As everyone warns you before you come to India, "Don't drink the water, don't brush your teeth
with the water or wash vegetables with the water. Hell, don't even look at the water." So paranoid was I about the water, food and hygiene of India that I half expected to fall ill the instant Air India flight 310 from Hong Kong touched down at Chatrapati Shivaji Airport in Mumbai.
But we didn't get sick. Not in Mumbai, not in Ahmedebad and not, excepting matters of snot and phlegm, in Udaipur. We were doing well in ol' Jodhpur, too, and probably would have burned healthy right through India and back to Seoul if not for camels and their Rajput minders in the Great Thar Desert.
The Great Thar straddles India and Pakistan, covering a good portion of what was once Rajputana, a collection of 22 independent, princely states that became known as Rajasthan - "Land of Kings" - when the states congealed and united with India. Each of these states was ruled by a maharaja, essentially a local king, who had armies of Rajput warriors watching his back. And to say that these fellows, these warriors, were tough sonsabitches is like saying that General George Patton could get a bit touchy from time to time.
It was Rajasthan, afterall, that give birth to the practice of
jauhar, wherein the queens, princesses and wives of the warriors would immolate themselves before a battle their men were almost certain to lose. The warriors then rode out to the battlefield, wearing saffron-colored turbans and knowing they had nothing for which to return home and that the enemy, even if victorious, at least wouldn't be getting into their wives and daughers. Small consolation if you ask me.
And here I was, in a land where men routinely burnt their wives just so no one else could nail them, worrying about whether my cauliflower would be washed properly.
The desecendents of these severe clans who live out in the Thar nowadays are tough, too - but they'd have to be, wouldn't they? The Great Thar Desert provides little more than subsistence farms of millet and meagre grazing for cattle, goats, sheep and camels. A child out here can reach seven years of age and never see a drop of rain, and even a wet year brings less than two inches. This is Marwar, "land of death," where precipitation is an abstraction.
The Rajasthanis live mostly in thatched-roof huts with walls made of sandstone slabs and patched with a mixture of straw and cattle dung. Electricity, except to the rural water-pumping stations built by the government in the 1990s, is non-existent. A toilet is the fresh cathole you just dug and dishes are cleaned with scraps of old newspaper and sand. Children attend primary school and then - if they don't join the army or become truck drivers - live out the rest of their days doing what countless generations before them have done: scratch a living out of the sand and scrub.
The highlight of life out here is when, at seventeen, you marry sight unseen through arrangement by the families a fourteen year-old girl from three dunes over. If you're lucky and she drinks her morning urine everyday this wife will live long and bear you a brood of four or five young sheepherders to follow in these dusty footsteps of yours.
Entertainment out here, like moisture, is scarce, but when it comes, it comes slowly. Walking out toward the path that runs through your hamlet, you watch it approach. One camel pulls a cart, laden with cookware, a propane tank, a burlap sack of vegetables and a couple of brand-name backpacks - Lowe, Gregory and the like. The other camels, led by beturbaned, mustachioed Rajputs, bear grimacing tourists who grit their teeth and swear to themselves because -
jesus creeping shit and christ almighty - riding a camel feels for all the world like birthing a child. Pure hell on the loins.
This small caravan approaches and, as it passes, you say 'namaste' or 'tata' if you're a kid or, if an adult, you just stare distrustfully at the pale passersby in their designer sunglasses and Vibram soles. The group lumbers into the distance and you resume threshing the millet or milking the camel or impregnating the wife. Such is a party in the Great Thar.
Having forked over 1500 rupees a day to be just such a diversion - "like giraffes paying to sit their zoo cages," I told Na Young - we got trucked out to the village of Bhikamkore, 75 kilometres northwest of Jodhpur, by jeep and then a few more kilometres beyond that. We found ourselves at the home of our guide,
Gemar Singh, which consisted of three huts fitting the above description: one for his wife and three year-old daughter, one for cooking and eating and one unfinished hut for guests. And as our hut, lacking plaster and window coverings, offered little resistance to the elements, we were to simply sleep outside in the elements. Good enough - you can't beat a desert night for stars. Or for sloth bears, jackals, scorpions and disgruntled camels. Sleep tight. As it happened, the silent clean air - coupled with my weekly dose of Larium - ensured one of the best nights of sleep since arriving in India.
On arriving, we immediately became the local attraction. Kids from nearby huts converged on Gemar's home to see what he had dragged in this time. In this case, he had dragged in an American who can't stand kids and a Korean girl who kept asking, just to clarify, "so, no toilet? Really?"
"The toilet," Gemar said, motioning off to the southeast, "is over there, where you don't see any huts. Choose a bush."
Now, unlike my wife, I'm not opposed to crapping in the underbrush, though given the choice, I certainly prefer an ivory white commode for my morning movements. But just as I don't
need a toilet, neither do I need an audience. The part of the Thar desert we visited is not so sparsely populated that you won't have to wave good morning to the migratory shepherds in their red turbans as you squat in a briar patch. And so, our first morning in the desert found me calculating potential bowel movements and the hours remaining until we arrived at a hotel in Jodhpur. Could I hold it for 43 more hours?
After breakfast, we mounted camels and headed west, riding through and endle
ss expanse of sand, scrub and thorny acacia trees, broken only occasionally by a small group of huts and a child or two tending the family flock, the bells around the goats' necks tinkling in the emptiness. Small herds of antelope, a peacock here and there and the local bird life - hupu woodpeckers, green bee-eaters - lent the only contrast to the stark lack of motion. Women in sarees of red and orange - their faces covered when outside the house - worked the millet fields and provided the only color beyond brown and olive green.
After two weeks of Indian cities, I was only too happy to be rid of the exhaust and noise and touts that come with travelling by rickshaw, bus and taxi. After cities like Ahmedabad and Mumbai, camels farting on a desert afternoon can sound positively lyrical. And goodness, do camels ever fart.
And they get sick once in a while, too, even the best of them. Stopping for lunch, the drivers unsaddled and hobbled the camels, two of which limped off to graze the greenery, such as it was. Na Young's mount, however, simply dropped to its knees beneath the nearest tree and sat, looking glum, with that whistling-lips face camels always wear. Seeking to perk the sick boy up, one of the drivers tried mixing some tire rubber and herbs, setting it on fire and wafting it about the camel's body, rather like smelling salts for a sacked quarterback. All this smoke in the camel's face, though, succeeded only in making the camel look more hangdog.
Plan One having failed, a second driver disappeared behind an acacia tree with an empty water bottle.
"Betcha that bottle ain't empty when he comes back," I said to Na Young.
Sure enough, next thing we knew, two other drivers - who had been chopping vegetables for lunch - were helping their friend wrestle a bottleful of urine down the camel's gullet. The goal here, as with the rubber smoke, was to get the camel moving. In that situation, urine might not make me feel any better, but someone manhandling it down my throat would sure get me on my feet. The camel, however, drank the urine and went back to whistling, but still didn't get up.
The drivers, dusting their hands on their britches, went back to preparing lunch. And a good lunch it was - two curries and chapati bread - but as I vomited and crapped my guts out into a Jodhpur hotel toilet, I had to wonder what that miserable camel contributed to my meal.
Last summer I read TE Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," an account of his time spent fighting with the Arabs during the World War I years, much of which he spent atop a camel. A light day of riding for him and his compatriots was six hours, and they routinely made nine hours or more at a stretch, even while sick with malaria. All of which, combined with what I've written above, is only to say that I am a goddamn sissy and I know it. I have never spent more than three consecutive hours on a camel and never forced my own urine down one of the beasts' throats. No matter how worldly and hardboiled you think you are, you will never pass the Tough Bastard test until you've spent nine straight malarial hours on a camel under a hot desert sun. I haven't and that's fine by me and my loins.
After two years of city-bound winters, I managed to abandon the wife on a holiday weekend and - devoted husband that I am - head for the hills. Dr. Phil would be proud. No really, he would: I was back home, boots off and under spousal jurisdiction, by sundown Christmas Eve. That's more than I can say for you.
seum devoted to the period at the base of the mountain. Now, I know what you're saying - "Ooh, a coal museum. Can't wait." - but it really is worth a visit and a damn sight better than the Korean National Museum of Presidential Bunions. The first floor of the Taebaek museum is filled with one humdinger of a collection of gems, fossils and precious stones and metals. I've long thought that, were I to give up my career as East Asia's preeminent proctologist, I would pursue a career in geology and, as such, I left my fair share of nose prints on the display cases in this museum.
