View from a fort and a camel
A trek into the desert from an ancient fortification confers a deep sense of peace on a weary traveller
The view from atop the nearly 900-year-old walls of one of the oldest inhabited forts in the world is distracting, to say the least. Two hundred and fifty feet below me, the sandstone city of Jaisalmer in western Rajasthan, resembles an earthen cubist painting of angular card-houses, surrounded by an endless sand-and-scrub landscape.
Above it all, the evening sky glows a dusky purple.
I came to Jaisalmer to explore this ancient part of Rajasthan and go on a threeday camel trek into the wilderness. The city sits in the midst of the Thar Desert. Jaisalmer Fort, known as Sonar Quila or “Golden Fort,” for the way sun lights its sandstone walls from amber to gold throughout the day, is a major draw for my visit.
I soon learn that Jaisalmer has its own charms. Although it is dusty, the city is a welcome departure from the grimy crush of New Delhi, where I entered the country.
Jaisalmer’s narrow streets are filled with vendors, trading in handmade leather bags, fabrics and finished clothing, jewelry, spices and countless other textiles. Busy, yes, but there is also a pleasant, unrushed feel to the place.
And the fort, accessible by a narrow stone roadway that passes through a series of stone gates, does not disappoint. Its interior is a labyrinth of alleys dotted with havelis, sandstone buildings, hundreds of years old, covered from stoop to roof in intricate carvings of gods, geometric symbols and mythological depictions.
One morning, I explore a group of elaborately sculptured Jain temples inside the fort, then hire an auto-rickshaw to see the dozens of chhatri cenotaphs at a nearby ruin called Bada Bagh in the afternoon.
But the highlight is sitting on the top of the fort’s walls just before sunset, with a cup of chai, to watch children fly kites from nearby roofs.
On the evening before my camel trek, I spend 30 minutes chatting with Dilip, the owner of the government-licensed bhang shop, around the corner from the outer gate of the fort, on a street lined with leather workers. The shop sells legal preparations of marijuana in edible, or drinkable, form. I ordered a bhang lassi, thick with ground pistachios, saffron, black pepper and dairy curd. It tasted like Turkish delight in milkshake form. Considered at once a medical tonic, a sacrament, and in some parts of India more socially acceptable than alcohol, bhang is as old as the Vedic texts, and remains legal and regulated in Rajasthan.
But a warning: It’s strong stuff. When the bhang finally hits me, I have a hard time holding a conversation with another guest on the roof of our guest house. After excusing myself, I spend the next hours in my room contemplating the vibrating sensations in my body and staring out at the twinkling lights of the city I’ve been exploring for the last two days.
The next morning, I emerge from my room at 5:30, walk past a few old people and children, presumably on their way to work or school, and dodge wandering cows in the alleys.
Outside the office of Adventure Travel Agency, two other travellers, three guides and I cram into an old 4x4 for the pre-dawn ride into the desert. Over the next three days, we forgo showers, eat mostly vegetarian meals cooked over a fire and sleep on bedrolls spread out on dunes. Everything we need, we carry with us, and all of our trash we pack out.
After about 45 minutes in the truck, we debark at the side of a road, where a half-dozen camels graze on stubby trees near a temporary camp consisting of a windbreak made from dried sticks and brush. A handful of men dressed in tan robes and blankets draped over their shoulders sit around a small fire brewing chai.
The men offer us the tea, and a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and freshly made chapati flatbread. And, then, our guides, with little instruction to us other than that we should lean back when the camels stand up, help us onto our camels. We each ride our own.
Once I am in the saddle, Deena, our 20-year-old lead guide, makes a percussive “ck-ck” noise from the side of his mouth, abruptly sending the camel up on its hind legs and nearly pitching me over the animal’s head.
It takes a couple of hours to get used to the camel’s swaying, jarring gait. We leave behind the access roads and windmills encroaching on the desert, and, by lunchtime, enter a primal landscape, with alternating areas of rocky and sandy ground punctuated by short, squat trees and towering Calotropis bushes, whose delicate white and purple flowers, our guides warn us, leak a gooey sap that can cause blindness.
We pass by small mud-and-straw villages where women are dressed in brilliant red and yellow saris with gold lace details, and men wear red, green or orange paggar turbans.
We pass single-building outposts made from brush that are used by seminomadic people during the rainy season for farming peanuts, guar and millet, and herding sheep and goats.
By late afternoon, as the sun slips behind the dunes, I catch glimpses of wild antelope grazing on dried vegetation. And, shortly afterward, we stop at a suitable place to make camp: a sand dune rising out of the mostly flat landscape as though the dune were the back of a serpent. As with each meal, our food — curried vegetables, millet and wheat chapati, and rice — is cooked over a wood fire and eaten with bare hands from metal plates. Exhausted from the long day, we unpack our sleeping rolls. I lie supine for a while, staring up at a clear sky filled with stars. Then I pull the covers over my head, partly because of the cold, but mostly because a friend told me that once, on a similar trip, he had awakened to find a small pack of wild dogs licking his face. I am awakened by something less startling and decidedly more pleasant: one of our guides handing me a cup of sweet fire-brewed chai with fresh ginger. The dunes are lit a bright orange, and are covered in undulating ridges set by an overnight breeze, and crisscrossed by strange tracks that, thank goodness, I don’t identify as scorpion trails until weeks later. Walking around before we depart , I find thousands of bleached-white spiral seashells about the length of the tip of my pinky. “They are from an old ocean,” Deena says. The second day is much like the first, but with more-frequent stops at small villages, where our guides, of religious backgrounds, say, “This one is Muslim” or “This one is Hindu.” At each of our stops, clustered during the hottest part of the day, a goatherd or a few children join us to share our food and try on our sunglasses. At lunch, an extended family of 10 leads us over a nearby ridge to their small compound, where they show us their fields of guar and peanuts and offer us freshly made goat or sheep curd.
“We found a goat,” Deena announces, as we stop to set up camp later that evening. “If you still want it, they will bring it here tonight, and we can make mutton curry and barbecue.”
For around 3,000 rupees (about $50 at 60 rupees to the dollar), we buy the whole animal, and an older relative of one of our guides slaughters and butchers the goat according to halal tradition. Sitting down to our meal of goat, we are three tourists, three guides and a half-dozen men from a nearby village, sitting around three fires and chatting about our lives.
With a full stomach and the fire still crackling, I slip away to my bedroll. In the morning, I awake to dozens of peacocks calling from perches in nearby trees, and a few wild dogs, tails tucked between their legs, searching the outskirts of camp for scraps.
As I lie under the stars after our feast, I’m more ecstatic than the night I tried bhang, and more exhausted than I have been in a long time. I stare at the stars and listen to the local men chattering around the fire. While I remember eventually seeing wispy clouds blot out the stars and hearing the faintest patter of rain so light that the drops evaporated upon reaching the ground, I don’t remember falling asleep.
Adventure Travel Agency (Fort First Gate, Near Police Post, Jaisalmer; 91-2992-25255; adventurecamels.com) is an excellent choice for those who want to see the less travelled parts of the Thar. My three-day outing was 1,250 rupees a day. The New York Times