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Camel Festival

from a visit in February, 2000

Camels are great. The male camels can be frightening too. They froth at the mouth and make amazing belching noises (like 100 toilets exploding at once) and they like to spit up their tongue -- it swells up to the size of a child's arm and wiggles about, mottled and purple, from the side of their mouth. Until they swallow it back down. They can occasionally be dangerous too, but all this is only during the mating season. Which is winter. Which is when the desert in Rajathan is cool enough to bear. So ... do we ride the female camels? Nope. Just the male ones. Great fun.

This was my trusty steed for several days in the desert.

Lunch break.

Moi.

We brought our camels to water twice a day.

This baby camel is a week old. Camels are very awkward getting up and down.

This baby camel was very sweet and friendly. Its fur was wonderfully soft.

Its owners wanted to pose with it. Note that the man is actually holding the camel off the ground.

Village children.

The desert in Rajasthan is mostly NOT sand, but we always found a dune to camp on.

One of our camel drivers.

Cooking on a fire of sage brush branches, and "washing" the dishes with sand. The sand is like hourglass sand, amazingly fine.

Hobbling the camels for the night.