Baby camels play fighting

Managed to find a restaurant with wifi for breakfast so could send 70th birthday greetings to my brother Rob in NZ and post a blip but it wasn't long enough to process my photos of yesterday.
The hotel we 'slept' in was close to the Jodhpur clock tower which chimed the hour 10 minutes early (I suppose to remind you the hour was nearly up and you should prepare for the next!), the dogs barked, the cows mooed, tuc tucs and motorbikes roared around and horns blared – suddenly there was a silence around 2 a.m. but it was a bit of a restless night. We did a quick tour of the bazaars and then drove up to the mighty fortress ramparts and looked at the views – the Maharajah's family had another palace built and moved into it in the 1850s so the old one is now a museum. We avoided it and sped on towards the desert over some dreadful potholey roads past enormous stone quarries where slabs of newly hewn rocks were being manhandled into lorries.

Yussef has eyes for everything and spied a black eagle and two Egyptian vultures in acacia trees about ¼ of a mile away so I crept off to see if I could get a shot. If you remember my encounter and flight with Kevin the vulture on December 1st you will not be surprised to imagine my thrill to return to the car and then see 40 or more vultures appearing overhead and sailing towards the receding fortress where there must have been a feast awaiting – they just kept on coming, one by one by one.

Beautiful, delicate chinkara deer were spotted - so well camouflaged in the increasingly desert like scrub and we saw herds of camels (whose herdsmen made towards us demanding money for taking photographs as did the goat herders and children). We saw wild boar, lots of goat herds and there was a huge flock of peacocks (the wild national bird) which were awaiting their afternoon offering at a little temple. We stopped to watch the temple guardian, an old man approach. He grabbed my hand and placed his forehead against mine and then he took me to see his 'deity'. He opened the doors and I nearly had a heart attack for inside was the most lifelike 'deity' I have ever seen – almost a replica of him so perhaps it was his father. Anyway Yussef tells me that most deities are there to help protect the land around and all within it but this fellow gave me the creeps...

The road was busy with tractors and trailers acting as people as well as goods transport – the canvas loads of animal fodder bulged outwards most alarmingly and camels pulled small carts that overflowed and took up all of the carriageway. There were lorries piled high with sacks of peanuts, potatoes, red onions and enormous blocks of rock and at the side of the road exhortations painted on walls to plant more, avoid pollution, use less plastic and save water and another that said 'driving faster causes accident, no hurry, no worry'!

The land became much more desert like and it was strange to see irrigated green mustard fields on one side of the road and desert scrub and acacia for as far as the eye could see on the other. We saw castor oil plants, cotton fields and date orchards but it wasn't flat and there were dunes and rocky bits too and we passed through many villages that had the main street as the bazaar with a wide variety of businesses and goods on offer from very basic premises. Huge electricity pylons marched across the landscape and nearer Jaiselmere there were literally thousands of huge wind turbines for miles and miles and miles. The army were on manoeuvres in the scrub land with camouflaged tents, tanks and what not which Yussef said I mustn't photograph for they shot first and asked questions afterwards, also an air force bombing range and we passed through the area where the first Indian atomic bomb was tested underground. But it was the camels that captured me – three beautiful dark babies that played together – the eagles and the vultures. We are staying in a mud hut in a desert village where camel safaris are on offer. I did a three day, two night safari 20 years ago so will forgo this time around – I just need to get close to camels though without some herder galloping towards me for alms. No internet available here though...

link to todays pics -

Belated link to the photos of 7th with the mongoose