Desert Safari Bollocks Part 1

It is cool how no matter what your country is blessed with in terms of natural resources the locals will invent a way to use them to get money out of tourists. Take New Zealand. As a country we are fully onto this. Our rivers are full of high-speed thrill seekers in jet boats and the wimps can go by raft. We’re blessed with tall bush covered mountains. So what did we do? Build bridges between them and push people off attached to thick rubber bands. We also have millions of acres of grassy hills. In the 70,s a few visionaries tried to take advantage of this with grass skiing. Never really took off. But in the 90’s a kiwi invented a big plastic ball you could climb into and roll down the hill in. Brilliant. In Cambodia, entrepreneurs want to offer tourists the chance to go digging for antique landmines. Hey, you work with what you’ve got.
In the UAE it’s sand. Lots of it, so it was natural that he tourist operators would look here for their inspiration. The Desert Safari is the classic UAE tourist trip. A work conference lunch buffet of sand themed delights.
First stop was the Camel Farm. Lucky we had a guide because if we hadn’t been told we were at a camel farm we might have mistaken it for simply a herd of camels standing near a couple of old sheds in the desert. There weren’t a lot of fences, but I don’t think camels have a lot of motivation for doing anything. Camels are a lot like dodgem cars at the Easter Show. If you take your foot off the accelerator and hop out they just kind of roll to a stop. The highlight of the camel farm stop was watching two camels doing their bit to boost the herd numbers. Ever wondered how a daddy camel climbs aboard mummy camel with her big bloody hump sticking up into his chest? With great difficulty and a lot of moaning and groaning it turns out. If someone in the porn industry ever makes a film for the hard of hearing they should record two copulating camels and use that as the soundtrack. I can’t imagine that getting it on in front of 18 Russians, two Germans and 4 kiwis is anyone’s idea of fun. Even if it was a threesome. The third party was the young guy (presumably young because the old guys pulled rank and made him do it). You know how those special forces troops hide near a target and guide the missile fired from the plane in with a laser pointer? Well this guy had a similar job. He had to guide the Camels ‘missile’ into the ‘target’. But instead of a laser pointer, he had to use his hands.

From the Farm of Fornication we were taken deeper into the desert for Sand Hooning. If you ever see a white second hand 4 wheel drive for sale and it turns out it was used in desert safaris. Don’t buy it. They get thrashed. The highly trained men behind the wheel make those vehicles do things and go places you suspect cars aren’t meant to go. I say highly trained because sitting in the back belted in and trying not to smash my head in the roof I was really hoping that our driver was highly trained.
There are no road marking out in the desert. They tried once but the wind kept blowing the sand away and it was just a big waste of spray paint. We traveled in a convoy of 4. We were second which meant we got to see the 4 by 4 in front of us go straight off the top of super steep sand dunes and then with the sound of the screams of the middle aged German lady filling our truck I got to turn and watch the group behind us roll down in our tracks. Imagine 7 mice in an empty beer can. 2 German mice, 4 kiwi mice and an Indian driver mouse. For the purposes of this analogy the beer can is one of those big super sized ones that used to be popular in the early 80s in Australia. Now imagine that can is tossed into the surf at Raglan. That was kind of what it felt like.

The desert safari is a precision operation, timed to the second, which I think the Germans really appreciated. We skidded to a stop at the top of a particularly large dune just in time to watch the sun set and from there it was on to part 3. The Desert Camp.

Stay tuned for the exciting wrap up of the Vegas Desert Safari. But I am off to the Dubai 7’s for 2 intensive days of booze and something else……. Oh yeah, rugby. So it might be a few days till I get back here.

Righto.