Thursday, September 6, 2007

OFF TO CAMP



Another bumpy van ride and we arrive, down a long dusty turnoff from a desert two-lane road, at Kaku Fort, or as one barely legible (but in English) sun-bleached sign says, Kaku Castle. This is home for the next two nights, and where we will meet our trusty steeds, who have been trucked here the 400-plus kilometers from their home base. This is the first time the Relief Ride is going so far afield. The past rides have been in the general region around Dundlod Fort, home base for the horses who are also ridden regularly by tourists on day trips or three- and four-day desert excursions. They aren’t often used for a two-week endurance ride like ours (and much later we find out that nearly half of them have never done a long endurance trip…of course, neither have we). The main building at Kaku is a cement, two-story,
multi-roomed home of sorts, with big wooden doors to simple bedrooms with en suite basic bathrooms (toilet and sink only). Inside the walled sand courtyard, there are three thatched-roof huts, with two single beds and also with basic bathrooms attached. There is also, in the same dusty courtyard, a big, round, canvas tent. While the rest of the group gets their room assignments and keys to clunky padlocks…I am told I’ll be sleeping in the tent…and oh yeah…there is a pit toilet across the courtyard behind the huts. Okey Dokey! By the way—I’ll also get to take “bucket baths” with a large bucket of hot water and a plastic dipper, while straddling the toilet hole. Awesome!

Actually I like it—in a couple of days we’ll all be in these tents, in the style of 1800’s Raj royals, so I’m getting a head start (and diffusing the drama, which I never like to do, Alexander and the two doctors are in another tent just like mine right next to my canvas home). I also get to pretend that I’m being put out and suffering, which of course, is a well-refined skill of mine. The tent is huge, five-and-a-half-foot high patterned yellow canvas walls form a circle probably twelve feet in diameter with four flap windows and an overlapping door. A high central pole peaks the roof like a circus tent. A charpoy (bed frame strung with rope or webbing that supports a cotton batting mattress) is dressed with a light quilt and sheets, and a small, lumpy pillow. There is a tiny table in the middle with a candle and roll of toilet paper, and the ubiquitous, useless, non-foaming, waxy bar of tiny pink soap that seems to be everywhere in India. A small mirror hangs on the central pole…and these are my digs.

The desert is amazing. Desert is the one ecosystem I have spent the least time exploring. This seems like Joshua Tree or the Palm Desert of California…scrubby brush, dusty powdered sand, sparse foliage that grows gray instead of green, gnarled trees with woody trunks and branches that end in clumps instead of limbs, among gently rising, windblown dunes. The terrain is arid, sandy, and “swept” feeling. I find out later that the horse company tried to dissuade Alexander from riding in this region at this time of year because daily temperatures could easily be 115 degrees Fahrenheit. It is pretty damn hot, but not that hot while we are here.

The tiny village of Kaku has loads of waving, calling children, fascinated by us—we’ve become local celebrities within minutes of arrival and all the children of the village begin to show up around the low walls of the compound and on the hill rising just outside.

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