After a quick stop in Jodhpur and some more temple, fort, and blue city sights, we moved onward to Jaisalmer, a five-hour drive. The landscape is pretty much all flat desert (shrubs, thorn trees, dirt, and the occasioanl sand dune would appear) along this drive and in the mid-day is absolutely boiling in the non-A/C gremlin car. The wildlife that we witnessed included camels, cows, goats, sheep, vulchurs and some deer.
It was a long day in the car, but we made it safely to Jaisalmer and to our guest house, the Ishar Palace Paying Guest House. This place was a total dive, but at 100 Rupees what are you expecting??? The best part of it was the helpful owner and staff, especially Little Jonny (LJ). LJ gave us a small speech that turned it to about 30 minutes of how great this camel safari was that they offered, in the end we signed up for the 2-day safari.
The safari started at 8:00 with all of us on antibiotics, but still afraid that we might have to jump off our camels quickly to go dig a hole in the desert! We took a jeep from town with stops at Little Jonny's childhood village for some chai tea, walk-around with the kids, and I acted as village doctor for about 10 minutes for some people giving them band-aids, ibuprofen, and neosporin for some cuts and pains. The jeep ride was quite bumpy, but fun as you could tell that we were getting into a pretty remote place of the desert.
At this remote location, we met our two guides and four camels. My camel was Peacock and as I would find out in the desert was stubborn and only wanted to eat food (I related well with him). The other camels for Bart and Bob were Rocket (the biggest one and would bite the others if he was not leading) and Dhubi (just a chill one). The camel riding was bumpy, but pretty cool as you could see a long distance without much effort, just sitting and laughing and avoiding the commen gassy smell from the camels...After a few hours of riding, we would stop and the guides would cook us Indian food with chai tea and beer and than it was time for a siesta...the midday sun would kick-in and we would not start on the safari until late afternoon.
That evening, we ate dinner, played around, and slept on these awesome sand dunes about 15 kilometers from the Pakistan border. Relaxation set-in here with beer in hand, good company, and a glorious sunset....This was about to change when the lights would go out in the desert. We were gearing up for sitting on our beds to drink a beer and watch the stars, when Bob yelled out "holy shit, what was that....i think it was a snake!" I did not have my flashlight handy, but started taking photos with my camera using the flash and sure enough it was a snake about a meter long and right next to our beds. The guides came running up and without a flinch, took care of the snake....we all were a little disturbed and put us on edge about having a snake slither on us during out sleep. This basically resulted in us sleeping very little in between watching for snakes, the beetles landing on you, and the midnight desert rain falling on us!!! Even through all of this, the experience was a lot of fun and would recommend it to others if you have a chance, JUST WATCH OUT FOR THE SNAKES!
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