bum chika bum

Apologies for the delay, but we were just out in the middle of the desert, about 150 kms east of the border with Pakistan, a little town called Jaisalmer, were there is no such thing as broadband (go figure) and all internet cafes have computers old as the hills, so posting pictures was not an option.

But for our desert adventure, we had to go out even further, another 45 kms towards the border to a little town called Khuri, where we got hooked up with four camel drivers and six camels. Their boss, Davi, spoke English remarkably well for someone who claimed never having gone to school. Basically the guy has quite a knack for mimicking tourists' accents, so after three days of riding through desert dunes, we had taught him to speak like he had been born in Broadmeadows. His crazy antics have provided the name for this post, as he had a liking for riding across the sand dunes yelling "bum chika bum, bum chickaree, chickaracka chickaracka bum!". An that became a warcry of sorts over the length of our safari.

In exchange, he and his crew taught us all about riding camels, how to make them sit down, get up, walk, trot, stop scratching and getting them away from edible bushes... The sand dunes were an amazing sight, especially at dawn and sundown, when the guys started cooking up what the company agrees is the best possible camp food on the planet: they actually cooked up rice, veg curry, dahl, their own chapatis, and chai with goats' milk depending upon availability (i.e. whether there were any goat herds around).

Spent two nights under the stars, and on the last one, we were keen on getting their cooking secrets, so we had their main cook, a guy we called Hello Man give us a class. (We called him that because "hello" was the only English he spoke - it was really his way of drawing your attention towards anything from dinner to antelope running among the bushes or a big branch about to wack you on the head).

So there it is, we have truly become desert people. There will be an Indian campfire cooking night coming to a house in Collingwood near you...

Today we're spending the night in a place about 400 kms to the south, Jodpur, after which we'll set out further south to a town called Udaipur on our ever-reliable Hindustani Motors Ambassador Classic.

Bum chicka bum

Luis