I’d have to fend for myself. The first step was to board my overpriced camel, Raju. I swung my right leg over what looked to be a legless camel’s torso, and the driver whistled a signal. Raju rose like a marionette. His front legs went up and I almost back-flipped off his rump; then his back legs went up as he buckled his front legs, nearly sending me somersaulting over his head. With my video camera smacking side to side around my neck and my heart racing, we raced off at a trot. “Easy, I want to walk, no running,” I begged the driver.
Grinning back at me, he said, “No easy,” and tugged on the camel’s reins to make him go even faster. I have ridden horses, elephants, and mules, but none compares to the camel. Both legs on one side move at the same time in a seesaw motion that produced a bizarre tug of war on the front and back of my underwear. I attempted to hover suspended between the camel’s two humps as it galloped. This failed miserably. The faster the camel went, the more uncomfortable my underwear became.
We had trotted only about five minutes when the out-of-breath camel guide announced, “Okay, here is where your driver pay me to take you.” This part of the desert looked nothing like the red and orange sand dunes pictured in my guidebook. It was a wasteland of brown sand strewn with empty bottles, cans, candy wrappers, toilet paper, and film canisters. The guidebook had also promised “musicians, dancing and singing with gay abandon” once we reached the dunes. But all I could hear was screechy violin-sounding instruments playing off-key. The vocals seemed to be more of a wail than a joyful song.
“You see beautiful sand dune over there?” he continued, pointing. “I take you for just 1000 rupees ($22) more.”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said.
“You get off my camel or you pay me now,” he insisted, the sun sinking lower. I negotiated 500 rupees ($11), captured, of course, on home video.
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