Yes we went on a camel safari and it was fantastic. :) Here are pictures:
As a side note Jaisalmer puts itself forward as the Golden city, but this is neither here nor there because as far as I can tell that is just the colour of the soil-based plaster they use on the outside walls. Nonetheless, it does have a golden hue when seen at sunset from the aptly named Jaisalmer Fort.
We arrived at 5am from the night train (third class A/C sleeper car) and were snatched up by the offer of a cheap ride to a hotel at 5am when the air was veeerrry cold. We went right to sleep and woke up at around 11am to figure out what kind of a camel tour we would do. We interviewed a few post-tourists, and talked to three different outfits and eventually settled on the renowned Mr Desert.
All was settled, and we were at the Sahara Travels booth at 9am for our camel safari. First thing was a jeep ride into the desert, our driver's name was Leeloo and he immediately liked Leah, because apparently their names mean the same thing in Hindi - a gift! We popped into a Jain temple that had been reclaimed as Hindu, and then we were on a one hour ride into the real desert. We passed by a few very humble villages on the way.
The camels were not very comfortable at first, although by the second day I became quite accustomed to the extremely accentuated sway of their walk. My camel's name was Pallo, and Leah rode Johnny. We had two guides who rode the other camel. These guys did everything for us, they cooked lunch which was rice, some spicy goulash of some kind and fresh chapatis. We were totally stuffed because they wouldn't let us get away without eating pretty much everything they made, which was loads.
During the day we just sat on the camels taking in the visual expanse of desert, sometimes covered in hardy plants, and sometimes barren dunes. At night we slept in the dunes, on the sand. Unfortunately this kindof sucked because the sand was really hard and we were very uncomfortable. In hindsight, I would have asked for more blankets and just loaded them up on the ground before we crashed. Mr. Desert's mom sent a home-cooked Indian meal to us which was very filling although I don't have any idea what it was (except for two spicy eggplants)
because it was so dark.
The next day we packed up and headed back into civilization. In the morning they had the camels gallop, which was not comfortable at all but by the afternoon it was too hot for that so we just walked and I tried to regain what composure I had. After it was all said and done, Leeloo picked us up and drove us to Karnataka, an abandoned village, one of 84 that were completely abandoned all at the same time over 350 years ago.
Karnataka and the other 84 villages were populated entirely by the Brahmans, the holy caste of Indian society. The story goes that India's Prime Minister at the time was a very bad man, and he seized power from the local Maharajah by killing all of his key supporters. Once he had local power, he used it to extort beautiful women from the villages, and when he walked into Karnataka he saw the leader's beautiful daughter and decided he wanted to marry her. After his negotiations failed, the town met and decided that knowing his behavior and that he would take the daughter by force the entire town and all their friends in the other 84 villages left on the same day and moved out of Rajasthan entirely - never to return.
When we got back to Jaisalmer, we found a great little place called the Jeet Mahal hotel and it was the prettiest, most Indian hotel we have stayed at yet - and just Ru 300! This is middle of the road for us, I think we spent Ru 550 one night and as little as Ru 150 some nights.
The next morning our hotel manager convinced us to go to this local pavilion that had girls dancing in traditional outfits, and to our surprise they had a series of floats that went by, some of them celebrating Indian successes, some humorously showing the differences between our ways of life, and some pushing ideas like recycling and other social ideas. Quite a neat event - the pics are above!
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