A camel ride into the Desert National Park

I didn’t know a safari on a camel back was such an exercise for the bones and joints! Our camel was Laal, and there were four more in the gang, with three boys to manage the camels and four foreign tourists along with the two of us. Sitting high on camel back, holding on to it when it sways forward and backward to get up, and riding on it, jumping up and down was fun. Especially when Laal and his friends decided to run a bit to add to the excitement, at one point, I was almost off the camel and screamed! I blamed Dee for the camel running too fast and not taking care of his wife and the boys made fun saying it’d have been a task for them to search me in the desert, had I fallen off!

It was a bigger dune this time than what we had seen the previous day. And we were truly deserted - there was no one else except our gang for as far as we could see! We were to spend the night here, in the open, in the cold! We were excited. We walked around as much as we could till the sun set, not able to take enough of the desert. As it got dark, there was a camp fire for warming as well as cooking. The boys cooked a meal for us, while we all sang and talked to each other, the boys also pulling each other’s legs.
After dinner, while we were for another round of walking on the sands, and warming up, the boys made our beds, and showed us our ‘room’ for the night.
And here was our room and our neighbors’... ;)

It was too cold, in spite of the blankets and thin mattress we had, but it was a memorable experience to open your eyes in the middle of the night to see only sand and sand around you and stars over your head, and the half moon slowly rising in the east! We watched the moon rise for sometime and fell back asleep.
I was the first one to wake up next morning, as I didn’t want to miss seeing the sunrise. A bowl of hot black tea on the cold morning was welcome. We watched the sunrise, went out for a long walk around the scrubs on one side, finding many more birds, experiencing the desert. Well, the birds here woke up much later after the sun rose, may be because of the cold weather.
After breakfast, I had my ‘myself time’ just walking about with Mother Nature when Dee had gone with the boys to find the camels that were wandering off in the night.
When we were back, again on camel backs, I asked the others ‘Aren’t your joints aching?’‘Are you kidding?’ replied one of the girls in the gang, ‘do you have any left? I have no joints any more!’

It was true, but it was worth every bit of the pain.