Operation Desert Smackdown

A Camel Odyssey


I recant everything I have said previously about being in the middle of nowhere. I have now truly been in the middle of goddamn nowhere, and in the desolate wastes of the Thar Desert I struck the greatest blow yet against the Cow menace. From Bikaner I made my way to the city of Jaisalmer, a famously picturesque medieval desert town pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Having no desire to join legions of idiot tourists at the popular sand dunes near town, I planned a more dramatic excursion. Three days into the depths of the desert on the back of a camel. The starting point would be 50 km beyond Jaisalmer, well into the restricted military zone containing the deserts near the Pakistan border. Having secured the proper "permits" from a villager's brother in the military police, we left early in the morning. I kept a journal throughout the trip, scrawling them clumsily as I bounced atop my camel. The following is a tale of grandeur and toil, beauty and pain, man and camel. This is what happened.

Day 1

The group is me, 3 Indians, and 2 Swedes. Between us we have four camels. The foreigners each ride one while the guides walk and a young boy steers the auxiliary camel. We're all wearing turbans, though we non-Indians can't tie them properly to save our lives. The Swedes are hellbent on learning how, and spend the whole time tying and retying their ridiculously bright and oversized turbans. The guide calls them both Turban Man. He doesn't have a name for me. He says my turban is small and ugly. The jeep ride out to the starting point was an adventure itself. At some point the driver simply decides roads are for sissies and veers off into the desert. After some time we meet the camels and guides. I have no idea how this rendezvous was arranged. It must have been something like "go past the sand and meet us by the other sand at 9am", because there is no other way to describe the surroundings and the driver had to honk every time he saw a camel in the hopes that he found the right people.

The Thar Desert is a vast expanse of sand and shrubs. We ride the camels for hours. Sand. Shrubs. Sand. Shrubs. Indistinguishable emptiness. Every couple hours we see a settlement, maybe three or four grass hats and a herd of goats. The animal life here consists of scattered herds, plus camels, flies, sand beetles, and some very skinny cows. These cows live in a country where they can idle up to a restaurant and have food shoved directly into their mouths and yet they've wandered out into a barren sandpit. They deserve to be skinny.

I've given the camels names. There is Dudley, the hungry camel; Bonzo, the lazy camel; Hieronymus the angry camel; and Chad, who is just Chad.The Swedes ride Dudley and Chad while the boy handles Hieronymus. Bonzo is my steed.

More hours pass. The blazing sun moves slowly through the sky. Nothing is spoken. There is nothing to say. There's sand. There's shrubs. I'm beginning to think that 3 days on a camel is about 2 days, 23 hours, and 30 minutes more than I need to spend on or around camels. I also think my tailbone will never recover.

We stop for lunch. Spiced cauliflower. I'm starving and my hips are sore from straddling Bonzo. While we sit the camels are sent to feed. To prevent them from running off, the guides do exactly what I'd do: tie the camel's feet together so they hobble off like a bunch of buffoons to inspect some shrubs. Bonzo is picky, he'll only eat from a bag. No, actually he is just lazy and expects his food to be brought to him. Dudley is a glutton. Every chance he gets he slips out from the formation to munch on tiny desert leaves, to the great consternation of the Swede whom he drags through the bushes. Lunch is cooked on a wood fire. Finding dry firewood is not a problem.

Bonzo is so lazy it's ridiculous. The guide keeps a cane which he uses exclusively for threatening Bonzo to pick up the pace.

More hours on Bonzo. I don't think I'll ever be able to have children.

Hieronymus is being a pissy little bitch. He's pure ego. He's the youngest of the camels and thinks he's fucking special. He moans and groans whenever told to do anything and just general makes a huge ruckus whenever he's unhappy, which is all the time. Dudley is the id, a swirling mass of instinct and uncontrolled desires. Twice now he's bolted away, sprinting to a shrub that particularly caught his eye. Bonzo is the superego. He represses everything into an unnaturally civil behavior, making him the most agreeable but also making him useless. You can tell he's hurting inside. The camel within him yearns to come out. Chad is just Chad, nothing, a void. He does not lose himself in the harmonious balance of the Yin and the Yang, but in their mutual nullification.

Camels fart all the time. Bonzo farts the most. He passes more wind than Aeolus. Bonzo's farts are silent and merciless.

We've stopped to water the camels at a village well. The village is 12 buildings. Our guide tells us this is the last village...the last village in India. Stretching before us is a dune sea, where not even shrubs dot the slowly shifting sands. From here it's nothing but sand all the way to the Pak border with distant, forlorn Indian and Pakistani army posts being the only trace of humanity for a hundred kilometers.

Hearing the splash of water, a single cow ambles up. He is a fat, long-horned beast. Then another cow walks out of the village, and then a small herd. This herd and the penultimate cow escape my attentions, for I have had a dramatic realization. I am in the last village in India, and beyond me is a waterless and plant-less land where no cow could ever survive and as far as the eye can see none venture. This cow before me, standing out away from the village, is the last cow in all of India. The guides and the village children begin angrily chasing away the herd, who clearly have designs upon their well-water, but the single, motionless Final Cow is let be. In the commotion I seize my moment. With nobody watching I turn the back of my hand and in the names of Honor and Justice, pimp-slap the cow right across the face. In a futile defense he turns the other cheek. A costly error. Again I back-hand him heartily, regretting only that I bear not a jeweled ring with which to leave my mark. The last cow in India turns and flees.

The glory of victory shines upon me.

We pass the village to the dune sea. We make camp at its edge. There is sand, but then there's sand: this is sand. Dinner is dahl and potatoes with rice. After nightfall we realize we have let the camels wander a bit far and we don't really know where they are. We find Bonzo right away. He's sitting in the same damn spot he sat in three hours ago. However, the other three are somewhere out in the darkness, within whatever range a wobbling camel can cover in three hours. The head guide walks up to me by the campfire and says "Give me flashlight, we look after camels." I consider the prospect of leaving the warmth of the fire to scour the night for camels and immediately turn to the Swedes, place my finger on my nose and declare "Shotties not looking for the camels." The gesture is not understood.

Camel Man decides we would be useless searching in the desert anyways. He barks some orders in Marwari. At some point in the night, Work Man and Aladdin find the camels.

Day 2

Yesterday was sand and shrubs. Today is just sand, sand, and sand. The night was frigid, awful. The Swedes, being Swedes, wore expensive thermal underwear and expedition sweaters to bed, yet awoke complaining of the horrid night. I, with my rather unsophisticated layering strategy of wearing two t-shirts to compensate for my lack of socks, felt I had the moral high ground. And that was the only thing I felt because I certainly couldn't feel my extremities.

Through listening to the guides I have learned that they were not joking about their names. The main guy, who we call Camel Man, is really named Baba. The second guide, who the Swedes and I secretly call Work Man because he does all the real work, is actually called Allaa, and the young boy is really named Aladdin. It's too good to be true. The Swedes have named the camels too, and they align perfectly with my own judgments. They call them Hungry Camel, Lazy Camel, and Angry Camel. They have no name for Chad, because there is nothing worth saying about him.

We ride off, yet again spending hours traversing empty sand. The dunes are beautiful but they are slippery and treacherous. We discover Chad's Swedish name: Clumsy Camel. Bonzo, though surefooted, is remarkably reluctant to climb piles of sand, providing yet more proof to my theory that he is a self-loathing camel in denial of his true self. Chad is tied to Bonzo so he will follow a better path and slip less. It doesn't help. He just slips and yanks Bonzo which causes a deep rumbling in Bonzo's gut. I prepare for the worst, and I receive it.

We make our way back out of the dune sea and towards the shrubs. We pass through a larger village, which seemed to hold a few hundred people. A flock of children follow us around squealing "chocolate! rupees! rupees!" and demanding that we take photos of them. Camel Man tells us we will be crossing a lot of desert and spending the night at a small set of sand dunes closer to civilization and popular with the semi-adventurous tier of tourists. He promises us "There coming English girls, you can do boom boom." I am holding Camel Man to account for this promise.

Lunch today is a mysterious dish Camel Man calls "Vegetable". It's a spiced vegetable, though we are at a loss to guess which. Work Man is becoming familiar to us as a blue-clad dot in the distance, which is where we usually see him, having been sent to tromp across the desert carrying buckets of water and piles of firewood while Camel Man sits around and cooks unnameable vegetables.

Just so you know, going to the bathroom in the desert is, surprisingly, a thousand times better than going in the woods. Mind the sand.

Sometimes I look up and think I see something strange on the horizon. No, it's just the silhouette of a shrub.

We reach the other dunes at sundown. A Japanese couple and their guides arrive and join our party because they work for the same camel owner and know that Baba/Camel Man is the best cook. He treats us to dahl and potatoes with rice. We're noticing a pattern. Their camels are led away because they are just spending the night and have a jeep rescuing them in the morning. Finally a Jeep arrives and a Japanese woman gets out. She is married to the Japanese couple's guide. There are no English girls, let alone any boom boom. The Swedes and I decide it is for the best. It would have been awkward around the camels.

The night is not as cold, probably because I put on every single garment I brought. Three t-shirts, two pairs of pants and copious underwear, but no socks. I'm also wearing my pathetic turban which I've wrapped tightly around my Muslim prayer cap, a hidden layer of extra warmth on my head. Camel Man thinks this is one of the strangest things he has ever seen. He asks me what to call this turban. I call it the Barack Obama Secret Muslim. One of the Swedes gets it, the Japanese are puzzled, and the Indians just laugh "Obama! Obama!" The Swedes and I make camp strategically behind a large dune and a bush sheltered from the wind at least. We still awake chilly, and of course sandy.

Day 3

The Japanese are evacuated by Jeep. We look at our camels, sigh, and apologize to our groins one more time.

Perhaps sensing that we tired of passing through sand and shrubs, and even of sand and sand, Camel Man led us instead on a novel day of navigating sand and rocks. When emptiness gets old, the thinking was, trade in for some desolation. We're getting closer and closer to actual civilization. We can see comm towers on the horizon, though after hours of riding towards them we see that they sit in another featureless cement village, though now they have electricity (but not running water).

Hours, hours, hours of sand and rocks.

Aladdin and his mount Hieronymus dissapear for some time. They come back carrying a large, unrecognized vegetable. Lunch is definitely going to be "Vegetable."

Finally we stop beneath a line of trees, the only ones we've seen for hours. Just beyond them is a road. We eat more Vegetable and wait. The camels were tied and left to feed. We were jokingly urged to say goodbye to our camels; we would ride them no more. I turned to Bonzo and said "So long you big doofus." It was not the last I saw of him. Dudley, Chad, and Hieronymus wobbled off to eat. Lazy fucking Bonzo just sat there.

Finally as we watched the progression of the afternoon sun we heard the roar of a Jeep engine, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the Vengaboys. Civilization.