Our Camel Adventure

Beduin to watching that I don't steal and ride off on his camel?

Chris and I have been making our lists of places to see while I'm a month here in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. At the top of the list is, of course, to get up close and personal with the camels, but not necessarily to ride a camel (although grandson Chamberlain wants a picture of me riding one!) With this goal in mind, we headed to the Heritage Village to first, become more familiar with the culture and secondly, to sit on a camel (or lean as I did). 

The two main attractions to this Heritage Village are the workers standing holding falcons for picture taking, and the Beduin watching over his camel. Keep in mind that there are no signs posted anywhere stating that if you take a picture holding the falcon or sitting on the camel that there will be a charge, like they would courteously do in the USA . They just encourage you to hold (actually hand you the falcon), and motion you to sit on the camel. Then, rubbing their fingers annoyingly together, they ask for money. Interesting. This seems to be the name of the game here in the Middle East. And that leads me right into our adventure yesterday to Al Aim to see another important thing on the "to do" list while here in Abu Dhabi - the Camel Market.

You will notice that I'm borrowing a picture from National Geographic that has some incredible pictures of the Camel Market that we spent three painfully long hours hunting for yesterday. We did finally find it - not because there were any directions or address listed on the official website - and, surprisingly, we were wrongly sent to a random residential area (no Camel Market in sight for miles) by the Google maps! (Note to self...complain to Google on this one). But we did locate it after many wrong turns and dead ends by reading a few message boards and posts about the place which was located behind a large mall in Al Ain. Also written in the posts and boards were warnings to us about watching out for the beckoning camel sellers pen - with his smiling (missing teeth), "come see my camels...come." Also take note that the picture above has been somewhat enhanced by the photographer. Enhanced as in, they appear to have clean clothing and have showered. This was not the case with the men we encountered.

We are definitely glad that we continued our search until we found this Camel Market however, because it was exciting to see. And it was incredible looking at all of the varieties of camels up close and personal with their different colors, shapes, ages, and sizes. And this trip was made more interesting (and a bit frightening) when we were surrounded by the camel salesmen. In fact, to semi-protect ourselves, when asked when coaxed and beaconed into their many camel pens to take pictures, Chris, without hesitation replied, "no camera, no phone." I, of course, went along with our sudden new place of residence and lack of any latest technologies (including Chris large camera in the backseat). And we had to hide a laugh when Chris' iPhone suddenly rang in his pocket to let him know he had just received a text from a friend. 

We finally had to stop our private tour of the camel pens when being surrounded by too many aggressive camel salesmen (not sure what their official name is), asking us for money... yikes! It was that ole' rubbing the fingers together thing again. "Money for what?" we thought. At that point, Chris pretty much threw Beckham in the carseat without totally strapping him in saying to me under his breath, "lock your doors now." And as we started to drive away, the camel market men were still rapping on our car windows trying to get money! Glad I wasn't alone. We laughed all the way home about this adventure, pretending to be Canadian with no picture-taking devises in hand, so hard that tears were rolling down my cheeks. So unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures. But, maybe when Ken gets here in a week or so we will venture there again (we now actually know where we are going), and let him do the talking. Will he also say we are from Canada?