CAMELS!!!

Sorry for the late posting but I came down with something during the past week that put me out of commission for a while. I am much better now but never missed home more than when I was sick. There is definitely something to be said for the comfort of chicken noodle soup, a quiet bedroom, and familiar medicine. Prior to being sick though I had an action packed week with two trips worth writing about. Let me start with the fun trip (Pushkar) and then will post later about the work trip (Maharashtra).

One of the top “things to do in India” is to attend the Pushkar Camel Festival. The annual event brings hundreds of thousands of tourists and camel traders to the small town of Pushkar and is quite the site to see. I traveled there with my two roommates (Fizzy and Alvaro) and met up with three other AIF Fellows (Carolyn, Pooja, and Hemant). As always, it was great to see the other Fellows, catch up on work/life experiences, and see how views of India/development have changed in the past couple of months.

On Saturday morning, we went to the festival grounds to meet up with a couple of other Seva Mandir volunteers (Lizzy and Rose) who were also in town for the weekend. Unfortunately, upon arriving we found out that we had just missed the first camel race. There would be other ones throughout the week but none during our stay. We decided to stick around and watch the “camel dance” competition but this proved to be even more disappointing.


Camels are awful dancers. The competition basically consisted of the trainers pulling the camels around in circles and making them do tricks that look uncomfortable at best and unusually cruel at worst.




After we left this spectacle, the trip took a huge turn for the better. We found a guy to rent us camels to ride around the festival grounds. There was some back and forth with the negotiating but we eventually got him to agree to let us race the camels at the end of the ride. Hemant and I shared a camel (named Jimmy) and were given full reign of where to lead the group. Everyone seemed to enjoy the ride, though there was a bit of panic when I accidentally dropped the rope that controlled one of the other camels. All was fine though and no fellows were lost on runaway camels. The “race” at the bottom of the hour was quite exciting, though brief, I think only a picture is necessary to tell the results.


While the camel ride and race were fun, there was still something missing: more camels! We all piled onto a camel-drawn cart and sought out more camels. It was a nice ride and quite amazing when we saw the vast campgrounds that housed the forty thousand camels that were brought in for the festival.


We spent some time walking around the grounds and tried to buy a camel though the vendors did not take us very seriously. At the end of our trek, I thought it would be nice to give something back to the camel that had been pulling us around. I went with our “driver” and picked out something nice for our camel though I don’t feel he fully appreciated the bling.

The next day we started with a spiritual walk from one of the main temples down to the lake. At the lake were thousands of people bathing in the holy water at various ghats (steps into the the lake).

The three other Fellows then headed off and I went to check out Ajmer (a neighboring city that we were told was worth visiting). Since we only had the afternoon in Ajmer, we saw one temple (because that’s what you do in India) and then we went to a park by the lake to rest and watch the sunset.