Out of India

Tents with all mod cons and a desert festival that stars snake charmers and camel races turn a journey in Rajasthan into an exotic adventure. Words and photographs by Amanda Jones.

MY ELDEST CHILD turned nine recently and with that birthday came two terrible realizations: she was halfway through her time living at home and, worse still, she was about three years away from finding me the source of extreme embarrassment. Consensual one-on-one time with Indigo was becoming a precious commodity so I shamelessly bribed her with a mother/daughter trip. When asked where she most wanted to go she replied, “I want to see snake charmers and ride a camel. India, please”. It was determined that the two of us would make a trip to Rajasthan, the westernmost state of India, bordering Pakistan and home to the Great Thar Desert. Indigo had heard me talk of how a five-day camel trek in that desert 20 years previously had transformed me from an Australian Vogue magazine employee into a freelance adventure travel writer.

The only problem with travelling with a child is that at my age I had no desire to revisit the accommodations of my youthful travels. Thus there was a dilemma – do you spoil your child or do you traipse about in backpacker mode for the sake of their moral fibre? I settled for the low road. I would expose Indigo to another culture and remind her that 400-thread-count sheets and room service are not absolute necessities, but we would be comfortable.

We set out in early February, a time when Jaisalmer, a lyrical town of carved sandstone palaces built by the Moguls in the 11th century, hosts the Desert Festival, a celebration of Rajasthani culture. I had been to Jaisalmer during my character-building, hovel-hopping travels and I had fallen in love with the dusty, intimate, easy-going town, so different from the heaving hives of India’s larger cities. The Desert Festival is the local government’s attempt to lure tourists, both Western and Indian, to hard-to-get-to Jaisalmer which has no airport and is a six-hour drive from the closest town of Jodhpur.

Our other attraction to Rajasthan was the desert camps. In the spirit of the Indian renaissance, India has reintroduced the tented safari camp, African style, but with a decidedly Raj twist. As in Africa, tented safaris are part of the history of India. Tiger hunts, which were lavish killing sprees that severely depleted India’s tiger population, involved silk-lined tents, five-course meals and Champagne in crystal flutes. I had seen pictures of the modern camps and while they are not quite as extravagant as they were in the old days, they looked Far Pavilions enough to spark my imagination. These camps are mainly clustered in or near the Thar Desert and all have similar facilities – large beds, running water in en suite bathrooms, old-fashioned writing-desks and awnings under which one reposes to drink gin and tonic and watch the sun melt into a virgin sand dune. And for Indigo there would be on-demand camel riding.

We flew into Delhi and quickly fled to Jodhpur. From there we were desert-bound. Our driver, Gopal Singh, collected us, not in a creaking Ambassador car of the India of old but in a brand-new Toyota 4WD. Our trip planning in itself was emblematic of the leaps that India has taken in the last two decades. In California in the mid-1990s I had befriended a young Indian man. His name was Asheesh Malaney and he had plans, he told me, to start an Indian travel company called Natural Mystic. I wished him luck, thinking he’d need it, given he was going up against the likes of Abercrombie & Kent. Now, Natural Mystic is one of the foremost luxury travel tour operators and event organizers in India. Elizabeth Hurley’s Indian nuptial extravaganza was planned by them.

And so here we were, with Natural Mystic’s Gopal, heading south-east and deeper into the Thar Desert towards the vigilantly patrolled Pakistan border. The villages grew further apart, the newer cement-block houses replaced by small mud-and-dung huts. With each passing mile time slipped backwards. In Delhi and Jodhpur most women wore Western dress, the younger ones in designer jeans and Chanel sunglasses. In the desert the women were wiry, dark-skinned and wearing saris, toiling in the midday sun. I saw the confusion on Indigo’s face as she observed these rural women hefting pails on their thin-necked heads, breaking rocks by hand to mend roads. They make, Gopal told her, a dollar a day doing this work while the men sit in the shade. India’s burgeoning middle class has not yet extended as far as the rural villages. “But look at them,” Indigo commented, “they look like they’re dressed for a party.” Despite their drudgery, Rajasthani women are truly the jewels of the desert. Even the road workers dress in brilliant colours, sparking the drab landscape with flashes of crimson, saffron, peacock blue and pink, their anklets and glass bangles singing as they go.

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