Many people go to the area of ​​Jaisalmer in Rajasthan with the idea of ​​taking a camel safari in the desert.
The city is beautiful and one can enjoy the feeling on being really close to the desert. (You can CLICK here to know more about Jaisalmer)
The city is very close to the border with Pakistan and the Thar Desert, also known as the Great Indian Desert. The area of Jaisalmer is in a very arid zone. What I did not know is this was no ordinary desert, but a subtropical desert, meaning there is a lot of vegetation on it.
I went to Jaisalmer with the idea of ​​staying in a hotel that friends already knew and had agreed on a very good price for me. But the value of the room was rise almost twice when I get there, so I decided not to stay. I do not like when deals change in this way.
Otherwise I agreed to do a ‘Deep Desert Camel Safari’ with them. They showed me beautiful pictures of camels in the desert and the places we would visit and I was thrilled with the plan! They also had great references on Tripadvisor, so I was kind of trusting them.
We were three people who would take part in the adventure these two days, which included a night sleeping in the desert.
We jumped into the car in which we had to wait while they were shopping the food for the next days (that included waiting almost 40 minutes with very hot weather).
Second stop was stop in a small village made ​​for tourism and then a ghost town that has nothing special. At least I got a pretty picture from that balcony, lol.
When we get to the meeting point, the camels had not yet arrived. Again we wait for nearly an hour under the hot sun in Jaisalmer.
My biggest surprise was that, it was not any desert out there…just wind turbines and small trees for kilometers around. My question was immediate: This is what you call desert? Nervously they told me that they would come to the desert and above the camels.
I have been always worried on doing responsible tourism and my vegetarian past have still some roots in myself, especially when it comes to ride an animal. I was really on a fence on doing this camel safari as I was not sure on how it would be for this animals to carry you in the heat of the desert.
The camels arrived and were not in their best shape. During the trip back they did not even have water to drink as the well was dry, and only there was where they could drink water.
Although camels are animals that can be for many weeks without water, but only if they are not working hard. When they are on a regular basis of walking or carrying weight they do need to take food and water often.
A few things you might have in mind when doing a camel safari:
– Check their shape, weight. An animal is healthy when is connected with the environment, walking with smooth steps, with their head up and if you can see their skeleton that animal shouldn’t be doing anything but recovering from being malnourished or being working too hard.
– See realistically f the camel will be able to carry your weight, and never accept to ride with other person in the same camel.
– Will they have proper access to food and water during the journey?
– Are they using any weapons or beating them during the ride or the owner is interacting in a gentle way with it? Camels are smart enough to know how fast or slowly they can walk and don’t need to be pushed to make them work harder than their comfortable rhythm.
Cooking and sleeping in the desert
The guide who accompanied us was incredible. Very friendly, he cooked us great food and he even taught me how to make chapatis , for which he had even created a song.
The day went touring one of the world’s biggest wind farms. We made a quick stop to refill energy in a small town where I manage to get the most delicious soda in the planet after spending all day under the sun. Beautiful and friendly people along the way. At dusk we finally got to the dunes where we would sleep .
Again we ate and we settled to spend one of the best nights I’ve experienced in my whole life. Being a subtropical desert, nights are warm and the days not so hot as would be in the driest desert.
Can I can tell you a secret? Riding a camel is one of the most uncomfortable things in the world!
They are very tall and if you have enough cushioning layers between you and him or her feel how hard your body on your back for hours. Besides that I was uncomfortable and I do not really like the idea of ​​traveling mounted on an animal, I finally walked most of the journey in front of my camel.
Mostly I attribute this bad experience to my disinformation: There is no desert in Jaisalmer, at least as I expected it to be. The desert in this area consists in the biggest windfarm in the world and only a few small sand dunes, which to me were not breathtaking.
The company with I took this tour is Deep Mahal and work inside the hotel of the same name, so I advice you: If you don’t want to have a bad experience in the desert do not take the tour with them! There’s many other companies in the area with better prices and better service for sure!
hi Just got connected to you, through ITB networking area,
Nice to read your blogs about India, and given an insights about India it gives a perfect view of activities available,
I probably missed and seen your blogs after 5 years, although i was in Chile in 2016 , could have met you
Any ways keep on writing..!! Take care..Vikram
We did a tour with ‘Mr Desert’ about 6 years ago and really enjoyed it. The camels were owned by the guide and seemed well looked after. I think the wind farm must be newish as I don’t remember seeing them. Agree though that a big chunk of the tour wasn’t through ‘real desert’ as we had expected. But amazing when we did get to the sand dunes and loved sitting by the campfire with a beer and Mr desert’s stories at the end of the day. Sleeping out overnight under the stars was also an experience and enjoyed going through the local village the next day. We’d recommend going with Mr Desert!
Hi Sarah! I think this night in the dunes was one of the best of my life too. So peacefull and special to sleep in the soft sand. Next time I’ll check your guy from Mr Desert 😉
I spent 5 weeks living in a village outside of Jaisalmer in 2013, and I’m passing familiar with the problems you’re talking about. One major issue is that the camel safaris are a really lucrative business there (compare to farming where 33% of all crops in the Thar desert fail), and many of the tourists have some already existing notions of a ‘desert’.
This results in somewhat misleading marketing in an effort to capture tourist business. Combine this with the fact that these kinds of 2 day safaris don’t attract much repeat business even in the best of situations, and you see the owners of the camels pushing their product in a … less than ethical way (how many of the advertising photos were *really* from those dunes?).
I was surprised as well when I got out there to see scrub and wind farms, but I think there’s something really fascinating about looking at that new development as well. In theory, the wind farms are bringing money into the ‘local communities’, but due to corruption the communities aren’t really seeing that money. That’s is another factor driving the misleading marketing of the safaris — lots of promises have been broken, and that leads to an ‘at-any-cost’ mindset.
You’ve mentioned ethical issues around the treatment of the camels, and there’s also ethical issues around worker exploitation in these businesses. These two sets of problems are interdependent: The owners of the camels have very large ‘camel camps’ (compare this terminology with ‘camel farm’, or the maybe more honest ‘camel mill’). As they own the camels, they own the industry. Guides are paid a pittance and have no say in the overall treatment of the animals.
IMHO, the best way to deal with this would be to get more camels into the hands of the guides themselves — you’ll see the treatment of the individual animals improve immediately, as the guides rely on them for their livelihood. I’d love to find a way to encourage some more honest marketing as well — I know I’d have signed up for a several-day camel safari that offered a chance to visit some local villages, chat with some people about the wind farm business and its pros and cons, and discover a modern *changing* India. Sure, they can still advertise one night in the small dunes, but I think repackaging this as a ‘changing/developing India’ tour, exposing tourists to all of the successes and problems that go along with that would go a long ways to improving everyone’s experience.
Implementing a program like this has its challenges too — camels aren’t expensive, and any number of tourists could *easily* sponsor a guide to purchase a camel of his own, but the ‘camel camp’ owners are not invested in the success of such a program. It would be great for an organization to provide tourists interested in this kind of tourism with some assurance that the money is going where it should.
I’m hoping to head back there soon to visit my friends — maybe I’ll learn more about the current state of things when I’m there. I’m also interested in something else — the big fort in Jaisalmer may be losing it’s UN world heritage status, I’ve heard. I’m curious to see how that impacts tourism in the region.
Cheers,
n.
Hi Nathan! Many thanks for your message, I really appreciate all the time you took to share your feelings here. I guess you’ve had a very interesting experience in Jaisalmer, I remember all the nice people who I’ve shared my days there.
It was very interesting to me to see all this area and agree with you on this toruism related issues with the communities. Most of my time during this camel trip I was trying to convince our guide to start his own Tour Agency, he was awesome and probably the most valuable piece of this bussiness, and he told me he has been thinking about that for few months…so hopefully he can do it soon 😉 Many people are trying to make bussiness by advertising something different because they thing that would sell more & better, but honesty is very appreciated by customers, what I was trying to explain to this guys…don’t sell something that is not, because then you’ll have an unhappy customer, but if I buy knowing exactly what I’ll get and I like it I’ll recommend you to everybody I can.
I hope you can go back there soon too!
Thanks again and see you around!
Happy travels 😉
Well informed write up! It seems you have researched over camels. Camel ride is not comfortable always. You have very well defined it why? Nice write up…gonna share it on my wall!
Thanks and regards,
Siddharth Malkania
https://siddharthmalkania.com/
Hi Siddharth! Many thank’s for your words and the share! What I’ve found was the cushion I’ve had was not very soft and also the pace of the camels are very different to horses, they walk with legs of only one side in one pace, so the rythm and movement is bigger…what they are called the boats from the desert 😉 They are lovely creatures btw!