, sand squelching under their large feet and between their toes (come on, I had to make at least one camel toe joke). For about an hour, maybe a bit longer, we reclined on our uncomfortable ride before we came to the place where we would sleep that night. This was in the desert and away from civilization but only just, like a Bear Grylls Saharan survival documentary that looks like he’s isolated from all civilization before the camera pans out and reveals that he is actually within 500 metres of the pyramids. The main road was about 2 clicks away; a village lay about the same distance from our campsite. Our jeep driver came and dropped off our supplies for the night, pillows, blankets, food and beer. There were no tents so we slept under the stars, on a raised concrete platform under natty blankets.

Caring for their beasts of burden.

Before dinner, we visited the nearby village to drop off parts for their solar powered generator. I got the feeling that the kids there hadn’t seen many foreigners. Gradually, they overcame their shyness just in time to play a big game of tag before we had to go back to our campsite. As the sun set, the colour of the sands changed minute by minute. I found myself thinking to myself, was there residual radiation from the nuclear tests performed in the desert here that made the light appear this way? Mary took a memorable shot of the camel and its driver (that is now the header of this blog). Here, the driver appears to see the camel as an equal of sorts, just as mahouts seem to with their elephants. As far as a camel can be affectionate, the camels were affectionate to their drivers, with the affection returned reciprocally.

One of my favourite holiday snaps, camel with driver.

While we were busy enjoying the sunset, the camel drivers had been busy fixing us dinner, which turned out to be a delicious goat curry. I’m not sure whether it was delicious because it was well cooked or because it was my first taste of meat in almost a month of being vegetarian. Either way, it tasted good to be a carnivore again. We enjoyed our beers huddled around the small fire, (deserts get really cold at night), gazing up at the stars. I’ve never been anywhere where the stars seemed to illuminate the sky in this way. Wherever you looked, there were stars. Stars layered upon stars, galaxies overlapping and interconnecting. Lying on your back, looking up at the heavens, you could see shooting stars blasting their way through our outer atmosphere. When we retreated to bed, we could hear the sounds of the camels, the crackling of the fire and the snarl of feral dogs attracted by the promise of goat bones and the warmth of the fire. Both enjoying the stellar lookout and worried that I might wake up with my face eaten off by a pack of dogs, I fell into a comfortable sleep. I woke early for sunrise and walked to the top of the tallest nearby sand-dune, hoping to see a snake or something but didn’t see anything but beetles. Maybe David Attenborough was wrong. The desert seems to be a  desolate place, mostly devoid of life.

After breakfast, the by now familiar egg, bun and chai tea which seemed to be our breakfast every day in India, we hopped back onto our camels, who were no doubt happier that we were riding them in the relatively cool morning rather than during the searing heat of the mid-day sun. We sauntered back over the same ground we had come on less than 24 hours before, regretting that the end of our camel sojourn was nigh but also hopeful that it would be over before our backsides were too bruised.

As close as I got to a camel at Giza.

In the end, it was over too soon. It proved to be one of the more memorable trips from our time in India. In fact, it was so memorable that I haven’t felt the least bit like riding a camel since. This means I spurned the opportunity given to me by those reputable salesmen at Giza to get the ubiquitous shot of myself in front of the Pyramids.  The same thing happened at Petra, no camel shot for me at the Treasury. For a short while, I felt like an explorer of the desert, a camel riding Indiana Jones (forgetting the part that I was probably never less than 5 kilometres from the road and my camel was on a track it had probably walked a thousand times). The desert is a wonderful place to indulge in such fantasies, given that the fragility of life is clearly displayed by the lack of it. Not much, it seems could survive in such a harsh environment, which makes the camels’ way of life even more notable.