Jodhpur

no capital letters with this post because the keyboard in this cafe is busted, or perhaps some, it works every now and then. So i arrived in to jodhpur from jaisalmer about an hour ago and i got an auto rickshaw to a guest house just below the spectacular fort. i was absolutely exhausted after a 7 hour bus ride and after two and a half days in the desert on a camel safari. Tonight i plan on taking it easy and hopefully finding a nice cold beer somewhere :)

The camel safari was spectacular. I ended up with a great group of people, two canadians (early 20s), two americans (mid 20s) and a german guy (40). The first day we did only maybe 4-5 hours on the camels and then camped out at the base of some large sand dunes. For most of the night we sat around the fire talking or lay on the dunes watching the stars in the incredibly clear night sky (and wondering where the hell the big dipper had gone.) The night was freezing and I didn't prepare well enough the first night and was pretty damn cold, especially when i had to get up to pee, but I eventually fell asleep, only to be woken to the sounds of camels having sex. Which is loud, really really loud, imagine lots of wookie-like sounds. Our camel driver came over with a big grin and said "Ah, camel-sutra." Post that wake up alarm we trekked out further into the desert and visited a small village along the way. The village visit was very uncomfortable, obviously a lot of camel safaris go through and we weren't all that welcome. We did a lot more riding after the visit, and started going a lot faster on the camels, which is uncomfortable but a huge amount of fun. The camels pay no attention to what the insignificant human on their back wants to do. You'll be up there screaming "Tandela Tandela, and trying to get the camel to turn" while it plods along in the direction that it wants to go. After several hours of riding we camped out at another dune and again sat around the fire playing games, talking and looking at the stars. It was pretty late by the time we finished and went to bed. Then at around 3am i was woken up when the girl next to me stood up and said - "I've been stung by a scorpion." We all jumped up and she shone the light at the bottom of her blanket and, yup, there was a scorpion walking around. Not big, maybe 3-4 inches long, but very evil looking. The girl, to her credit, was completely calm. We debated what to do for a few minutes, trapped the scorpion, got the camel driver and then i sms'd deva (1/2 bar of reception, thank god!) to see what to do. We put some local anesthetic on her foot, which was apparently hurting like hell, she took some codeine, and the camel driver tied off the bottom of her foot and put sugar on it. Why sugar I have no idea. Deva told us to keep her calm and to keep her heart higher than her foot, so we did that and stayed up for a while making sure the pain was not getting worse. Close to dawn we went back to sleep when she seemed to be doing ok. Everything was fine in the morning, her foot still hurt, but not as badly as during the night. We packed up camp pretty quickly and high tailed it on the camels back to the jeep to get back to town.

That was pretty much the end of it. I parted ways with them there, had a shower, ate at a tasty roadside cafe and got a bus to Jodhpur. Going to email them in a few days and make sure everything is ok.