On leaving the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand I volunteered to do a brochure for them. For one reason or another I couldn't email the files so I decided to send the disk to Thailand. International Post from India requires that all packages be wrapped in canvas, stitched closed and sealed with candle wax. It makes for a very beautiful presentation but it's just one more annoying thing to negotiate and wait for, right? Well, in our quest to do the required bundling we turned the corner from the post office, saw a little parcel packing sign and walked into the home of the Pareek family and one of the best circumstances we've had since arriving in India. The Mother, who we were told to call Mommy, made chai while we sat around and chatted for about an hour with the daughter, Rupali, who wrapped the package and the son, Amit, a photographer. As we were leaving Amit invited us to come with him the next day to snap the Camel Fair. This was our golden ticket because touring with a local will keep the notoriously aggressive beggars, barkers and thieves in check. Our odyssey began with the 3 of us popping out to Old Pushkar - a place that isn't in the guide books because it's virtually a ghost town on a ghost lake. A month prior, a group of civil engineers brought in some earth moving equipment to dig a hole big enough to fill with a little water. They call it a lake, but most of us in the west would call it a pond, or if you're from Texas: a tank. There were some nice old ghats and we just sat, chatted, drank chai, and took pictures for about an hour. Next stop was a Hanuman Temple which was populated by 12 peacocks, 6 monks, 2 cows and a very angry monkey who lunged at me every time I tried to take his picture. The holy men were very enthusiastic to show us around and at dusk they wanted us to smoke chillum (strong marijuana and tobacco), but we politely declined citing the fact that I needed to be sense-aware to pilot our moped 6km back to town. One advantage of shooting digital is that if you show people the picture immediately any awkwardness goes out the window when they giggle and call their friends over to look. The only problem, if you choose to see it as one, is that everybody will want you to photograph them over and over. The more the monks smoked the more they giggled and the more photos they wanted us to take.

In the late afternoon, we scooted back to the Camel Fair and just wandered around taking thousands of pictures. With each step we took it felt like we were going deeper into the rabbit hole. It was like were walking straight through the pages of an 80 year old edition of National Geographic. A huge fairground, or Mala, on the west side of town is the center for the festivities, but the visiting tribes camp for as far as the eye can see. For many people from the surrounding villages this excursion to Pushkar is the biggest event of their year. The camels have taken a backseat to the utter lunacy that takes place for 8 days. Imagine a Blackpool or Coney Island in a steroid fueled dust bowl of animals, humans, religous zealots, and motorscooters and you're still not at the tip of the iceburg. I was beginning to think my Strange 'O Meter was collecting too much dust.

As touched on above, the Camel Fair follows the traditional Indian format of pure chaos exponentially magnified by a ludicrous number of people. Whenever the venues in the fairground changed, literally thousands would climb over one another while sprinting to another corner to see acts such as children on the high-wire, children poking spears in their throats, children performing freaky acts of contortion, and children doing many other life threatening undertakings as their parents whipped the crowds into hysteria by banging drums and screaming into microphones that are hooked up to distortion spewing loudspeakers. There was also a carnival that included such spectaculars as the Barrel of Death where a daredevil would circle the walls of a massive round wooden structure on a motorcycle while being chased round and round by two cars. I think we patrons who paid the steep Rs.10 ($0.25) entrance fee were in the most danger for every time the vehicles circumnavigated the rickety portable wooden shack the whole place would shake, shimmy, and very loudly groan. Probably the most bizarre venue was a skinny old Sadu who violently lip-synced a Bollywood hit while shattering long fluorescent light tubes over his head. He ended his tirade by rolling in the glass shards that had collected under his feet...oh, how I missed India! Sorry, no photos, it's hard to take pictures when your writhing in sympathy pain. PROGRAM OF TRADITIONAL RAJASHTANI DANCING

Call me a coward or call me a chicken, but the thought of going on an Indian Ferri Wheels is high on my very short list of things I just won't do. It could have been the sound of the gears grinding or the axle squealing, but it was probably the fact that you'd need a tachometer to calculate of the number of revolutions an Indian Ferris wheel spins in one minute - needless to say, I was not up for an impromptu flying lesson. On a much lighter side, there was traditional dancing and comedy on the main stage, but my favorite attraction was the pipe cleaner thin gentleman who has been growing his moustache for over 10 years. He plays the famed Rajasthani Nose Flute and performs heroic acts of chivalry while riding his golden cardboard thoroughbred. He is, deservedly, in almost every photo book about Rajasthan. His permanent smile was due to his brand new enormous bleached white teeth which hadn't quite settled into his face yet...maybe next year.

The camels were...well they pretty much behaved like I would expect camels to. The "Ships of the Desert" move with a gentle fluidity and they're much taller than I expected. The owners cut complex patterns into their coat instead of branding them so, as you can imagine, we saw some pretty crazy coifs. We also caught a sweet young couple necking. We walked past the Mala into the fields of animals where locals were playing traditional music from Rajasthan called Bhopa. Typically, the men play the Ravanata (12 stringed instrument), the women sing and the children sit in your lap collecting your rupees.

I've had some very bad horse experiences, thus I think they are evil calculatingly diabolical animals. But the Rajasthani horses are some of the most stunning creatures I've ever seen. They're lean, strong, tall and many of them are a mixture of white and light grey in color. These royal beasts emanate power and grace. Many have pale blue eyes and another distinguishing feature is that their ears open straight outwards with the tips curling towards each other.

Our mystical spell was broken when we witnessed some camels getting their noses pierced to hold the reins that would navigate them through the rest of their lives. They don't get bull rings like cows because it would rip out of their very spongy septum. Instead, imagine the bridge of your nose being impaled from each side by a goat's horn, then a metal bolt being driven through and fastened from the inside. It hurt's just writing about it. To keep them from fighting back the keepers literally bend one of the front legs back on itself and tie it together - in human terms it would be like tying your ankle to your butt. The screaming from the poor animals was horrifying. The whole process took about 5 minutes at the conclusion of which the camels jumped up and shook their heads a few times then acted as if nothing has happened. Needless to say, it took Helen and I a little while longer to recover.

As the day wore on, we trekked up a hill that overlooked, not just the whole camel fair, but all of Western Rajasthan. Waves of gold mountains rose above the copper desert as the burnt orange sun slid into the silvery dust kicked up by the approaching tribes. There are some colors you'll never capture on film...that was our dusk.

But Amit wasn't finished yet. He summoned us to his lovely Havali where his sister Rupali whipped up some lip-smackin', good old-fashioned Rajasthani home cookin' that we ate while sitting around the television watching a reenactment of the Ramayana which is one of the Hindu holy tales. The special effects were akin to those of the famous 70' movie "Jason and the Argonauts"...fantastic! Mommy has seen the film over twenty times...kinda like me and the X-Men. Their unabashed generosity in opening their house to us has really meant a lot. This picture is from the night we introduced them to western food.