Camel Safari can lead to infertility!

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The drive from Ranthambhore to Pushkar was long but we were treated with interesting sights of India along the way. We saw people wearing brightly coloured clothes and kids pumping water from wells. A boy was playing a game which involved rolling a small round thing down a slope to see how far it would go – shows you how much kids really don’t need TV, he was loving the game.

When we arrived in Pushkar we went on a Camel Safari. I thought ‘OK, I sat on one with Lucy at London Zoo when we were ten so it should be fine’. However, I’ve become a lot more aware of death since I was ten and when I saw how big they were I was petrified! Anyway, there were two camels waiting for us – a pretty, cream-coloured one and a mangy old brown poo-coloured one. So I asked (twice!) if I could go on the pretty one but they insisted Manoj go on the nice one and I go on the scruffy old ugly one! The experience that followed turned out to be second scariest so far (after the Grand Canyon flight of course!). Manoj’s camel was so well behaved, it stopped when told and just looked really elegant – holding its head up nicely and so on. Mine, however, was a grumpy old bad-tempered thing that didn’t do a thing it was told so the guy kept whipping it, making it even more pissed off. It threw me around in a huff! It kept stopping to eat, bending down so far to reach the ground that I had to cling on for dear life to stop myself flying over its head! Eventually the guy got on the back of the camel and it settled down a bit. Pushkar is a holy place so we stopped by the lake to receive a blessing from a Hindu priest before getting back on the camels to ride into the desert.

I had to cling on for dear life to stop myself flying over its head!

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Well, my camel might have been well behaved, but for you blokes, if you ever want to have kids, it's not something I would recommend unless you are sitting on a saddle with some sort suspension system, as it can be painful at times! We finally reached a point in the desert to watch the sunset. It was beautiful…except we then had to get back on the camels for the ride back! Anyway, we survived and it was good fun really! We walked about in the market for a bit and then had some dinner. By the time we’d finished it was almost 10pm so we had to head back to our hotel in the dark, only knowing its name! The wind whipped up a sand storm on our way back – we couldn’t see or breathe, it was crazy, it took us ages to find our way home but we did in the end and went for a refreshing dip in the pool to freshen up.