Gotta ride the camel
Trip Start
Dec 13, 2008
1
18
59
Trip End
Jun 25, 2009
Osian,
Rajasthan,
India
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
We finally found someone to take us to Camel Camp. We realized afterwords that we could have walked here though a short cut from the street. You just walk up the sand dunes. Once at Camel Camp we splurged for their set lunch. It was very good! The service was great and they would have just kept feeding us all day if we wanted!
We decided to take a camel ride after lunch, but they needed to prepare the camel and told us to go hang out by the pool. The pool is great and we ended up chilling there for over an hour all by ourselves. We checked our watch and realized we did not have time for the camel ride anymore because we had told our rickshaw driver to come back and get us in a few minutes.
The manager was not happy with us that we were canceling our camel ride! But we were wondering why he never came and got us from the pool? To top it off our driver never showed up. The manager was trying to force us to take a very expensive jeep ride back into town by saying it was very dangerous to walk there. He was staying the people who live in the villages were from a different "caste" and could not be trusted. I am not sure what is wrong with India and why they still believe in the caste system, but it is very sad. Everyday in the newspaper we read tons of horrible news about a girl honor killing herself because she was caught walking with a man of a different caste, or someone honor killing an entire family because their child wanted to marry someone of a different caste. It is just bizarre to me that that still exists!
Anyway the walk back to town was fine. The people were poor and asked for money, but did not do anything else. We also saw some men with "freelance" camels. We ended up taking a camel ride with one of them for way, way cheaper than we were going to at Camel Camp. Being on a camel when it stands or sits is very scary! We rode though the sand dunes and then the guy even walked us into town. We told him we wanted to go to the Jain Temple next so he took us on the camel most of the way there! The stray dogs were freaking out and barking at our camel walking through town. It was really funny.
The Mahavir Swami Jain temple is super old, some parts dating back to 8th century. The sculptures are very impressive. We had an unsolicited guide follow us around and tell us about the temple. Although we would have never chosen to have a guide he turned out to be pretty informative. He even took us to bus stop to go back to Jodphur (this is where we should have gotten off in the first place.).
village huts in osian
