I have put some photos of it up on http://www.flickr.com/photos/meags/
At the start it was great. I have wanted to ride a camel ever since I rode an elephant in April. They are really funny animals, they look, sit, eat and walk funny.
It was really enjoyable for the first few hours. Then we stopped and our guide cooked us lunch while we rested in the shade of a tree.
It kind of went downhill from there. The afternoon was hard, my legs were really sore and they made us keep galloping so that we would make it to the sand dunes for sunset. bouncing half a metre up and down when your legs and but are already sore is not a good thing at all.
Then at night I was freezing. I tried to warn them I get cold easily (I mean I carry a jacket around in summer in Australia) but they just kept assuring me I would be fine. After what felt like hours and my toes were going numb I got out of my ‘bed’ to ask for an extra blanket. Our guides had vanished, they had told us there were more blankets and to let them know if we needed anything. They were gone.
So, I took a blanket from their bed and tried to go to sleep. It was around this point my stomach decided to start churning. Never a good thing. After getting up in the freezing cold to go to the toilet my strange migraine started. These are the headaches I used to be on anti-epilepsy medication to manage.
I thought at this point that it must be close to sunrise and that we would be getting out of there soon, so I checked the time. 11:30pm!!!! It was a horrible thing to learn.
So, I drugged myself up with sleeping tablets and tried to salvage the night, I just told myself everything would be better in the morning.
I’m not sure how long later, one of the guides came back and took his blanket, I asked for another one because I was still cold even with his think one but they didnt have any!
finally, I got to sleep. I work up with the sunrise and not surprisingly I was roasting under my 5 blankets with 3 layers of clothing on.
We set off and i told them I needed to leave early. We were meant to keep going until 5pm. My migraine wasn’t going away (they never ever last this long) and my stomach couldn’t handle food.
It wasn’t until I actually started crying (from the pain of the headache) that they took me seriously and said they could get a jeep to pick me up. Naturally, they tried to exploit the situation so that I would pay a fortune, luckily I am not that stupid. I managed to get the people from my guest house to come and get me from the next village and was in bed with strong pain killers within the hour.
So, all in all it was crap. But I am glad that I finally rode a camel and i have some good photos to show for it.