Bikaner: desert city and camel safari
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
5
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Bikaner,
India
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
When you drink four litres of water per day and still don't need to pee, you know it's hot. Bikaner is a sprawling city in the middle of the Thar desert - about 160km from the border with Pakistan. And it's hot. 37 to 38 degrees in the shade when I visited, 3 degrees more just a week after I left.
Bikaner is a marketplace for the many villages dotted around the desert. It also lives succesfully off the military - with 'Pak' nearly within sight, there are many army and airforce bases here. Bikaner is home of the famed Camel Corps. Yes, soldiers on camels. At least they can't get stuck in the sand.
I arrived here by overnight train from Jaipur. Indian Railways has a baffling range of train classes, but this particular train only offered second class sleeper places. Among travellers, this particular class of travel is often regarded the best way to interact with Indians, as middle-class Indian people can afford it too. As it is not airconditioned, the windows can be opened so you also get to participate more in the landscape and stations passing by. The downside is that the windows need to be open to keep you cool - so the train is absolutely filthy. Put something like this on the rails in Holland and there would be riots with many dead.
Next to the door of my car, a printout listed all the people booked on car S1 tonight, and running through the names it was obvious that I was the only foreigner on board. Inside, three levels of padded sleeping benches were clapped out and ready for the trip. It's somewhat like a European couchette train, but without the compartiment doors, windows and carpets, and with a layer of dust and (on the floor) an interesting cocktail of peanut shells and spit-out chewing tobacco. But I wasn't complaining: the temperature was fine, the train was nearly empty and I was on my way into the desert. I could wrap myself from head to toe in my new sheet and doze away on the bouncing train.
Under the lower bunk, chains were thoughtfully provided by Indian Rail to lock up your bags, and I used my cheap Czech bike lock to do so. The only other person sharing the 6-bed compartiment was a man in white clothes who happily veered up and introduced himself as Mr Shah from Gujurat, the state bordering Rajastan to the south. He was a retired businessman who had travelled the world extensively: Japan, China, Europe, the US, you name it.
He had just accompanied an unstable Italian girl from Gujarat to Jaipur (she was just 21, mentally shaky, and planning to do Vipassana meditation to find herself back... this is hard-core meditation that involves 10 days with 10 hours of meditation per day, no food after noon, and no talking. It seems to me you need some life experience to meditate *about* before you can use this for your own good. No wonder she was refused and sent off home by the gurus. Mr Shah was on his way to Bikaner to visit some sights that he had not seen yet in India. He was a Jain, and was able to answer all the questions I had after visiting the Delhi temple and bird hospital.
Jains are cool. They have the most beautiful temples of all. They do not like sitting around in cow shit. They only wear white clothes (though there is rooms for imagination: some have great embroidering), sandals, are strictly vegetarian and in general are very picky eaters, meaning that a restaurant serving Jains is probably going to be healthy and good. Some Jains, like Mr Shah's wife, also does not eat products that come from the ground, like peanuts, onions and ginger. (This reminds me of the Romanian pre-Easter fasting rule to avoid 'earth' products as well). The really religious ones wear masks and sweep the floor to avoid breathing in or stepping on insects, and also do not use any form of transport. I forgot to ask Mr Shah about the Jain standpoint on mosquitos, of which I happily kill lots every day.
After arrival and checking into a cool room at the Palace View hotel in a quiet corner in the north of town, I visited Bikaner Palace, a huge complex of rooms and courtyards, surrounded by a moat. The style was pure Rajput (royal Rajastan) desert architecture: windows had stone screens to keep out the heat (and to keep the ladies of the palace in a state of 'purdah', free of the lustful gaze of men like me). The guide who was unfortunately included in the price spoke Indian English (Inglish) and was very hard to understand. He was just blurting out fatcs, dates and corny jokes anyway. Highlights were some beautiful rooms (one with a ceiling fan that would be powered by some poor serf sitting outside pulling a rope all night long), the view from the roof, and the original 1915 French war plane parked in the museum for some reason.
For a change, the old town bazaar was pleasant to walk through, and the lack of tourists that reach Bikaner means the people are genuinely friendly and interested. I had met an Australian girl called Christina here, and together we walked through the streets. She was surprised that she was not getting as many looks and attention as usual (the locals assumed we were married). We stopped off at the town's biggest haveli (city palace), which was built in the 1920s for a local textile baron, and now was a hotel. It was nice to hang out in the courtyard, munch on cheese toast and sip tea brought by four waiters.
I played carambole with a man sitting on the street. This is a flat version of pool, you flick wooden discs across a board to get all your coloured discs into the four corner pockets. I won, but only because he let me. The Jain temple was the only real sight in the old town. After leaving my sandals at the door, the caretaker told me it's special as it the only one around with paintings, as opposed to carvings. The temple is also much older than the surrounding city, dating back to the 13th century. He pointed out about 20 small pictures showing diverse punishments. This way, illiterate beleivers could clearly see what would happen if they strayed from the Jain path. Between all the people being skewered, burnt and stood on by elephants, my favourite was the punishment for being too critical of others: a poor sinner was tied to the ground and was being stung by three huge scorpions.
Khushboo, the caretaker's nine-year old granddaughter spoke English quite well and showed me around, took me up to the temple roof for the view, and showed me the cow hospital next door. Hindus may worship streetcows, it's the Jains that feed them healthy food and take care of them if they are hurt in accidents, or when they get old.
I bought Khusboo some chocolate and was invited into the family house down the road. Her family lived on the second floor of an ancient house in the old town. It was maybe 3m wide and had only two small rooms on each floor, with all walls stacked high with cushions and sheets to use as bedding at night - everyone just sleeps where there is space. A TV was switched on to an Indian soap opera (as we walked through the living room of the neighbours downstairs to reach the staircase, I saw two women kneeling on the ground with their faces just 20cm from the screen, watching the show).
I was offered tea and sweets (a kind of marzipan cookies), while the family got together all the people that could speak English in the area. Soon the room was full with seven women who spoke varying degrees of English, and me. They were all dismayed that I was not married yet, of course. A beautiful 25-year old girl, one of the neighbours, told me she would be getting married next year, and that her parents had selected a very talented and potentially wealthy husband for her. Most Indians marry the person that their parents select, and the system has worked very well for millennia. Only in the big cities do the children of some modern families get the luxury of choosing their own partners, though this is often regarded as a bad, Western thing.
Nearby Bikaner lies one of India's weidest temples. In the village of Deshnok, a 30-minute bus ride south of town, in the Karni Mata temple people worship rats. The whole place is teeming with hundreds of rats, who are beleived to be the reincarnations of souls. So you have to be careful where you walk - you may step on your granny.
Christina and I took off our sandals at the entrance, as is usual in Indian temples, and proceeded through a beautifully carved marble doorway to the inner courtyard where we spotted the first of the rodents. Scurrying along the walls, and occasionally dashing across the middle of the courtyard, were dozens of rats, maybe 30cm from head to tail. All were squeaking contently, because they were having the time of their lives - they were happy, fat rats.
A net was suspended over the courtyard to keep the eagles out, and inside worshippers arrived with sacks of food to offer to the rats. A family was sitting on the floor, pouring milk into a large bowl, and on the edge about 30 rats were dipping their faces into it, slurping away. Elsewhere, piles of food were left behind, and the rats could just stroll over to nibble at it. It looked like they were getting more than enough food, as they were not in a hurry to eat.
Just like it's said to bring good luck if you eat the food that the rats have nibbled on, it's supposed to be a blessing if a rat happens to run over your foot. All they did with to my feet was to briefly sniff at them, and then apparently decide it wasn't fit for consumption. I nearly did step on one, on the way out it darted from the doorway right onder my sole, which I lifted back up just in time. So maybe in this case it was me blessing the rat, instead of the other way round.
The next day it was time for my camel trek. Camel safaris are big business in the Thar desert, though more in Jaisalmer than in Bikaner. It seems that in Bikaner the quality is better (whatever that means) and that you don't see other tourists or too many village children screaming for chocolate along the way.
I had booked a 2 day trek, and together with three silent French youngsters and two Germans of my age, we set of by jeep to a village out of town, where we were handed our camels. After a few instructions ('don't come near the head, and don't come near the ass') we were ready to roll. We were in a caravan of no less than 15 people. 6 tourists, 6 camels, 6 camel owners, 2 people steering camel carts with water, bedding, tents and food (broad-wheeled, to get through sand) and a guide called Jitendera (Lala for short).
Camels a weird creatures. They get up with a strange scissoring-motion that has you rodeo forwards and backwards. They make strange groaning noises and fart a lot (due to their diet very dry, hard food that needs rechewing over and over again). They very tall, offering good views over fences and walls. They're extremely interested in other camels, and they always get excited when they spot one in the distance - their heads turn, they groan and forget to look where they put their feet. They're well-built for the desert though: they need 40L of water per day, but can go without water for days on end.
Lala told us what you need to look for when you select a camel at the camel market:
- good hump
- healthy eyelashes
- elegant walk
- healthy hair
So it's just like selecting a girlfriend.
A 3-year old camel (ready for work) will cost about 10000 - 15000 Rs (€200-300) which is a lot of money in this country. But if treated well, it will work 8 hours per day for 17 years. Male camels are preferred, as the ladies take 13 months to bear baby camels, which is too long to wait for, for most farmers. All Rajastan camels (of which there are 6 wonderful varieties) have one hump only, the ones up in the Himalayas have two.
We plodded of into the heat of the desert (after a few hours Lala told us to cover up better as most of us were already slightly sunburnt in the face), getting used to the swaying motions of the camels. Some people complain of backaches or pain in the arse after sitting on a camel, but I liked the motion and had no complaints after two days. The routine was to leave early, have lunch at noon, and then doze in the shade of a tree until 15:00 when the temperatures began to drop again, and then to walk on until 18:00. At €15/day the trek was not the cheapest available, but in exchange for that you don't get whiny budget backpackers on the trip, and the food was amazingly good. At least 6 different pans of food were set before us each time, with chapati (bread), rice, fruit and water to accompany it all.
Don't think the Thar looks anything like the Sahara. Not many deserts are just waves on sand dunes, and the Thar probably looks like what you've seen of the Sahel on TV - flat land with some dead grass, sometimes sandy streches, but with regular scrubs or trees. One area of the Thar does look like the Sahara, and consequently has hotels and drinks stalls built beside them, all awaiting the buses of tourists from Jaisalmer who drop by to watch the sunset. Lala told about one part of the desert (at Khuli) where enterprising locals had succesfully removed all the plants to create the landscape that the tourists demanded.
To my surprise, the desert is full of plants, animals and people. It doesn't look that way, but it's one of the most fertile areas around, but just has a water problem. Especially the last decade the drought has been bad and rains have sometimes stayed away for years. Finally in 2003 there was enough rain to satisfy everyone, and it's the reasons India is doing well right now. With the right irrigation, you can start a succesful farm, and we saw the result of that on the first day when we stopped for lunch at a desert farm. The houses were just mud huts with thatched roofs, but this family's wealth was its water well, drilled 200m down, which supplied enough water to irrigate a few hectares of wheat and chickpea crops. Drilling a new well costs a fortune at half a million rupees (€9500), but will last for decades. Not all areas are good - sometimes there's only salty water and drilling is useless. These are the spots of desert that look most barren. Otherwise, there's always some kind of human activity in sight, a small building, some nomads grazing their goats, etc.
We passed though some villages with surprising numbers of children (all waving and asking where we're from), with many modern small houses, but also many mud huts (actually better than concrete, as it's cooler inside) that had been decorated with beautiful patterns. One of the houses was freshly painted in bright blue and pink, in preparation of a village wedding that was to take place soon.
The variety of animals we spotted astounded me:
- dozens of partridges
- 3 chameleons (Lala did not allow me to touch one though it looked like a fairly harmless animal)
- one very fat lizard
- plenty of deer with corkscrew antlers (and also some camel-back hunters)
- 2 nilgay (a kind of large deer)
- wild peacocks
- hawks
- ravens (like very big crows)
- eagles (40 of them cirkling overhead)
- vultures (on the ground and in the air near the Bikaner rubbish dump)
- big ants, small bees, doves, wandering dogs
The silence of the desert was amazing. During the day, all you hear are the birds. In the evening, when the wind dies down, it's the noises in the distance of trains and village stereos that drift across the sands. We spent one night in the desert, camped near a high dune from where there was a 360° view of the flat desert around, with the lights of Bikaner twinkling 30km away. It was completely silent, and all of us slept outside under the blankets, looking up at a billion stars and a bunch of satellites and planes. I was now a happy part of that darkness near the Pakistani border that I had seen from the plane window on the way over.
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Mood: sweaty
Weather: relentless sun beating down, 38 degrees
Stomach: calm
Sign of the day: "Lungs at work - no smoking please" (palace wall)
