Eight camel sore days through the Thar Desert

Meet the Team

Mahindra: Owner of rogue camel 'Boss' and one to watch in the future (aka 'Chapati Man')

Gopal: Camel cart driver extraordinaire with possible future role as driver for F1 team

Kisore: Head man of the warrior caste and all round nice guy

Potential Hazards

Scorpions:

Dodgy water:

Female distraction (of the wild camel kind):

Rat infestation:

Nasty spinning wheel accident:

Measure of success

Arrival in Jaisalmer with intact bottoms.

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Heading north into the cold

Delhi was going through a cold snap during our visit - so New Years Eve was a chilly 2 degrees at midnight. Brrr. We toured the usual tourist sights but have possibly been spoiled by seeing so many amazing forts already - however the Qutb Minar (above) was impressive and the great Muslim chicken and mutton restaurants in the bazaars of Old Delhi saw us cruising there for meat about 3 times in 3 days. The meat was very fresh - check out the pile of goats' heads in the box on the right..

From Delhi we headed north to Chandigarh, a completely planned city designed by Le Corbusier. I had only heard of this guy via a Mitre 10 commercial but apparently he's quite a famous architect. The city was very green with lots of concrete and very straight roads. The best part though was a huge illegally built mosaic garden that was built on govt. land over 18 years by stealth - now accepted by the govt and a tourist attraction in its own right.

Heading further north again (suckers for that cold weather) we came to Amritsar - home of the Sikhs and the beautiful Golden Temple. We accidentally arrived on the birthday of one of the gurus - men in turbans were handing out free food on the streets and the temple itself was lit up with thousands of fairy lights. Not to mention the fireworks and free chocolate ..

The final stop on our northern tour was a jam-packed jeep ride 30km from Amritsar to the India-Pakistan border for the famous nightly border ceremony (so famous they have built grandstands for the tourists on each side). Below are the Indian border guards in full ceremonial costume.

For about half an hour, crowds on either side of the border cheer for their side as each set of border guards huff and puff and high-kick their way up and down no-mans land before throwing the border gates open and lowering their flags. It was surreal to have the crowds so close to each other - below is the view of the Indian border gate from our seat - the crowd and land you can see beyond it are Pakistani.

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Big game ...

From Agra we headed for New Delhi via the eastern side of Rajasthan, getting a taste for what we hope to explore in more depth on the western side - forts, camels and the desert.Tempted by the desert around Pushkar (home to the world's largest camel fair each November) we did a short sunset camel trek - just enough to wet our appetites for something more extensive in the west.
Surprisingly we also came across a couple of great national parks (Ranthambore and Keoladeo) and went in search of tigers and pythons (respectively). The tiger hunt was unsuccessful although the footprint below was spotted.The python hunt was markedly more succesful, maybe because we were on foot and bikes rather than in a jeep.

Being on foot isn't that threatening when all you spot are parrots in the trees ...but is slightly more heart quickening when it is a jackal or python that is only a few metres away (it's amazing how fast the latter move).

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