Birthday Boy
Rajasthan, India
It was nearing 3 a.m. when there was a quiet, almost apologetic knock at the door of my guest house room. I knew what it was all about – I think everybody in the hotel knew what it was all about. The fact was that I was not a discreet puker. When I got sick, I had the embarrassing tendency to shriek like a pterodactyl, and that drew a fair amount of attention from anybody within about a two-mile radius. I have to believe that Americans with food poisoning were nothing new to the good people at the Haveli Guest House in Jodhpur, India; I imagine, however, that the staff was more accustomed to pressing one ear against the door to listen for the telltale sounds of a guest with stomach trouble, rather than, say, sandbagging the door and draping the corridor in yellow caution tape.
Clinging to a toilet for twenty-four hours has a way of screwing up one’s best laid plans. Just a few weeks into my solo round-the-world tour, I would be turning thirty, and I was determined to be somewhere memorable to mark this occasion. I had selected the Taj Mahal based on the fact that most Americans had actually heard of it and that it sounded interesting enough that it might distract attention the fact that I was alone on my birthday.
A bad bowl of fish curry had changed all that. Now, according to my calculations, I would be in the tiny desert town Jaisalmer, India in far western Rajasthan, and I was pretty sure that nobody had heard of that. People would likely assume that I had simply made up a place on the far side of the world to cover the fact that I was sitting alone in my apartment eating Apple Jacks out of the box.
In a potential saving grace, it seemed that Jaisalmer was famous for camel safaris. This sounded, if not exactly appealing, at least exotic. On the other side of the coin, however, reports on camel safaris from returning backpackers seemed to be decidedly less than enthusiastic. Travelers spoke of the event in the same halting voice that they might speak of surviving a multi-car pile up on the freeway: stunned disbelief, gaps in their memory, and abrupt adjective-dominated sentences (“hot…painful…fetid…”).
“Still, pretty cool to ride a camel, huh?” I would offer hopefully, quickly mentioning that I was already committed to spending my birthday in this fashion in hopes of softening the response and encouraging them to find the positive. It seldom worked. It was as if I had enthusiastically proclaimed my intention of spending my birthday licking dogshit off the sidewalk. Worse, it only served to announce the fact that I would be spending my birthday alone, my only hope of companionship being to hire whatever beast of burden happened to be available and riding it around.
Thus it was that on the last morning of my twenties, the other four souls who would be going on the camel safari and I met up at the local German bakery in Jaisalmer. (The ubiquitous “German bakery” is one of India’s great mysteries. How Germany managed to swoop into a country of one billion and claim credit for the croissant, I’ll never understand.) The group consisted of two French Canadians, a brother and sister named Justin and Marianne, one Israeli named Shlomi, and me. It took us about forty-five minutes in a jeep to get to where we would start the safari, of which I spent the first twenty-five dropping atomic hints regarding my birthday until I finally had to coyly admit that I was, in fact, turning thirty the next day. And how embarrassing that everybody knew!
Less than an hour from Jaisalmer we were piling off the jeep and onto our respective camels. (My camel’s name was apparently Sandy. It occurs to me now that maybe they were all named Sandy.) We started off all excited and asking the camel drivers all kinds of questions, until Marianne asked what the camels were constantly chewing on.
“Their own vomit,” he answered matter-of-factly. That put an end to the Q&A for a while.
With nobody talking anymore, it was dead quiet out there in the desert – one was left alone with one’s own thoughts. My thoughts that morning mostly focused on trying to come up with another time in my life when I had been this uncomfortable. The heat was astonishing – the last time I had felt heat like this was when I was an eight-year-old fat kid and fell onto a campfire trying to retrieve a marshmallow. In addition, my legs, straddling Sandy’s broad back, were being torn apart like the wishbone of a Thanksgiving turkey. To add further insult to my misery, my camel was third in the line, meaning that I was caught in the flatulent slipstream of the two lead camels. My brain was reviewing the emergency evacuation procedures through the ear canal should things get much worse.
An impossibly long two hours later, we came to a halt. Our camel driver unhooked the chain of camels, handed Sandy’s reins to me, and informed me I would be controlling him from here on out. I believe I replied, “I don’t think so,” not as a matter of defiance, but more as a simple prediction. Camels are, after all, just about the weirdest domesticated animal on the planet – riding one feels about as natural as strapping a saddle on a giraffe. To make matters worse, Sandy was not happy about this transfer of power, and took the opportunity to voice his displeasure.
Let me just say that I had always expected camels, in keeping with their comical appearance, to make a noise like a cute variation of a farm animal. So when Sandy opened his mouth, I expected to hear some kind of yodeling moo or a maybe a sweet trilling baaa.
Camels do not make this kind of noise. They make the kind of noise that you will be familiar with if you have seen the T-Rex scenes from Jurassic Park and had your ear pressed against the speaker. It sounds less like a child’s barnyard animal toy and more like the last sound a person would ever hear before losing a torso. And this is who I would be spending my birthday with.
Nevertheless, I now had the reins of this ridiculous beast. And much to my surprise, Sandy did exactly what I wanted him to do, which was basically to not whirl his neck around and projectile vomit in my face. In fact, after a while, the whole thing was like riding a bike – specifically, an eight-foot tall bike with exploding square tires that had been dipped in camel vomit. After a while, controlling him was a breeze, especially if you wanted to go exactly where he wanted to go, which I did.
In the late afternoon, we arrived at an area of massive Sahara-style sand dunes, maybe a couple hundred meters long by a hundred meters wide, just sitting in the middle of the landscape as if it had been poured from the sky. In the late afternoon sun it looked like billowing silk, the finest and softest sand you can imagine, and from there we watched the sunset and ate dinner.
It was the first real chance for Justin, Marianne, Shlomi and I to talk to each other. We quickly discovered that we had almost nothing in common whatsoever, and yet it was exactly because of that that we got along so well. It is a fascinating thing to meet people who lead absolutely different lives and learn about how they came to live those lives. When the campfire took its last quiet breaths, we laid out our blankets on the top of the highest sand dune and stared at the star-studded night, all wrapped up in the pale band of the Milky Way like a Christmas ribbon.
I woke up just before sunrise on October 24th, just as the sky started to glow a faint blue in the east, gradually rinsing away the stars until the sun blazed up over the dunes. It began to heat up quickly after a surprisingly cold night.
It was now my birthday. I was thirty years old, and my friends and family were thousands of miles away. Still, it was a nice thing to be wished a happy birthday by people you barely knew, albeit after I had dropped some subtle hints (i.e., “It’s my birthday today…remember I told you? In the jeep?”). My day with Sandy, however, could have started off better. As it turned out, the sand dunes on which we slept were too steep to ride our camels down, so we had to lead them down. I started down the steep dunes, but found it was difficult to navigate. To compensate, I started taking large loping steps, in order to get down faster and stay upright.
It did not occur to me that this technique would not play to Sandy’s strengths as an awkwardly-designed quadruped. He did not have much of a choice, however, since I was pulling him down, oblivious to his distress. I paused because I felt a curious gust of putrid wind on the back of my neck, and stopped to turn around.
Camels are not small animals – they tend to measure about seven or eight feet tall and weigh up to 1500 pounds. They are built for survival, going for weeks at a time without water in an unforgiving environment. They are not given to prancing gracefully down a hill any more than they could skim across the water like a trained dolphin. When I stopped to turn around, I was so close to this beast barreling down on me that his face actually butted my head.
It was a terrifying sight. I thought I was going to die, crushed under this terrific weight, and I did not want to die. Moreover, I sure as hell didn’t want to die like this, on my thirtieth birthday in India, in a manner likely to make international headlines that spawned terms like “camelanche” and employed the word “pancake” as a verb.
In retrospect, of course, the smart thing to do would have been to stop. I was not about to stop. Humans did not get this far up the evolutionary ladder by simply stopping in front of 1500 pounds of out-of-control camel flesh. So I gripped those reins tighter and tried to zigzag out of the path of destruction, which of course only pulled this camel along with me. At every swerve, I caught a glimpse of Sandy, legs splayed out in four separate directions like a “Slippery When Wet” sign for camels. I could see the camel drivers calling at me to do something, but it was drowned out by the terrified ear-splitting guttural roar coming from two feet behind me.
How this looked to others, I cannot be sure. I do know that when we reached solid ground, Sandy’s eyes blazing wildly, my companions were doubled over in laughter. I didn’t care – I decided that the gift of life, the freedom from a horribly gruesome and unbearably embarrassing death, was my first birthday present of the day.
From that point on, quite unexpectedly, things began to improve. For Sandy and me, I think that brush with death (mine) served to bring us closer. He and I got along just fine after that. In fact, more often than not, we took the lead in front of the other camels. Sandy was in his element now. By that afternoon, we had hit a wide flat expanse of desert, and the two camel drivers called up and asked us if we wanted to race.
“Race? Race what?” asked Marianne.
“I think he means the camels – race the camels,” Shlomi responded.
“He can’t mean race the camels – what would we do, just wait here for them to come back?” said Marianne, looking into the distance.
“He means with us on top, Marianne,” said Justin. “We’d race them. You know? Like a race?”
“Ah. I see. No, I don’t want to do that.”
“Me neither,” I chimed in.
“Yeah, there’s no way,” Justin started. “My legs feel like they’re being…”
“Ok!” Shlomi called over to the camel guys. “Yes, we want to race!”
So with that funny brand of Israeli democracy deciding our fate, and a few loud wild clicking noises from the camel drivers, we were off, four of us in a line, racing across the desert.
It turned out to be a thrilling experience, despite the uncanny sensation of somebody shoving a chainsaw up your ass. But here’s what counts: Sandy and I, we won that race. You could argue that the others let me win, but that would be assuming two impossibilities: 1.) that they had any control at all over those beasts, and 2.) that they even remembered it was my birthday. I celebrated our victory by patting Sandy on the head.
We stopped for the night on another set of sand dunes, and for the first time in my life, I watched the sun rise and set on the same day. One of the camel drivers had taken off, reappearing about four hours later, just in time for dinner. As usual, they cooked up a nice feast for us over an open fire under the stars, with one difference: at the end of the meal, he brought out one more thing that they had cooked and handed it to me. I looked up to see Shlomi, Justin, and Marianne wearing excited grins.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“Birthday cake!” said our camel driver with a huge smile.
It turned out he had been informed by the others that it was my birthday, and they had chipped in to buy butter, very expensive commodity in the desert, and quietly bribed him to ride two hours across the desert to a village where he could buy it. “It’s a surprise party!” Justin explained, handing me a Fanta.
I took a bite of that cake thing. Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t cake – but it at least tasted far better than it looked. The taste, however, was far less important than what these guys had done for me, knowing me less than two days.
And then they all sang happy birthday in every language they knew, and once again we laid out next to each other on the top of the dunes, huddled together for warmth. One by one the others fell asleep, but I didn’t want this night to end just yet. So I laid there on my back in the desert of western India, gazing up at the endless night sky, that magical moment when you are looking at everything and nothing at the same instant, and wondered how anybody could feel insignificant with friends so close by you can hear them breathing.
