From Udaipur to Pushkar on horseback - Day Five

With the Aravali mountains behind us the terrain became flat which meant one thing: more canter! 

We had lunch again under a huge banyan tree. These provide wonderful shade. A very skinny street dog hung around in the hope some of our lunch would fall on the floor. She recently had some babies and so we all pooled in and gave her a feast. She looked gorgeous with black around her eyes, as though she was wearing make up. 

In the afternoon we came across a big group of camels, 30 or so. You can imagine the horses weren’t thrilled but they still managed. Apparently here they only ride male camels so all the camels in that herd were females or babies. They were herded by 3 old men dressed in traditional white clothes and bright red turbans. 

We are officially half way through our journey and the horses show no sign of slowing down. Two of them, including the one I ride, Sapna (‘dream’, in Hindi) have a very fast walk. We calculated that the average walking speed was 7km/hour but these two easily do close to 10km/h. It can be quite tiring for the other horses who end trotting the whole time to keep up. 

Manjeev was still feeling unwell but he seems to be doing much better (comparatively). On the other hand, the Australian couple decided they would leave us. It turned out to be too much of a challenge and it seems they have a lot of body pain. We will definitely miss them. We are now down to four of us.

the four of us with Dinesh in the middle 

  another great camping spot