We saw one child using the sewer as a toilet
who looked very female from the hair and the clothing, but the plumbing was
definitely male.
Speaking of the sewers, the fort is remarkably clean due to fast-
running water in the sewers. By Western standards it is pretty bad and you
find a lot of corners that smell of urine, but there seems to be less
leavings to avoid when walking.
Leaving the fort Mark took a picture of the archway and a woman who
happened to be under it at the time assumed she was in the picture and
chased us for baksheesh. However, since we were going down a long incline
and she knew she'd have to climb back up, she gave up fairly quickly. She
was asking for Rs10 and to be frank Mark didn't even know if she was in the
picture or not. (She was, it turned out, but so small you could barely make
out her face.)
We just wandered around the town for a while. Mark got a picture of a
rather dirty shop calling itself a medical store.
Mark says, I am getting used to seeing red-brown stains just about
everywhere. A very popular pastime is chewing betel nut, a stimulant. If I
was disgusted at the red stains in our Hong Kong hallway from where people
had spit betel nut juice, after a visit to India I don't think it would
phase me.
We stopped and got a Limca. Limca is a local soda--in fact, the best
of the local sodas. It is a tart lemon-lime, sort of like the locally
available Teem and better than 7-Up. Locally available sodas are American
brands bottled by Lehar--Pepsi, Teem, and 7-UP--and local brands such as
Limca, Thums [sic] Up cola, and Campa-Cola. They also occasionally have
Slice. Pepsi and Limca are probably the best to our taste. If they
substitute Teem for Limca, that is okay.
Wandering around a bit more brought us to what we usually gravitate to
everywhere we go--a used bookstore, the Bhatia News Agency (street address
unknown, assuming there is such a thing in Jaiselmer). Mark bought a ghost
story comic book as an interesting souvenir, and also a copy of FREEDOM AT
MIDNIGHT for Rs75; Evelyn got MAY YOU BE THE MOTHER OF A HUNDRED SONS. Good
reading for the train rides ahead (and necessary, as it turned out--but that
will come later).
We got back to the hotel in time for the 11:30 AM power failure. Mark
was mostly packed already but he was making last-minute changes to what he
would take on the camel trek. Looking at what we are actually going to
do, he says, I suspect my mis-apprehension about riding a camel into the
desert was probably ill-founded. We are not going very far, so if I do not
take to camel-riding it will not be much of a loss. As I said earlier, I
think I sort of lost my taste for riding large animals when we rode an
elephant in Thailand. I was not happy with how the animal was treated and
it seems to me I have better things to do with my vacation than make an
animal miserable. In Africa I was particularly uncomfortable on the camel I
rode, but later the same trip I rode a horse and got a better idea of how to
cooperate with the animal rather than fight it and would sort of like to try
again. If you just try to hang on and sit level, you are fighting the
animal. You have to sort of bounce in the rhythm of the animal's stride.
Still, I think going out on the desert is a serious matter, he
concludes.
Well, we repacked our bags so that we were taking with us pretty much
just what we would need for the trek and we left the rest behind the desk.
We went out to get lunch and a bottle of Bisleri to take on the trek. We
ate at a place called the Trio Restaurant. Evelyn had ker sangri, described
as desert beans and capers, but the main ingredient seemed like stems or
stalks of some sort rather than beans. Still, it was tasty, and different
from what one gets back home. Lunch came to Rs85. At about 2:40 PM we went
back to the hotel to wait for the camel trek. At 3 PM they said it would
start at 3:30 PM. It actually started at 3:15 PM. A tall man in a turban
came to the desk to get us. He was not a driver; he was an arranger.
Evelyn had thought that they might send a jeep around to pick us up and take
us to a general starting point, but that didn't happen. The arranger led us
out to where two camels were relieving themselves in the street. There were
four camels there in all and we got the two that were not busy. (Each camel
carried one of us and a camel driver.) These turned out to be Moria and
Borach. Mark got Moria. He says, It may have been good fortune. Borach
was just not very happy with his assigned task. Moria was a male but very
gentle. He may have had female aspirations. In any case Moria was very
docile but tended to worry overly about cars coming past. Well, it's easy
for me to judge that he was overly concerned. When I am the one doing the
walking the cars here scare me too.
We passed some school kids who waved at us and laughed to see the
tourists riding the camels. We never actually got out to any real desert
but we did get to some reasonably open country. The desert here is the Thar
Desert. Mark likes that name; he says it sounds like something out of Edgar
Rice Burroughs. One of the things that is amazing is how well sound
carries. We were out there with no buildings or man-made structures for a
good mile in one direction but there was the unmistakable sound of singing
coming from that direction. It must have been from a good long way off, but
it sounded no further than if it were a hundred yards off. Mark told Evelyn
that the heat of the sand heats up the air just above it, creating an
inversion layer that traps the sound and carries it long distances. Evelyn
said she had to take his word for it, but Mark told her not to because he
was making it up--but it did sound good.
Mark said that at one point Moria looked around at him and said, I
thought foreign tourists *lost* weight in India. He says that he's not too
surprised. He had always heard that tourist camels can be mean. Mark told
Evelyn that you do just the opposite of what your intuition tells yous.
Instead of holding onto the camel stiffly, you go limp and go with the ride.
Then when the camel gets up to speed, you reverse the stick. (That's
another of those film allusions!) Actually, Mark says he kept getting
images from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and Peter O'Toole riding his camel, but in
his case there wasn't a driver sharing the same camel. It occurred to Mark
to dig in his heels and say, Hut! Hut! Hut! but he was a little afraid of
falling off. A camel is a tall animal. With turban, his driver was well
over six feet tall, but when Mark was in the saddle and the driver on the
ground, Mark's foot was above the top of the driver's turban. If you get
thrown from a camel you have time to worry before hitting the ground.
In any case, Evelyn says that while riding a walking camel is fairly
easy--you just go with the flow--riding a trotting camel is something again.
Even with padding in the saddle, you can get fairly sore after a couple of
hours. (She also recommends that women wear a good support bra.)
Mark did have a problem while riding in that his left foot kept falling
out of the stirrup. Well, trying to fall out--it slipped out only once and
he immediately realized what a powerful military advantage the Mongols had
over their enemies with the use of the stirrup.
We were glad we had each brought a liter of water. You get amazingly
dehydrated under the desert sun. The saliva in your mouth turns to glue if
you haven't drunk water in the last three minutes. But a drink of Bisleri
at a camel stop is like water in the desert. In fact, it *is* water in the
desert.
Mark has heard that camels tend to spit. Our two camels didn't, though
Mark's driver did every couple of minutes. Mark doesn't know where he got
the saliva from.
Mark says, A couple of small facts about camels: India has only the
one-humped dromedary variety. I don't know where Bactria is, but I have
seen only one-humped camels. Camels here have a peg implanted behind each
nostril. Reins are attached to these. That is how a camel is steered.
(It turns out Bactria is in northern Afghanistan and southern Tajikistan.)
Our first stop was Bara Bagh, about an hour's ride away. We were not
exactly riding through trackless waste--the power lines and army lookout
towers reminded us of that. But you do get some feel for the desert--its
size, how well sound carries over it, etc. A camel's feet are also
interesting to watch in action: as the camel sets each foot down, a pad
spreads out to give a firmer footing on the sand or shifting rock.
Evelyn says, So as we plodded and trotted along, I found myself
wishing it were a weekday rather than a Saturday. It would be even more
enjoyable to be riding a camel across the Thar Desert if I knew that back
home people were getting ready to go to work.
Bara Bagh is a site of cenotaphs to ancient heroes. (In case you're
wondering what we were asking ourselves, a cenotaph is a tomb or monument
erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are
elsewhere, like the Kennedy grave in Arlington--oops, we weren't supposed to
mention that.) It also had--out here in the middle of nowhere--kids trying
to sell us fossil rocks or beg rupees or pens. Even so, it was a relief to
get off the camel and stretch our legs a bit.
After another hour we arrived at Amar Sagar, which has a complex with a
cluster of Jain temples. At Bara Bagh there had been a flock of children
begging for rupees and pens. Here they were intent on being guides.
Earlier this day we had disagreed if going to England and Scotland meant we
had been to two different countries. Evelyn said Great Britain was only one
country. When Mark's would-be guide asked him what country he was from,
Mark said, Scotland and that his name was Angus. He pointed out the
Evelyn that the kid accepted his country as Scotland, so that proved it was
a country. But Evelyn is one of those people for whom no proof is
convincing.
The Amar Sagar temples are being renovated by the government in a
project which has been going on for over twenty years. We can understand
why it is taking so long: tickets to the complex were Rs10 each, but the man
at the entrance said, Ten rupees each, one ticket, okay? In other words,
we pay him Rs20, he tears out one Rs10 ticket, and he pockets Rs10. The
whole project is probably stalled for lack of funding.
Then back on the camels for our return to Jaiselmer, rising out of the
desert in the setting sun like some magical fortress. And in some ways it
still is a fortress. Being so close to Pakistan, Jaiselmer has an army camp
nearby, and we apparently rode too close to it or something, because a guard
with a rifle came over and had a conversation with the drivers--in Hindi, so
we have no idea what was said. But it must have satisfied the guard,
because he let us ride on.
Mark doesn't know what happened to Moria while we were at Amar Sagar
but the camel had a bad wound on his face when Mark saw him again. There
was a place about half the size of a small coin where fur and skin were
missing. Mark doesn't know if he'd been bitten or wounded by the driver.
On the way back we stopped at Sunset Point to see the sunset. However,
we got there too soon and got a picture before sunset. The drivers were in
a hurry to get back. (Actually, Evelyn thinks the purpose of Sunset Point
is to get a picture of Jaiselmer at sunset, rather than of the sunset
itself.)
At the end of the trek a cold Limca was mighty good. We neglected to
mention that from the Jodhpur foreign tourist room on we'd been running into
the same English woman over and over. This was Anne Martin. She was in the
tourist room of the Jodhpur railway station, on our train, and in the same
hotel in Jaiselmer. We'd talked to her in the hotel after the entertainment
the night before. |
